The Donnas do what they do just fine, but, four albums into their career, you can't help but want to see a little bit of growth in place of arrested development.

With its grove of synthesizers, sequencers, and sonically treated vocals, it's music without pulp -- or a great deal of heart.

The results are not bad -- nor are they dynamic. It's shiny and it shimmers, but there's no fizz, no explosion.

The 10-song album... hits and misses in equal quantities, though even at its worst moments, there's at least a germ of a good idea that simply wasn't realized -- or, in the case of some of the album's longer tracks, was overdone.

This is an album about textures, grooves, and sounds, but it's not really about songs. Once one is done decoding its structure, Look Into the Eyeball is an elegant but empty building.

Scottish pop whizzes Belle and Sebastian have finally found a way to rid themselves of their onerous rep as critics' darlings: They've made an album that isn't very good.

Uncompromising and wildly unpredictable, but only intermittently entertaining.

A melange of rather unremarkable vocals; ambitious, overwrought dance-pop; and lyrics that occasionally read and sound like English as a second language.

Ultimately, 999 Levels of Undo is a fascinating study of a visionary musician -- unfortunately, it's not an especially compelling listen.

Occasionally, it all works, coalescing into something with passion and imagination... In other spots, however, Frusciante's amateur (and sometimes listless) singing proves to be a major letdown, even with souped-up reverbs and megaphonic EQ-ing.

But other selections feel more like skeletal sketches than finished songs, composed of interesting components but short on fully developed ideas and momentum. Great stuff for background noise at a party, or in a TV commercia, but not necessarily compelling headphone fare.

Like so many of Master P's own productions, the music here stems almost completely from synthesizers, a fact that diminishes the potency of the grooves on My World, My Way. With so many of the right elements in place on tracks like "Beef" and "Uh Ha," it's a shame to hear cheesy synth lines where a shattering bass should have been.

Pitching in on Road Rock are such longstanding Young cohorts as Spooner Oldham (keyboards), Jim Keltner (drums), and Ben Keith (guitars), but such is the CD's murky sound that the contributions of all are rendered a bit flat. Moreover, although the collection clocks in at 65 minutes, the performance feels truncated and lacks thematic unity.

What is meant to sound languid and trippy instead comes across as overwrought and pretentious?

An album awash in old new wave sonics, borrowed Ziggy-isms, and facile science fiction claptrap. As you'd expect with an album called Vapor Transmission, it suffers from quite a bit of gas.

Not only do many of the tunes have a similar feel, but Monahan, whose dusty vocals put the band on the map with the hit single "Meet Virginia" in 1999, is regularly drowned out by the soaring guitars and effects.

Like far too many bands whose members bring strong musical pedigrees to the project, Unified Theory's sum is less than its parts -- despite, or perhaps because of, an abundance of adventurous spirit and experimental zeal.

The lack of quality material here isn't the only problem with Revelation; the entire production lags as well.

This is as base as it gets, friends, a frantic, frenetic, and unapologetically adolescent orgy of sexual and scatological tomfoolery.

Too often Coxon's sketches-in-song come off as coy experiments -- fascinating to himself, perhaps, but holding little interest for those of us outside the lab.

Bereft of the spectacle that is Pink Floyd these days, it's hard to work up much enthusiasm for still another round of new versions of old classics.

She's giving us déjà vu all over and over and over again by basically sticking to the same set of sonic templates throughout the 15-track album, never making much effort to shift up the tempos, melodies, and structures.

Multitracked to death, Until the End of Time lacks the intensity that made the original Makaveli's Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory so brash and exciting.

With the exception of 1999's By Your Side, which showed flashes of the band's original brilliance, in recent years the songwriting of brothers Chris and Rich Robinson has deteriorated into a muddled mess of hard rock cliches. Lions is the low point of that decline.

Well, if nothing else, the search for the year's dumbest album title is over. And in some respects, the search for the year's dumbest album, too. True, Limp Bizkit's third release is filled with thrashworthy hooks, hardcore beats, and plenty of blind rage, but frontman Fred Durst is so inarticulate about exactly what is pissing him off that it's tough to take him seriously.

Renaissance is about as substantive, lyric-wise, as a Hallmark card.

An album of bland and relatively anonymous adult pop that rarely gets racier than offering to "keep you up all night" and "make you holler."

An unseemly, almost unnecessary foray into heavy metal and hard rock, especially in light of her success on the acoustic side.