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."

Mostly everything is contrived and cliché, lifted from a stock collection of guitar rock and electro rock of the past ten years.

I'll admit, the songs on Babel wouldn't be so painful if it weren't for the god-awful "deep" lyricism of Marcus Mumford.

The album suffers some of the worst adjectives any musician can hear: boring, forgettable, and embarrassing.

Into The Diamond Sun is somewhat equivalent to being pelted with macaroons; at first sweet, delicate, even impressively constructed, but soon proving not just boring, but intensely samey, sickly and unsatisfying.

This album is a carbon copy of Vampire Weekend, but you know how when Gus Van Sant remade Psycho shot for shot and it was rubbish? It's like that.

Magic Hour's never exactly bad. It's worse than that. It's boring.

Quite frankly, it's f**king boring.

Awful.

It is, quite frankly, tedious and utterly un-inspiring, lacking any serious ability to convey the emotive forces which I would hope drove the song writing processes. [Review of UK release The Future Is Medieval]

In the end it's hard to fathom just who is going to really love this album.

It is samey, ugly and spectacularly stupid at the same time.

Only three tracks are of sufficient quality to have seen the light of day and it means you can't help but question the motives behind the release of such an inessential collection.

here isn't enough variation on here to retain its limited intrigue, as Lortz relies too much on his consistently unremarkable songwriting; ultimately, it's a forgettable record.

Beachy summer party/winter bummer wallpaper for your Bohemian café-bar and for the hipsters that frequent it, who like their pop music perfectly pleasant and non-threatening.

It's just painfully mediocre.

This album is an abomination. It's a rancid pile of regurgitated tripe.

Where this album should be fresh and current, it sounds tired, repetitive and uninspired.

After half a decade away, If Not Now, When? really does feel like a misstep. Hopefully a little creative control can be wrestled away from Boyd in the future, otherwise a much under-rated band really could be lost forever.

There's no debating in my mind that Digitalism have the potential to produce an album even better than Idealism. But sadly, I Love You, Dude is not it.

The album does have one redeeming aspect preventing its plunge into epic echelons of suck, and that's lead single Party Rock Anthem.

Circuital makes it clear that we are dealing with My Morning Jacket post-metamorphosis. From a provocative indie/country/blues band with exceptional vocals, witty lyrics, and a stellar band, MMJ has found prime real estate on the premise of becoming a commercial parody of themselves.

Owl City is electro-pop's unwanted bastard child, combining all the worst elements of the genre. The production is lazy and unbelievably dull.

Apparently The Wombats only managed to write the one song for the album and so have decided to just repeat it ten times, offering little-to-no variation in tone or tempo--although to be fair to them, they do stick a different synth preset on for each song so you can tell them apart.

The occasional highlight isn't enough to make up for the cloth-eared versions of timeless songs found elsewhere on the record, or to cover up for the fact that See My Friends is a mostly soulless, and an entirely pointless album.

F.A.M.E. is a vile, despicable album that doesn't deserve to be supported in any way, shape or form. Its very existence is a frightening indictment of our times, in terms of our attitudes to music, women and the cult of celebrity.

Vices & Virtues bucks that somewhat healthy trend in entirely the wrong manner, and represents exactly the kind of the uninspired drudgery of Americana indie rock that has emerged in the wake of the likes of My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy.

Their live performances are largely improvised around one riff per song, which could make for an interesting show--but on this record, it gets old fast.

It's not too hard to imagine the Saunders sisters staring aimlessly while some confused producers shuffle the cards until randomly finding their rhythmic groove. And that's the worst think about this record: constantly thinking of the word studio when you're trying to invest some emotion.

At its weakest, the album is merely boring with the lamely typical Can't You See, an album opener of distorted rumbling and vocals so low you'd strain to make them out. Arguably worse than a bland track is that the album actually offers some hope for a reasonably enjoyable experience.

Save for a few tracks, you get exactly what you'd expect from a band like Dead Confederate: middle of the road alternative rock music with seemingly little depth and a whole lot of cliches.

Sleep Mountain isn’t entirely unenjoyable; its two main crimes are that it’s too safe with its simple chord patterns and unimaginative riffs, and that it’s too in thrall to the records that have inspired it.

The derivativeness quickly overwhelms.

The girls are solid musicians, and they’ve structured their little songs well enough. The record is pretty short too, clocking in at 24 minutes, which is good, because I was bored already at the 15 minute mark.

Polished to the point of being nausea-inducing, this album has been packaged to a precise remit: robotic, stadium-rock-lite that follows the tried and tested formula of acoustic quiet bit, drums come in, second verse, chorus, repeat to fade so strictly that you’ll feel like banging your head against a brick wall and/or adding your own beat-box percussion.

They are capable of making albums that are big, over the top and fun. The Resistance is over the top, but comes off as boisterous and overblown.

Bricolage is as a sometimes fun but mostly ambitionless and unnecessary project.

Colonia has an awful lot of ideas, but doesn’t really know what to do with them and the majority of tracks end up sounding messy and--like the rest of us following Christmas--carrying a little too much extra weight.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with something throwaway now and again, but it’s difficult to stomach over the course of eleven tracks.

The record sounds phoned in, plain and simple, and its awkward concessions to cliche, its trash heap lyrical conceits, and its dopey production have a cumulative effect that would be insulting if it weren’t so transparently uninspired and uninteresting.

The album aims for Grohl-esque rock anthems, but falls short mostly due to a lack of melodic gifts; given that, it needs many more musical ideas than it has to keep anybody interested.

A 55-minute mess called Curtis, undoubtedly one of this year’s worst releases.

Unoriginal, haphazardly thrown together and lacking most of what could make it the least bit enjoyable, Places Like This just proves that Architecture in Helsinki is a one trick pony.

This record is half as clever as it thinks it is, and utterly inessential.

For what it is, it may in fact be quite good. But, to her discarded fans, at least, she's given the ultimate finger.

Liam Lynch is about as funny as the plague, and even that had its moments in Monty Python. This doesn't have any.