So, largely unimaginative arrangements, flat delivery, a surfeit of vague ecological metaphors that wash like spray on the rocks (you can have that one for free, Mr. Hansen), and a lack of any sense of connection, of need, of reality.

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.

There’s no sense of cohesion or flow between any of these songs, partially due to a clear lack of thought devoted to these conceits, but mostly because every M. Ward- and Conor Oberst-penned song sounds the same lately.

The only crime Lazaretto commits that wasn’t already covered by his misogynistic solo debut, Blunderbuss, is being really boring.

In the end, Ribot’s considerable talents are sadly lost among 12 disjointed tracks that range from out-of-place cacophony to irritating cliché.

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.

Frustrated fanboy headscratching aside, the point is simple: All Day is a misstep of the worst kind, wherein Gillis' craft devolves from transformative to parasitic.

It's hard to paint this as anything other than what it is: a professional-sounding album of radio-friendly pop. It's as bad as that sounds.

Its songs are mostly amalgams of tired pop music tropes/techniques and trite realizations

With two exceptions (Desiigner and, uh, Damon Albarn), the [guest artists] completely fail to elevate the tracks in any way, an unfortunate consequence of needing to feature Charli XCX on your album because she’s good and popular as hell rather than because you and Charli XCX have made any particularly interesting music together.

No, at best, The King Is Dead is a patchwork of genre exercises, giving listeners little more than a chance to play "spot the influence." But even then it fails, for it taps only a very shallow stream of tradition, focusing on a series of folk facsimiles from the 70s and 80s that never quite add up to the real thing.

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.

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.

Bibio aims to express an exquisitely blurry mind-state; instead, his lack of focus conjures only a musty shadow of the varied, sportive electro-pop album he strains to create.

If The Raconteurs were any other group (that is, if The Raconteurs didn't have Jack White), the press/Blogosphere would slam it.

Menos el Oso takes the act of melodizing the banal to dizzyingly silly new heights.

What was once shambling and humble and fun has turned into another anonymous, swaggering, guitar-driven indie rock act.

Every aspect of the album sounds like the full-length equivalent of a Spotify Chill Out playlist: flat, disposable, inoffensive (though “technically-sound”) 2010s muzak.

The most egregious offender is Planet of Ice's last song, 'Lotus,' which clocks in at close to nine minutes, thanks to clumsy feedback inserted somewhat inappropriately between the beginning and end of what must have started out as a fairly straightforward rock song.

While this is drastically experimental by their standards, there is nothing here you haven't heard done infinitely better many times before.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Colors dispels a greater notion of contemporary selfhood with its sheer tastelessness. It holds status as the most truly perplexing move from the artist to date. Unfortunately, the result of that move is borderline unlistenable.

It’s “Lost Boys and Girls Club,” “Cult of Love,” and “Trouble Is My Name” (“Trouble is my name/ Is it your name too?”), endless clichés in songwriting, narrative, subject, and sound.

A change in demeanor accompanies this change in style, however, and it's a turn for the worse: Phoenix now gesture at being a Serious Group with Something to Say.

Ultimately, Nas’ decision to sacrifice lyrical and aesthetic sensibility for controversy, hype, and pop-appeal exposes the commodification and hollowness of his artistic voice and vision.

Lily’s nonchalant declarations of self-esteem leave me cold. And as soon as she traded generically upbeat ska/reggae samples for a bunch of ho-hum electropop beats, she became indistinguishable from her imitators.

Imperial Teen sound here like they're trying to squeeze some new flavor out of a chewed-up piece of gum.

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.

Beyond all else, perhaps, think of this zero as the massive bedazzled orifice out of which our heroine has spawned a new era of popular culture.

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.

The subject matter on the indistinguishably titled Love, Angel, Music, Baby is painfully mainstream throughout.

Our Love To Admire isn’t even a contractual obligation to push off without care. But boy does it sound like one; a band phoning it in, out of steam, and running on a few lingering fumes and smoldering coals.

