The Recession's singles are exceptional, but the filler suffers from a detached and dispirited sound.

he vocals are gorgeous and Carlos plays with restraint and taste throughout. Unfortunately, such moments of inspiration are rare, as most of the songs reflect a project that struggles to find a place to stand.

It seems Gogol Bordello is still stubbornly clutching for the inventiveness of earlier records like Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike and Super Taranta! without truly progressing, leaving us with a Rick Rubin-adorned imitation of their visionary past work.

It’s an ideal time to simultaneously start over and glance back, which Walker does on Sycamore Meadows, trading the glammy style of his prior solo work for competent, traditional radio rock....Then again, you’ll need a high threshold for boorishness to enjoy his frequent autobiographical nostalgia for substance abuse, pubescent defloration and venereal disease.

Hiatt puts these thoughts to paper in his signature cerebral style, but it isn’t enough to make these played-out themes feel fresh.

On Play On her approach results in a scattershot collection that too often mistakes bombast for sincerity ('Unapologize') and sap for sentiment ('Temporary Home').

He set out to depict the pains of contemporary Chicago, but he ended up just making another Common album.

Not everything has to be pure pop, but nothing else on Brutalism even comes close to sounding like a complete song the way [“Body Chemistry”] does.

The bottom line is, these guys have always just wanted to rock, and Himalayan is the first album that doesn’t let them.

Entering Heaven Alive is seldom actively bad, but the most interesting component of either of White’s 2022 albums is that, well, there are two of them.

And yet, given the promise of their combined talents, Strings turns out to be seriously frayed, as these guitarists sound like they're going to another job instead of hanging around to jam.

Put Your Sad Down is full of great ideas--it's the execution that's often shaky.

The two started jamming together and the songs evolved organically. Before the duo knew it, they had an album’s worth of songs. And that’s basically what the album sounds like--two guys of a certain age doing stuff they think is really cool that only winds up being cool to guys of a certain age.

Dirty Projectors, his self-titled rebirth, is therapeutic and at times frustratingly insular, full of dazzling and meticulous electronic textures that bely the melancholia underneath.

Chaosmosis, though full of small pleasures, will undoubtedly go down as a minor work in the Scream discography. Primal Scream’s best records dissolved genres together like potions; Chaosmosis seems happy just to ride out the groove.

All in all, Sunflower Bean stripped away more than was necessary. The blunt truth is that the refreshing and energizing band that birthed “Tame Impala” and “Rock & Roll Heathen” just didn’t show up to the Human Ceremony recording sessions.

There are glimpses of vitality on Hymns, but The Spirit is flaky.

Where these two songs [“Darkseid” and “4ÆM”] burst with fervor, Miss_Anthropocene’s other tracks often stumble and limp.

Mockingbird Time suffers most in the songwriting, which too often relies on soft hooks and indistinct details that never quite add up to conflicts or characters.

It’s just a shame that what lies behind dozens of layers of metaphorical shrouds, isn’t a bit more poetic and interesting.

It's just not very fun. Wale's conversion to Ross' braggy rap-excess didn't seem like a great idea in theory, and stretched out to an hour his updated, devolved craft starts to wear thin very, very quickly.

On the heels of 2011’s critically hailed D, Corsicana Lemonade is a plain, uninspiring disappointment.

She has the potential to be the next Ann Peebles, a real superstar in the blues world. But first she needs to snap that leash.

AIM isn’t nearly as ambitious. It’s just busywork, M.I.A. watching the clock, scanning the news, occupied, but idle.

Free Energy can put a damn pop hook together--problem is the execution.

The third disc, annoyingly titled Kid Amnesiae, starts off promisingly enough with a straight piano version of “Like Spinning Plates.” ... Only four of the 12 tracks here stretch past four minutes, with the majority of them clocking in at under two. That would be excusable if these leftovers revealed anything about what it must have been like to be in the room while making a pair of classic albums.

If the album is frustratingly uneven--if, despite moments of exuberance, it can also feel like a mundane grind--well, I suspect that also mirrors life in Mali. And almost everywhere else, too.

Rome does sound like the result of five years of Very Serious Effort, except instead of honing a few rough spots, the hubris-driven tinkering ended up chipping away all the soul from what could have been a jaunty and lively homage to some of the best movie music ever made.

just as the sequel-ness inherently implies, faithfulness to their past work sinks Event II, as just the sound and goals of the album seem out of place in 2013 and overly nostalgic, without adding much to the conversation that seemed long finished.

A Wasteland Companion is Ward's seventh proper solo album, and it certainly has it moments, even if many of them are fairly derivative.

The Pinkprint has moments. Some are great, but most are not.

Glow & Behold is never shrill or musically obnoxious, but it’s obnoxious how dull it is.

