The affecting style that made them the most imaginative revivalists of their generation has been replaced by half-assed and half-hearted prog rock.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Kiedis's lyrics are absolutely baffling.

A bore of an album.

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

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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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