The songs all sound pretty much the same; this could be Avril Lavigne, Sheryl Crow; hell, it could be Christian Contemporary.

Let's Go Eat the Factory works as an offering to those obsessive enough to be satisfied just to see Sprout and Pollard up on the same stage and little else.

The Recession, then, is a portrait of the artist as an over-his-head young man.

Indeed, Annie’s given us a few winning singles but also a lot of glitz that can probably be ignored after one listen or two.

No doubt there's an EP's-worth of gems buried here that are worth returning to, but for the most part, New Love resembles its thematic obsession: it's a strained affair.

The lyrics here are trite and the melodies saccharine.

This is the new big British band? This is barely inspired enough to make it off campus.

While Nookie Wood suggests lusty concupiscence, naughtiness, and vim, these conjurations are foundered by big production and mastering straight out of 90s alt-pop radio

As the Chicagoan trio defines it on their debut album King Night, witch-house is a curious blend of aesthetics.

Unfortunately, the inspiration and vivid imagery don’t sustain, leaving you stuck in the middle of a boring anecdote.

The songwriting is pretty much entirely solid, and there are brief flashes of idiosyncrasy, but this album boils down to being a product of the excitement of influence and just being young playing and writing music, without ever remotely threatening to stand up as something worthy of all the critical saliva that’s already dripped onto bedroom carpets worldwide.

It changes the sounds of the band from the bombastic elastic to the crouched minor. It changes the hopes of the band from boundless to restrictive. It limps, self-conscious and careful.

“The Line,” “Winter Queen,” and “Wingsuit” share in the rest of the album’s sterile, self-parodying style of production, but set themselves apart with their uncommon catchiness relative to the rest of Phish’s studio discography.

There are enough genre-hopping and synergistic, trans-genre partnerships present on the tracklist that Long. Live. A$AP, its commercial bets hedged, feels not unlike a myriad of other major-label rap disappointments from nearly any other era of rap.

A real carnival of a mess, completely inconsistent, sometimes really horrifying, and, more often than not, entertaining.

Relying heavily on posturing and tired song structures, lacking the incisive commentary and pointed humor that it strives for, Music's Not For Everyone is a record that fails on many fronts.

There's something inherently adolescent about an EP that veers sharply from genre to genre, each song an island, completely separate from those that precede and those that follow.

The album’s an impressive document of Barrett’s talent, but I don’t hear the hooks that similar acts like Belle & Sebastian built their name on. Without them, The Pica Beats remain an also-ran.

If we're ripe for an introduction of post-grunge sounds into the retro mélange - and given that the moment in question is now 15 years ago, no doubt we are - then we have here one among the early contenders.

Only about a third enjoyable.

The album tries really hard to be the soundtrack to both your trip to the disco and your trip down the rabbit hole, but doesn't offer any particularly compelling reasons for why you should make it either.

Its intentions are good, but it’s stuck in trying to make itself into something that it is not: frightening or bold or looming.

Freedomland is frustrating because it documents possibly compelling works by a band whose performances captured here were probably compelling, too. It just doesn’t reach the standards of prior work, so I’ll just keep waiting for their next studio album.

A Girl Cried Red replaces Nokia’s NYC authenticity for her inauthentic take on a genre that struggles to maintain itself.

Dimensional People wants to be a major rap album, complete with cameos stacked way high, all epic and prodigal. But it’s just not all there.

The lyrics mostly follow white-kid reminiscences, and it's best just to slot them in with all the rest of early-90s-mining that goes on on Old Friends, because they're forgettable.