It’s not terrible, it’s mostly pleasant to listen to, it’s beautifully produced and it’s easy to recognize the skill it takes to craft their saintly, synth-driven sound. But when you couple a critical reputation like theirs with the band’s own claim of making a big artistic jump, mostly pleasant to listen to shouldn’t cut it.

It is an album that would make Tenacious D roll their eyes and make metal fans scratch their heads.

WYWH is all about atmosphere, but it's an atmosphere that doesn't always leave an impression, which makes this album a very tentative step in the right direction.

Dawes’ latest may well sound fresh and new, or at least vaguely soulful, if you don’t know it’s a retread, but Passwords is all too easy to crack, and what’s inside isn’t really worth protecting when others have been doing it all better for decades.

Other Worlds is an immersive, expansive listen, filled with warm electro-dub grooves and plenty of ear-tickling headphone details--but it can also be a snooze.

Whereas BSS' two previous albums indulge the group's pop sensibilities while showcasing its knack for rock anthems, Forgiveness cremates and scatters these strengths over an intimidating and overwrought runtime.

As Above So Below is so soft, so painfully passive that at times that it's hard not to wander away.

They made a wholesome record without embarrassing themselves or their fans.

Tatum and his collaborators nailed the sounds, but they don’t come close to finding tunes that resonate.

The chillwave movement has always channeled nostalgia—warm echoes of a distant past, faded and warped into a new aesthetic. Purple Noon, though, mostly just elicits nostalgia for the glory days of chillwave itself.

It's pretty much a greatest hits album, which conceptually blows an opportunity right off the bat.

Where lyrics are concerned, be prepared for plenty of eye rolling (or eye gouging).

Stripped of its clever concept, Top Ten Hits for the End of the World can be apocalyptically bland.

A nicely composed mix, no doubt, and one that's often gorgeous to boot, but Penny Sparkle mostly sounds like a band getting complacent with age.

Anastasis demands intense, patient listening, though it rarely rewards it.

The ideas behind Weight have some potential, but Editors can’t seem to pull them off successfully.

There are moments when the synths, pianos and strings coalesce to form something resembling the urgency and poignance Swan Lake is capable of, but these spare highlights are only barely worth looking for.

British singer/songwriter David Gray last released a proper studio album in 2005. It was called "Life in Slow Motion," and it was lovely. It was also a complete waste of that title, which could be far more accurately applied to his syrupy new LP Draw the Line.

Common’s inability to sound sincere about a man he spent two years championing is the most telling part of this consciously shallow caricature of hip-hop’s dregs.

Barfod has more faith in his electronics, and when he’s playing something he trusts, he permits the songs to venture out and reach greater emotional heights. But that comfort doesn’t extend to his human players, and his hesitation to let go and explore permeates the album.

Throughout Father of the Bride, a record with half-baked political commentary (“Something’s happening in the country / And the government’s to blame”) and lazy wordplay (“All I do is lose but baby / All I want’s to win”), it feels as if Koenig turned away from what made his band so great in the first place, instead electing to adopt a sound that doesn’t necessarily fit him, one that comes off as derivative and frequently boring.

It’s an occasionally comical throwback to when they were at their biggest, with a few good-not-great moments. One can only hope they chill out and come up with something better in a few years.

Heavy production, heavy hooks and heavy club-friendly beats are the status quo, everything coming across like someone else’s tampering rather than Allen’s creative doing.

Everything about this record is a shame: it explores new creative territory, the rhyming is solid and syntactically delightful (Big Boi's pronunciations are always more quotable than his lines), and it's a deserving outcast trying to make good as one-record-every-two-years lifer. And it simply does not work.

By the time the pop-induced sugar rush wears off you realize that, besides being done before, these songs have definitely been done better. Worse yet, all you've got to show for it is a headache.

High points feel scattered among a patchwork of pillowy piano tunes, conspicuous genre experiments and politically charged trial balloons. There are good things and not-so-good things here, but there is no cohesion in the overall work. Closer Than Together doesn’t hang together as a whole.

Levon coaxes an intricately textured tone from his saxophone on 'Over Her Shoulder,' but generally, Joe’s erudition gets the better of him on this strangely dim and twinkleless album.

Tonally, however, Bish Bosch offers nothing dramatically new, just (a lot more) of what Walker's done before.

Speaking of The Beatles, Different Gear continues the Gallagher quest for the perfect Lennon impression. It's yet to be found.

In its song choices, if not necessarily in its treatments, Run for Cover is more ambitious than it needs to be--than it should be, in fact.

While † threatened to alienate with its sheer abrasiveness, its long-awaited follow-up succeeds in boring with its sprawling and unfocused Queen-meets-Skrillex mashups.