If Tegan and Sara were looking to release something which sounds like so much of the girl based rock, which can be found on TRL and on the radio waves, then they could most likely consider So Jealous a wild success.

Lantern comes off like Birchard wallowing in an uncharacteristic and blissful tedium.

Dry Land Is Not a Myth fails for two reasons that could have been easily corrected: (1) rock albums, especially rock albums purporting to be "psychotropic," should never be produced by artists whose primary working medium is the remix, and (2) Church's weird, pinched vocal delivery, which the editor remedies with a variety of fixes characteristic of overproduced music (see point 1).

Wilson continues to rehash southern California culture with increasingly less perspective, further eschewing the untamed adolescent aesthetic by including stuffy musical theater elements and a top-down point-of-view that’s more clumsy analysis than sincere memoir.

This game of literal musical chairs completely cripples The Most Serene Republic’s musical aims to the point that the album’s 40-minute runtime feels 20 minutes too long.

Audio, Video, Disco is simply too unfocused, too half-baked, and too busy hiding its inadequacies with superficially interesting window-dressing to fit in either of those settings--or any other.

The majority of tunes on offer here do very little to build on the ideas and panache exposed on Soft Control.

LaValle’s been trading in spitshined tonal conventions and vacuum-sealed beauty for quite some time now, and this might well be his best effort at putting it to record. But there are already three Album Leaf LPs that do this exact same thing, and the prospect of him doing that thing slightly better simply fails to excite.

Rarely will one find a detractor when it comes to Cage’s sheer talent, but--thanks to sterile production and the replacement of hip-hop beats with rap-rock thrashings (“Beat Kids”) and corny, overdramatized hooks (“Captain Bumout”)--Depart From Me demonstrates an immaturity that will render Cage’s career difficult to reconcile.

As a whole, Black Ice is a mess of tired conventions shoved noisily at the listener, as though just getting them all on record was good enough.

What Will We Be is a better, more realized album, but it’s still a dud, filled with mediocre, half-composed songs and tediously unfocused songwriting.

In some ways, it is as an exercise in stripping away everything that makes The Flaming Lips such a truly special group, leaving only that which serves as decorative tinsel to their music, hanging limp and lifelessly in the air.

Its complete lack of anything unique just reeks of someone in the background, someone with a suit and a cigar, shaking hands with these fellows and telling them they’re “gonna blow up.”

Sure, Nine Black Alps may be a more "genuine" concoction of Nirvana's formula, but how can this be considered revelatory or of interest when it comes across as so faceless?

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.

So the mission statement of this CD is clear; this is a product made by the emotionally and culturally sterile for people who either have no conception of love, depression, or any other emotional state outside of pop culture cliché, or those so desperate for entertainment that they would deceive themselves into thinking the feckless chicanery of this masturbatory ensemble resembles soulful expression in any way.

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.

If there is a compliment to be paid to Hurley, it is that the band refrains from delving into the sort of WTF territory they've explored of late.

It's just annoying to listen to.

We’re given a de trop of horrid synthesizers, only to be outdone by worse choruses and banal refrains.

Lysandre is full of problems/problematic things, and most of it rests on one of the album's biggest problems: the insistent, ever-present "me."

I hate to say it, but Love at the Bottom of the Sea is such a drag: a damp and dreary album, drowning in bad faith and bad jokes.

All of this is borderline insulting to its target audience, myself included. For a moment in “Brand New,” Williams lets us see his hand, and it subtly reveals how incredibly marketed and capital-centric this album is.

Even by Cornell's extremely shallow standards, this is unbelievably lazy production. [Joint review of both discs.]

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

The only thing Arcade Fire’s Everything Now is about is Arcade Fire, which is its most pernicious and pathetic quality. Arcade Fire are no longer Orpheus and Eurydice, lovers doomed to tragedy; now they are Narcissus, the Greek hunter who lost the will to live after staring at his own reflection in a pond for too long. They ask their listeners to participate in this cynicism as they grasp so falsely at explanations for why “we” are like this.

It's pretty much all the same synth leads, bang-bang beats, and tired rhymes as every other Aftermath related project since The Eminem Show, which wasn't that great either.

