This project was D.O.A. from the moment Ghost announced it a year back, and hip-hop fans should consider themselves lucky that there’s at least a few salvageable moments in Wizard of Poetry.

When it’s watered down by this much sneakerhead aestheticism, it becomes hard to even hear the culture-shaking subversion that lurked in the sounds of Machinedrum’s influences.

Everything about Everything is Love feels superficial, from the artists’ constant pronouncement of their love for each other to their engagement with topics like fashion, art, watches (this gets its own category), social issues, how great their friends are, sports, and, indeed, their own lives. The most boring aspect of the album is its centerpiece: the couple’s obsession with their wealth.

Where The Excitement of Maybe shines--like a harvest moon--is in production, composition, and musicianship, but these alone aren't enough to sustain the distinctive voice Cervenka has spoken in so boldly, particularly when they're employed in the service of pastiche.

Only toward the end of the record does BJTM finally let up, delivering a couple relaxed and half-realized shoegaze jams (“Super Fucked” and “Our Time”) that come close to being good. Sadly, it is all for naught.

Unfortunately, two good songs do little to temper the overall disappointment with this new direction, and having thoroughly enjoyed Take Me to the Sea, it really pains me to denigrate its successor.

The thick and poorly affected patois, the overproduction, and the sheer terribleness of the songs on Trapped Animal seem, at best, a huge dent in The Slits’ otherwise immaculate armor.

Your willingness to stick with McPhun from here on out depends entirely how much you enjoy listening to music that sounds like a meticulous recreation of 80s dance pop.

Younger Now is a hookless, joyless, profitable success.

Drake offers little here that does not retread the sonic and narrative territory of his previous work.

This loss of focus characterizes You Can’t Take It With You. While As Tall As Lions are affected deeply by the weight of the world, they’re too flustered to make sense of it all.

It sounds like a cross between Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson without the soul, the Banana Splits, the Grease soundtrack and shitty disco records.

Weezer's once unique aesthetic has been replaced by something formulaic and ultimately too safe.

It Falls Apart is a mess of overproduction and features bland songwriting.

Schmilco is missing the same spark that drove Schmilsson. Where Nilsson was relentless in pursuit of something other than settling down, Tweedy has gone the other way.

The band's tight, and every song contains at least a few interesting musical ideas, but the album as a whole comes across less like a creative mess and more like a stoned-battle-of-the-bands gone wrong.

Birds’s stripped-down approach bares an utter lack of finesse behind a microphone.

So let's put it simply: With Recovery, Eminem has misunderstood everything that once made him great as thoroughly as anyone else ever has.

Since half of experiencing Tangerine Reef comes from experiencing the visuals it accompanies, it’s hard for me to really vibe with this album as a complete thing. Really it feels less than that, like a side table, a bed frame, or a pierced hole in an ear with no earring in it.

Sometimes Avi Buffalo’s entrance into the gauntlet of the undisguised voice leads to a pretty song or two, maybe a moment of blissful pop; but more often than not, the songs whimper without much intelligible emotion.

Food is another sad testament to how the squares have won and how we’re all likely to capitulate at one point or another to the dictates of the majority.

Off to Business--released eponymously by Guided By Voices, Inc.--is the ultimate product of this trend: an album full of ebullient mid-tempo rockers, ebullient pretty guitar parts, and ebullient power drum fills.

Minus a few semi-refreshing exceptions that see Brian Wilson team up with old bandmate Jardine--is more or less artistically bankrupt, failing as it largely does to communicate or emotionalize anything of Wilson’s concrete being or of the 21st century in which he now finds himself.

Revolutions is an extremely boring affair, never building any momentum from the start to finish.

More than one track goes on about how love will eventually get us to heaven and such, and the sickly, sugary sweetness of it all just leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

For a solo artist obsessed album-in and album-out with delivering a product alien to the mothership, this move represents a regression, a willingness to tread ground he's covered, almost note-for-note.

While I'm certain that this mode will suit Moore in his future indie folk material that is sure to come, In the Cool of the Day naturally goes from inoffensive to mildly irritating fairly quickly through repeated spins.

Except for the admittedly awesome surf-rock instrumental 'Reflecting,' there’s nothing done on Circular Sounds that you can’t find done better on old vinyl, battered mixtapes, and (shudder) Counting Crows albums.