Too much of Aerial fades into a soft-focus background of soothing synthesizers, murmuring bass, and twittering birdsong.

Smith is capable of subtle introspection, but too many of his new songs sound like the self-pitying complaints of an adolescent venting in his diary.

The W is the sort of back-to-basics album that rock bands like the Who and the Rolling Stones used to make when they felt they were losing touch with their audience. It's capable but uninspiring -- Wu by Numbers.

Beck desperately aims for Johnny Cash's funereal blues, but the unremitting bleakness of Sea Change more closely resembles alternative rock's limpid whine.

Uh Huh Herb is a disappointment, the tepid, not-quite-there record that many artists seem to make after hitting a career peak.

The carefully constructed sonics, though beautiful, can be so snoozily contemplative.

The central flaw of Room on Fire is the lack of hooks.

It's full of the same monochromatic balladry and hipster references of its recent albums.

The album has its charms -- Björk's voice soars on "Scatter Heart," and her duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke has a mambo-style sexiness -- but its overdone orchestrations and outsize emotions lack the resonance of Carousel and its metaphysical overtones or even the easygoing peacetime fizz of On the Town. [Sep 25, 2000]

Too tentative and slight to be genuinely moving.

The Eminem Show has pretensions toward real life, but it possesses all the resonance and revelation of a sitcom.

Endlessly pleasing (or trying to please), Feels Like Home dilutes even Jones’s brand of comfort-food jazz, grinding it down to something like a chewy gob of baby food.

Though his voice is strong and sincere throughout the album, most of the material has a certain karaoke-like vibe.

Without question, 50 Cent has one of the most distinctive voices in hip-hop: He raps in a molasses-slow, beyond-laconic drawl, and chants in a singsongy patois reminiscent of dance-hall stars like Sean Paul. But there isn’t enough invention in the rhymes, and, worse, barely any humor.

Like her awkward lyrical ventures into S&M and bisexuality on The Velvet Rope, songs like "Love Scene (Ooh Baby)" and "When We Oooo" aim for hot-and-heaviness but have the chilliness of her brother's famous televised kiss with Lisa Marie Presley.

Sky Blue Sky shows his restlessness as an artist, his need to keep moving - not always forward, but never merely standing still, and certainly not dipping into the back catalogue for an idea or two.

Ironically, little on the album captures the imagination the way narrower genres like techno, house, or even hip-hop often do

Your level of interest in their music probably correlates with your willingness to be bored.

Quarry doesn’t have great songs, just not-so-clever quips.

It is a noble effort, modeled on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, but the results are underwhelming.

The note that truly dooms Diary is thematic, not musical. The disc collapses under the weight of one song about heartbreak after another.

Charitable fans and critics will probably seize on the few sparks generated by 3D to eulogize TLC as vanguards. The truth -- that their riskier impulses were often tamped down by a conservative industry -- is somewhat more depressing.

It’s merely another nice try, charmingly forgettable.

If he hasn’t yet invented a persona intriguing enough to live up to his music, give him credit for being one of the few white men still brave enough to make black music.

Putting Naked together was likely satisfying for McCartney, but like a lot of inherently selfish artistic endeavors, it’s somewhat less rewarding for everyone else.

Timberlake and the Neptunes work hard at creating memorable songs, an admirable undertaking given the pathetic state of songwriting in pop music. But little more is expressed in songs like "Señorita" and "Take It From Here" than flowery notions of romance or brusque come-ons.

And though the smarter songs (the more personal "If I Had It All," the easygoing "Fool to Think") benefit from the concision, the group's newfound musical sharpness isn't that of a world-class bar band but that of an outsize stadium act -- all grand gesture and larger-than-life lyrics. Sometimes, as on "I Did It," the band recaptures the spirit of seventies rock in all its innocent fun. Other times, especially on the cloying, overdramatic "The Space Between," it recaptures only those moments that involve holding a lighter high above one's head.

The rapper's nicotine-scarred voice does sound bluesy, and his raps are serious without being arch like Beck's. The album's sound -- a marriage of classical string arrangements and sparse drum beats -- makes the guitar stomp of his rap-rock peers seem more one-dimensional than ever. But Everlast's blues are one-shaded -- nothing on Eat at Whitey's approaches the grim fatalism of the Geto Boys' "Mind Playin' Tricks on Me," Eminem's "Rock Bottom," or even Snoop Doggy Dogg's "Murder Was the Case."

Buckcherry now captures the decadence of seventies and eighties hard rock better than anyone who actually lived it.

The Massacre is as frustratingly uneven as Get Rich or Die Tryin’, but it’s longer and messier.

At its very best, "Superman Inside" for example, Reptile is as expressive as anything he did in the nineties. The other half of Reptile is a series of oddball genre digressions and cornball balladeering.

Intermittently successful...[t]oo often, his faithfulness turns into meticulousness, resulting in an album that's as formally impressive but as snooze-inducingly detailed as a special-effects-addled blockbuster.

Morissette seems unwilling to step into unfamiliar territory.

Nelson's voice, silky enough to sing standards, lacks the vocal grit for the blues, and he rarely works up enough energy to milk the titular cow. Most of these songs are better suited for a supper club than for a juke joint. [Oct 2, 2000]

The songwriting is scattershot... and the sound strains for punk-on-a-budget but is as three-chord conservative as other retro acts like Rancid and the Distillers.

Filthy Philly rapstress ropes in famous mates, but falls short of rap superstardom.

The songs, engaging as they are, sound cursory, as though Lee wrote them while riding the bus on his way to the studio, staring at his watch and an empty notebook.

Many of these songs are thin schematics for “perfect” pop songs. They’re impressive in their commitment to formula--deploying catchy, whiny hooks, taut structure, loud-soft interplay, and well-timed guitar peals. Yet for all their nakedness, they offer little in the way of revelation.