It's their mediocre album.

Take Foxy Brown's (belated) fourth album, Brooklyn's Don Diva, as the latest missed opportunity.

Serene but emotionally flat, Valley feels like too much church on a cold Sunday afternoon.

Despite creating some killer drones in '03 and '04, the duo has been in decline for more than two years now, and the trend continues with All the Way.

A lot of its songs are ballads that ooze sap like an abandoned sponge.

The near-crazed desperation to please listeners for her own sake is all over Merry Christmas II You: A "gift" to her fans (or so she claims) that they, of course, must pay for, it's her fascinating, career-long saga of self-obsession in a nutshell.

The reason this convoluted rock opera can't match the Who, U2, Green Day, or even Styx is that Danger Days is a story constructed without rising or falling action.

Pink Friday is full of boring....the most confounding thing about Pink Friday is that it lacks style, lacks weirdness, whatever your opinions of how deeply that weirdness goes.

Faced with competing for "pop" ambitions this "rock" wannabe never really had, she instead strides toward brunette-dom on the new, stalwartly unfun Goodbye Lullaby, which--if you couldn't tell from the piano on the cover-means Vanessa Carlton and Michelle Branch. This is the death of Auto-Tune, moment of silence. Except, you know, for the single.

Even more telling is her frequently blank-eyed delivery: She's never been a great vocal interpreter, but on Fatale she sounds about as present as she did on Blackout.

When there is a firm hand reining him in, Game can still make good rap music. Left to his own devices, however, he produces a dismaying mess.

The Beasties of 5 Boroughs seem scared--reluctant to innovate; serving up nonsense lyrics and numbing production that are just plain lazy... sensing that there's nowhere to go but down, so better to establish a passable holding pattern than risk an inexcusable backslide toward irrelevance.

Jennifer Lopez makes albums for the same reasons you and I give holiday gifts to people we don't exactly like: vanity and obligation.

There's an overwhelming tinny ring that starts on the second track, "Beauty on the Fire," and ends with the last track--it's this young possum's voice.

There is some entertainment value in Probot. The manufactured praise accompanying Grohl, supplied by a corps of pro fuglemen who lead and escort the illustrious on his vanity venture, is grand.

I'm just not sure that pop music should come out of a thesaurus.

This suspicious move into another moribund genre resembles the frustrated strivings of a band uncertain of how to exist After Rock.

Like nearly any DM record, Exciter, their 14th album, mostly leaves one hungry for the inevitable remixes.

On their directionless new Creature Comforts, Black Dice seem confused, in fact, about what precisely their aesthetic is.

The Vines have trouble faking both the depth of feeling and the noisome mischief that good garage-punk requires, and the two rote Britpop numbers they tack on don't help.

A bore of an album.

Tenaciously mindless and effortlessly grim.

Nowadays, the Gallaghers can only offer stylized guitar murk and hookless acoustic ditties; even scarier, you can understand their lyrics, which are more mush-headed and lovey-dovey than you'd expect from a band this self-satisfied.

t's nü-Mariah on mood stabilizers, extended with pseudo-pastiches of semi-popular songs.

Less than the sum of their parts, the album and the band don't even amount to an interesting failure, because the known quantities do what they have always done only this time in tandem.

There's something rote and antiseptic about the album's party mood--the electro-beats' clean squelch, the undercooked hooks, the odd primness of Kylie's singing.

The title track's having-it-all exhaustion, underscored by its bipolar sonics and start-stop rhythms, will endear her to the Allison Pearson crowd; a few other tunes will reinforce her fan base among fellow whiny celebrities.

Strangely: no guitar, only piano. Which, strangely, doesn't make them sound any more romantic, nor does it add interest to the other songs, which are either too slow, too genre, or too lyrically distracting.

Ultimately, most Run DMC fans would have been much happier with old-school Run, D, and Jay than with a smorgasbord of Billboard chart-toppers for hire.

