There is no excuse for accepting this level of mediocrity.

The Future Bites is the worst sounding album he’s ever put out.

Fike doesn't make much of an effort to flesh out any of his genre-fluid ideas. Instead, he's content with writing half-written bouncy hip-pop anthems (Cancel Me) and tryhard "indie" jams (Double Negative) in hopes of charming everything and everyone.

Every song on here comes from a collaboration from a different source, or a different trend that Legend is hopping on. There’s nothing personal here. ... Bigger Love’s second half has painful trap pop (Don’t Walk Away), plastic soul (Remember Us, Always), and a piano ballad closer with no defining traits or features (Never Break), all in classic John Legend fashion.

Every solid moment on American Standard is outmatched by a one to ten ratio of awry choices for songs that shouldn’t be hard to ruin. It’s almost impressive to see James Taylor screw up songs that are fundamentally easy to cover.

Fresh Air and Midnight Snack. Sagar sounds lethargic and detached, which may be the mood that he's going for; but when he sticks to the same tired motifs, it's hard to feel any more excited than him.

Their style fits in between Chvrches and Taylor Swift’s 1989, though not up to that level of craft. Interesting moments, like the echoing guitar of There’s A Honey or the finger-snap rhythm of Loveless Girl, are drowned out by overstuffed songs with unmemorable melodies.

Wet feel disconnected from the album's overarching theme, and though they do put some feeling into their maudlin ballads, you'll come off it without remembering a single note.

ye doesn’t reward repeat listens. It gives its limited treasures upfront and it’s an album with precious little beneath the surface.

They’re playing the blues, man, and obviously, nobody does that anymore. And really, even on a good half of From the Fires, the fast-tracked major label signees don’t even try to really emulate their esteemed deities’ dangerous sexuality and, instead, bafflingly resort to half-assed emotional platitudes.

Outrage! Is Now is unequivocally uninspired, shelving almost all of the rawness that put the Toronto doublet on the map thirteen years ago. It’s lyrically apathetic, and Jesse F. Keeler’s basslines have lost all of their punishing nature.

There’s barely any turntable work, just vanilla rock that once you’ve heard once you’ve heard it a million times. ... Incubus have un-made themselves.

From referencing Harold Shipman in a song title to taking a moral high ground to the view of secluding yourself with drugs, Songs for Our Mothers presents an insignificant manifesto.

The Libertines have tried to recreate the feeling of their halcyon era but have lost their mojo during their extended hiatus, which means that most of the time, this record sounds like someone playing dialogue from outtakes of Steptoe And Son over a recording of an out-of-tune piano being pushed down an old flight of stairs.

Aside from a few crunching riffs and a smattering of neat melodies, there’s very little to recommend within Drones.

The band begins to slog through the session--each song sounds like the sonic embodiment of utter indifference, only this time it’s accompanied by electric instruments.

While not everything here is awful, the good is often streaked throughout each song like marbled fat in a rubber steak.

Given that these songs mostly clock in under two minutes, that should be enough to carry the flat arrangements and melodies, but it's not.

13 songs in 36 minutes is a constrictive ratio for a record with so many proposed ideas, and its brevity makes Rustie’s ideas sound especially half-hearted. It’s bad enough that he doesn’t give the more physical tracks enough time to flex their muscles, but the tracks which suffer most are the briefer, more innocuous pieces.

Synths take a higher precedence this time round: it’s an indie-pop record, far from their post-hardcore roots; indeed Living in Song sounds like an Architecture in Helsinki knockoff. But even when you can hear the band trying out new things, it simply sounds turgid.

We get a record that is surprisingly dull, which alternates between syrupy, unremarkable ballads and uptempo tracks that sound like they’ve been assembled by a committee of consultants.

Lyrically it’s weak, and the over-polished studio buffing does nothing to emancipate the blueprint that is, essentially, the same as it was 17 years ago.

Conveniently, he’s premeditated every song in #willpower with a bevy of wishy-washy, quotable clichés that are meant to fit the space of 140 characters. Sadly, that's as deep as it gets.

The bottom line here is that this is a boring album, plain and simple.

By attempting to give us what we want, and provide reassurance that the Sonic Youth legacy is in safe hands, Moore has somehow managed to make it look weaker and less appealing than it ever was.

On Flower Lane, Mondanile and the gang stepped out of the bedroom and into the studio, and the result is something just as sterile as every other song by Real Estate.

By playing it safe and giving the fans exactly what they want, Coheed & Cambria have successfully delivered two of the most predictable, mundane albums I’ve ever heard.

Many of the tracks on Dos! are merely soulless specters of previous work from Green Day's "golden-age."