This robot-induced hypnosis leads less to genuine enlightenment than it does to pointless New Age dehydration.

It's All Around You middles about with infuriatingly placid tracks that suggest a fading band merely treading water.

The Pipettes are only fresh in the sense that they've appropriated Spector-influenced girl-pop for a new era.

Listening to World Waits, you get the feeling that it would be a more enjoyable record if Enigk didn't execute every single note with such immense, ridiculous fervor.

The Oranges Band are good at what they do, but The World & Everything in It seems destined to function as background music rather than as a focus for rapt listening.

[A] near-carbon copy of their debut record.

Maybe Now or Heaven isn’t an awful record, but it’s certainly one that strips away everything I felt was compelling about the band to begin with.

Simply put, the music on Swing Lo can't support its great ideas. To quote Dylan, "a song is anything that can walk by itself." Maybe time will prove me completely and utterly wrong, but as far as I can tell, nothing on Swing Lo walks by itself.

Ostentatious as it is, there’s no denying that Magna Carta… Holy Grail is filled to the brim with satisfying, big-budget production.... It’s just a shame that Jay-Z doesn’t rap ‘em for all they’re worth.

Musically, the album mines its entire aesthetic from a bargain bin of classicist hip-hop clichés.

The Dark Leaves is too uneven to transcend its shortcomings, and that poses more of a conundrum than if it had been simply awful. There are great songs here, but it’s frustrating to see them so outmatched by the lesser efforts.

As much as The Garden departs from past Zero 7 albums generically, it ultimately falls into the same trap: it readily signifies pop accessibility, but fails to communicate more than a vague aura.

Its total lack of affectation is the album's biggest problem. It feels like it's sequenced to fit some expectation of what types of songs an album should have.

The most frustrating thing about Currents is that, for probably the first time, it seems like Parker is writing songs that would be pretty decent and probably interesting if he freed them from this musty aesthetic and gave them room to express themselves.

Oddly, he's got a ton of talent, a great band, an excellent producer, and lots of committed fans, but he still comes across as needy and overbearing.

Hello Everything is his most disappointing release yet.

Unfortunately, Let Us Never Speak Of It Again barely registers any of the emotion or punch of the debut and, worst of all, goes ahead and adds positively dreadful lyrics to nearly all the songs.

Divided By Night has few worthy moments and a whole bunch earmarked for the couple of "Fast & Furious" films. The guys still have the goods, but this album will not be well-remembered.

You can’t fault the band’s energy or enthusiasm, but You and I doesn’t bring enough of its own ideas to the table to make it essential listening.

Because the album risks so much in its all-in politics, the songs on their own are more difficult to judge. For that reason, the album is enjoyable almost solely in small doses.

Scattergood’s voice is the star, but it can be utterly distracting, a vessel for an expressive, prolific writer who may be too afraid of the revision process.

It’s a difficult album to love, or even like. But, for all its faults — and there are many — there is enough here to make one think that maybe, just maybe, Bloc Party are capable of making, with their third LP, the kind of challenging yet highly accessible pop album they think they’ve made here.

Fuck Buttons have created an aural ibuprofen, an auditory Novocaine.

In a time where it is possible for acts who made their careers in that early-90s cauldron of independent creativity to reform and remake themselves, it seems a cop-out to make such a risk-free album, especially since Hatfield had full creative control. Fan-funding could liberate, rather than stifle, even allowing experimentation; there's no boss to please, only fans to engage. But that doesn't happen at any point on There's Always Another Girl. Just more of the same.

It’s not that 31 Knots aren’t succeeding in flexing their musical chops--they just don’t know where to take them.

These tracks are lifeless, and the multitude of sounds turns to mud, eventually eating itself.

Taken in small bites, there are great moments here, but you're unlikely to clean your plate and ask for seconds for all 14 courses. I for one will be hanging out for dessert, but I don't imagine I'll be invited for dinner again.