Other artists, such as Florence and the Machine are creating better, more interesting music with the same techniques. Seek them out instead of wasting your time on this one.

Crows isn’t without merit—Moorer’s voice is beautiful, and the themes are on an emotional canvas that anyone over 13 with a normal amount of chromosomes has experienced, making her album relatable if not particularly memorable.

Mmost frustrating about this album are the shades of old Morrissey.

Jay overreaches, leaning too heavily on by-the-numbers production from Kanye West and Timbaland, and muffling his own voice in favor of a guest-heavy tracklist.

Where A Brief Inquiry… excelled due to its exceptional pop songwriting and well-calculated sonic departures, Notes… is far too ambitious and self-aware (“Will I live and die in a band?”) for its own good.

A couple songs on Continuum do hint at what Mayer is capable of if he can shed his perfectionist skin and get to the quick of his emotions. [Nov 2006, p.76]

In Your Dreams is an album about exorcising the demons of the past and moving forward toward the beauty lingering in our imaginations.

Meadow may amount to less than the sum of its parts, but those parts are often pretty great. [Sep 2006, p.78]

It’s a record in total lust and fealty to Hailey; you’ll probably want to duck out to use the bathroom halfway through.

She's still got class and sass to spare, but among so many collaborators, Sinatra sounds too malleable and impersonal. [#13, p.111]

What she has done so compellingly throughout her career--evanescent moments of self-doubt given voice through melancholic bursts of catharsis--yields here to '70s singer/songwriter cliches once peddled by Carole King and later adopted by the Lilith Fair crowd. [May 2007, p.68]

It's not an especially good album, but its failures are noble rather than ignoble-byproducts of ambition rather than hubris.

Unfortunately, no amount of slick beats and swagger can camouflage Untitled’s defects.

Narcissistic, repetitive, underpowered and yet strangely compelling in its quirky construction and directness.

There's something disconcerting about Siberia's familiarity. [Dec 2005, p.111]

Unfortunately it feels mostly like an over-concentrated mess of misplaced ambitions.

If anything, the vocals provide the most effective dynamism in lifting these tracks out of their banality and providing sporadic moments of layered exaltation – short, shimmering flashes of greatness on an album that’s not especially compelling.

It's the sound of a band trying to play it both ways, and succeeding at neither. [May 2007, p.61]

Unfortunately, irrational moments like “The Rape Over” make you question the entire 17-track outing.

What emerges from Set ’em Wild, Set ’em Free is the realization that Akron/Family is maddeningly unknowable and, essentially, a product of all these influences rolled up into one gigantic, take-it-or-leave-it stringball.

An efficient and insistent hunk of modestly effective dancefloor candy. [Oct/Nov 2005, p.125]

Dreams Come True is nothing if not well-produced and lovingly assembled. Problem is: there ain't no soul.

An audacious but unsuccessful experiment. [Oct/Nov 2005, p.132]

There’s a genuinely evocative album buried under the obnoxiousness.

A premature nostalgia trip: a journey back to college radio at the end of the '90s. [Apr/May 2006, p.106]

Kaiser and Cartel just might be the Sonny and Cher of the indie-pop world.

In song after song there are moments where it sounds like the band is weaving its way into a fantastic instrumental jam section, only to have the new idea abruptly cut short by the track’s end or an obligatory return to the next verse.

Wilson's fake tales of Middle England lack the sharp observational focus of the Arctic Monkeys, the bratty cleverness of Blur circa Parklife or even the sexy swagger of Franz Ferdinand. [May 2007, p.61]

The songs are sprightly but not riveting, the beats competent but not galvanizing.

The years, however, have worn on the Meat Puppets. Their unrestrained gusto has been replaced with a slower, methodical purging.

Rice, singing [on "Light Industry"] about “Bennie and the Jets and dreary weekend sex,” plays perfectly into the song’s hesitant mood. It’s the one moment on Gulp! where his audible exhaustion fits, a song that makes you wonder what the rest of the album would have be like if only the band could translate Rice’s weariness into something more suited to their strengths. Instead, Sports Team take a swing with Gulp! and barely make contact.

He’s nodded to his Texas roots before, but on this collection meant to play up his twangy side, he seems scared of edging too far into the darkness of country music’s long, rich tradition. And what a shame.

Creating a musical theme that stretches across the album isn’t a bad idea, but The Little Ones fail to pull it off, and the songs suffer from a frothy sameness.

The intensity of his voice never completely gels with the bright instrumentation. [Apr/May 2005, p.138]

Although Goodbye winds down after the brilliant power pop of "Only One Too", Jewel never appears to be going through the motions. [Jun/Jul 2006, p.131]