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

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

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.

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.

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

The affecting style that made them the most imaginative revivalists of their generation has been replaced by half-assed and half-hearted prog rock.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

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.

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

[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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

It's long and boring and preachy.

The lamest album that'll be released this year.

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.

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.

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

Tenaciously mindless and effortlessly grim.

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

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.

A bore of an album.