Bogged in reverb tanks, delays, and other swirly effects, Some Cities' production masks their slovenly musicianship.

Human After All is determinedly monochromatic aurally, compositionally, and mood-wise. Gosh, they really are robots--the music is flat, barely inflected, sitting there like a vending machine waiting patiently for your quarters.

Endicott, who jumps skin from Julian Casablancas to Robert Smith to the guy from the Killers in just three tracks, has less charisma than a mustard plug.

It's long and boring and preachy.

A record that's half as long as The Fragile but just as plodding and mummified.

In the end, it's Oasis's attempts to capture former pinnacles, from trying to re-create the simple sunny-side-up pleasures of "Live Forever" to trying for another album-ending mountain like "Champagne Supernova," that keep their latter-day output so entirely forgettable.

Corgan does his level best to make the whole affair as joyless as possible.

Somebody press more charges against this fool--he's losing focus.

Death Cab succeed by refusing to offend. That can be an admirable trait in a person, but never in a musician.

It takes nearly 13 cuts in on the new, G-approved Blood Money before you hear anything that sounds like a real Mobb Deep record.

[It] feels more like record label franchise building--"And let's get Willie to sing a Grateful Dead song!" "Cool!"--than an actual, like, album.

The Diane Warren and Desmond Child faux-Steinman stuff is far worse, but the inescapable message of Bat III is that even Meat's former partner hasn't been at peak strength for at least a decade.

With the band sounding listless and drained of ideas, it starts trying anything.

There's nothing wrong with making music for tweens, or lighter-lofting boomers. It's simply a matter of execution, and here these chums are scattered and grasping.

An album of the same-old, same-old.

The affecting style that made them the most imaginative revivalists of their generation has been replaced by half-assed and half-hearted prog rock.

Here and there, Complicated sets up some promising scenarios—worrying about a platonic friend's reaction to a mix tape, or trying to initiate sex for the sake of outdoing a girlfriend's exes—but they never pan out.

Rather than fading into you, they're content to simply fade away.

Jackson's songs don't seem uninflected so much as just plain skimpy, but their word-shy inertia suggests a sly detumescence that only the very successful can imagine, let alone turn to the service of their art.

The piano twinkle and mere droplet of a beat on 'Like the Rest of Us' sounds like Slug doing Regina Spektor; the coos and plucks of 'Me' are Yael Naïm; the barista-strum acoustic rap of 'Guarantees' aims for Elliott Smith and ends up with Uncle Kracker; the skipping hand-clap gospel of 'Puppets' is pure Moby Playtime; and, for some reason, 'Dreamer' sounds like Michael McDonald--funkless, martial, stiff, and innocuous, perfect for an upwardly mobile 21-45 demo that seeks neither boom nor bap with their soy latte.

22 Dreams, Weller's ninth solo effort, is complete bollocks.

Their latest is ridiculously brazen, comically outsized, and defiantly Bruckheimer-esque.

This is a bad rap album, and one that needed the shock of Internet promotion that the Jay-Z diss on "It's Good" gave it when C4 leaked.

On the whole, Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water feels like an interminable groan, a harried hustle toward obsolescence. Rather than creating a cathartic requiem for, say, the impending dotcom depression, this turgid non-effort doesn't even live up to the mookish reputation refuted with such salacious fervor on "Take a Look Around."

Kiedis's lyrics are absolutely baffling.

The first few minutes sound like very early David Bowie without Mick Ronson, electricity, or songs. The rest is so annoying that after 15 minutes you'll fondly remember grade-school sing-alongs and eating paste during arts-and-crafts.

Songs like "Frantic," "Dirty Window," and even the balladesque "Sweet Amber" stop and start, cut to pieces by groove-robbing edits that replace the guitar harmonies on which Metallica built an industry.

Once they could juggle being both captivating and grating. Today, they're just the latter.

The new Monster Magnet album is kinda crappy, and they'd better check themselves before they quite irrevocably wreck themselves.