This is easily the biggest disappointment of 2006.

The more you listen, the worse it gets.

Comets on Fire, 90 Day Men and No Doctors all released albums within the last year that proved classic rock to be relevant in today's music community. The difference between these bands and Black Mountain is that it doesn't sound like the members of Black Mountain had to crush their souls to write their songs.

It is Moby’s right (as well as his wont) to repurpose the same songs, the same structures over and over again. It is my own right, however, to choose to listen to something else entirely.

They play a very recognizable breed of avant-rock or indie-rock and are doing something that has been done over and over again in New York City.

There's nothing inherently wrong about writing songs about enjoying booze and drugs, but this isn't something I'd put on under the influence of either. Just imagine what it sounds like sober.

The shallow cynicism and apathy that animates so many of its songs are under-interrogated by its writers, instead finding form as a pessimist’s non-committal, inconclusive pouting.

Wildlife is nothing more than an album that sounds fine in the background--even at a volume you couldn’t help but pay attention to--yet ultimately fails to make any kind of memorable impression.

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

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.

Musically, there are too many things going on and too few things going on. Every track sounds more or less the same, and every track sounds like a poor heyday tribute.

Despite what they’d like us to think, The Red Album sounds like every one of Weezer’s misfires since "The Green Album": a few songs that work and a whole slew that flounder completely.

Climate Change is an album about nothing. It hears nothing, speaks nothing, and sees nothing. It could be about partying, but even that subject is given such perfunctory treatment that what’s left hardly rewards participation.

This album is so soaked in self-pity that a track called "Madness" seems like a given. "Stone Froze Mascot" is a bad metaphor in and of itself - more self-pity, more of the same. Sound-wise, the album could use work, too.

Katy B’s stultifying lyrics, paired with an EMI-sponsored coterie of established DJs, producers, and vocalists, surgically selected as if delegates of their respective niches, evince only the sound of the culture industry at work.

The blandest rock n' roll record possible.

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

The sound of Stigmata is grayed and stale--reaching, perhaps, for 18th-century Baroque, but instead winding up stuck in a rusty soundcard from 1998.

A slightly boring rock frontman adopts a pseudonym to make a solo album, and it sounds like his main band, recorded in a just-passable studio.

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

There’s potential for a good album from the group, but they have yet to find a unique voice and passion with which to write.

The release’s awkward format and patronizing presentation are among the least of its poor qualities: Even for the heads, Kaleidoscope offers very little not already heard elsewhere. ... In addition to the previously mentioned Chainsmokers pair-up, there is the very ungainly Big Sean feature “Miracles (Something Special),” which, wearing more than a few embarrassing, auto-generated reverential name-drops.

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.

I have done my best to place the album, as a series of utterances, in its agony and vacuity.

The tracks are disaffected exercises in barren repetition and arrhythmic progressions that feel truly tossed off (improvised would be an insult to people who are actually accomplished at that) and indulgently "arty" in the worst sense of the word.

Each CD is crammed to a full 50 minutes with some of the most heinous crimes against good taste since Wham's "Wham Rap! '86." [Joint review of both discs.]

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.

Never mind the cultural appropriation bollocks, here's ethnotronic industrial pop.

Sometimes, like on the outstanding "Wrecking Ball," the emotion calcifies into catchy, mature hooks, propelled forth by Cyrus' oft-underestimated vocal heft. Then again, the breakup also produced "FU," a dismally adolescent electro-soul duet with French Montana.

One Plus One is One sounds like an attempt to make a more serious statement, but with little substance invested in it. The result is Badly Drawn Boy's first boring album.

Most of the songs here aren't even good enough to be considered for a knockoff commercial targeted at the "indie-inclined" twenty-something demographic.

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.

Many of This Unruly Mess I’ve Made’s flaws could’ve very well been forgotten, or at least temporarily swept under the rug, had the actual music been good.

The music is appallingly predictable, unoriginal, uninspiring, boring, over-polished, and vain.

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