The architecture of these layered slices of electro-pop is transparent, but the songs never offer more than surface pleasures.

The Strokes’ hallmarks--those lean melodies, that steely interplay among guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. and bassist Nikolai Fraiture, the urgency of Julian Casablancas’s vocals--are largely absent on Comedown Machine, their fifth studio album. In their place is a looseness that’s refreshing enough, until you realize these guys are perhaps running short on ideas.

A good sound can only support wobbly songs so far, and the middle third of the album sinks into a deadly lull that suggests the band only sporadically knows how to pull off slower tempos.

Even the infectious energy of “Rollercoaster” can’t quite overcome a demo-like lack of polish that keeps the songs earthbound even as they reach higher.

Kiss's 20th studio album is a steady if unremarkable outing.

Unfortunately, the longtime troubadour of existential restlessness and uncertainty gets overly reverential treatments here from Don Henley, Lucinda Williams, and Bonnie Raitt, among many others.

It's your quintessential on-the-road/off-the-cuff indulgence, a sometimes successful merging of traveling-band existentialism and boredom-killing filler.

Given the musically versatile, vaunted band behind it, Big Whiskey, for all its stylistic reach and array of textures, is frequently beset with a curious bout of blandness.

Unfortunately, at times he still comes across as Usher-lite.

Morello is all over this album with mixed results. There are some great songs here.

He’s undeniably an intelligent MC with a sense of social justice, which makes all the half-realized ideas, indulgence, and misogyny (clueless “No Role Modelz”) puzzling.

What is unfortunately not elusive on the album are a clutch of interchangeable slow-to-midtempo tunes long on pulsating atmosphere--several with distractingly fidgety rhythmic tracks--but short on melody or verve.

It feels a little too soon for this overstuffed, 16-song collection where Oberst's cutting social commentary is dropped into a maelstrom of charging guitars and barroom backing vocals.

The tracks are tuneful and bounce in all the right fluffy ways. But the songs--most are three minutes--are unmemorable, and Leslie, who comfortably shifts from lower register to a sweet falsetto, isn't a commanding vocalist.

His voice, still a dynamic instrument that can leap from meek to menacing, is very much out front, prowling over spare, sometimes lugubrious reworkings. At the album’s best, the results are head-spinning....At its worst, a few songs feel plodding and insular.

Many of the contributors give the material a rootsy, rattletrap approach, creating a flat consistency that drags a bit. It’s not until the second half that Beck Song Reader comes fitfully to life.

Typically, the complaints against Wayne are that he's annoying, grating, and ubiquitous; but for the first time he's made himself seem uninteresting, which is far more career-threatening.

After so many highlights, the duds feel inconsequential, easily bypassed. Only when Keys panders to Top 40 radio does the album truly stumble, sounding like a hodgepodge of transparent ideas.

The pieces don't always fit, making Solid State her most uneven album in at least a decade. But every track offers the pleasure of Phillips's marvelous voice, which sounds like Scotch seeping through cracks in wood.

Whatever chemistry singers Charles Kelley and Hillary Scott had fizzles on 747.... 747 also suffers from baffling sequencing, opening with three downbeat songs and closing with the train-track skip of kiss-off “Just a Girl,” a song with so much modesty and so little finality to it that the record seems to simply stop.

While she seems like the twee offspring of Lisa Loeb, she lacks any of Loeb’s quirkiness and charms while retaining the annoying preciousness. Michaelson’s fourth disc, Everybody, puts all her limitations on display.

With Cosentino's voice free of effects and upfront in the mix, it's more apparent just how rudimentary her songwriting is.

Echoey wall-of-sound sheen, soft-rock flourishes, guitar bombast, and omnipresent programming predominate. Presumably the intention was to create a sonic mood to match the album’s thematic concerns, but too often the execution leaves the songs sounding plodding and inert.

Intentional or not, some of that transition seeps into the music, giving songs room to ramble but nothing resembling a core.

By the time "World of Freakout" rolls past, the terrain is too familiar--the agreeable enough "Warm Water" and the dull wash of "Space Remains" prolong a tepid trend that sogs the album's last half.

The songs are furiously bouncy and unbelievably vapid.

It's safe to say that Alone--a vigorously eclectic but mostly charmless collection culled from more than a decade's worth of Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo's home recordings--is strictly for hard-core fans of the geek-pop underdogs.

You get the sense that Familial, with all of its good intentions, might have made a better gift to a girlfriend than a serious petition to come out from behind the kit.