This album is difficult, complicated, pretentious, infuriating, inconsistent, and asks more questions then it answers.

God love her, but Faith and her handlers just can’t seem to tell the difference between good and bad songs.

It’s not groundbreaking. It’s not a huge stylistic forward leap or a studio-stunt. It’s simply another of Eric Johnson and his band’s records of simple grandiosity.

Clor’s singer and main-man Barry Dobbin unfortunately posses the kind of high, straining voice that grates to the point of making you want to punch him on the nose, and when combined with the incessant business of the band’s undoubtedly clever and accomplished music it makes this eponymous debut feel like an effort to listen to.

Honeycomb proves too rigid and self-serious to make good on Black’s strengths.

Uneven by and large, and below what we all know R.’s capable of, this one mostly shoots blanks.

To be fair Free The Bees isn’t a bad record as such, it’s just that this backwards looking, past-is-best philosophy so often smacks of a distasteful and conservative obsession with authenticity and tradition, as if sounding like the past is more important than sounding like yourselves.

What The Future Embrace lacks in terms of consistency, it makes up for with the feeling that Corgan has turned a corner, that his return to musical credibility is well underway, and isn’t nearly as inconceivable as it was one year ago.

A big confused mess.

Another Day On Earth is more blank than frank, a journey through a hollow land, more discreet than it needs to be. Imagine a recording in which every human error has been scrubbed, like coffee grounds off a formica counter.

The handful of slower songs drag more than they have a right to, and fail to hint at any depth or versatility that’s missing from the straight-ahead rockers.

The first disc actually suggests the band is capable of making a live album worth your time even if you didn't like Bring It On and Liquid Skin, but its welcome is worn out and its charms are fatally undercut by the turgid, unnecessary second disc.

Don’t Believe The Truth is simply Oasis being Oasis with maximum efficiency. Which is to say that if you’re a committed acolyte of the church of Oasis, you’ll love it.

So frustrating then, for such a multitalented rapper, to have his supposed magnum opus weak, stale, and far more aged than we’d expect.

Honkytonk University is one missed opportunity after another.

This record is worth having, but offers little more than a slow orbiting tour of familiar Boredoms territory.

It can get very very dull.

This is by no means a bad album, but to my ears, it’s worse; it’s mediocre.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the kind of music Hot Hot Heat makes. Nevertheless, bands have done it better.

If this is your first experience of the band, you might still find it fresh, but personally I’m beginning to feel radicalism fatigue.

In some ways is a step backwards towards their rockist, meat-and-potatoes roots, and in other ways is a quantum leap into the unknown.

It’s the sound of two very talented musicians getting their proverbial creative ya-ya’s out, temporarily sullying their good name to lay ground for something potentially even more exciting.

The album’s stagnant celebrity worship stifles their ironic, so-dumb-its-addictive intentions.

The only perfect choice here was to make an album full of ballads. It could have been a violent reworking of age-old texts. Unfortunately, there’s not enough violence here to fully rend and flay, just enough to bruise.

The musical missteps wouldn’t be so bad if Broder’s voice didn’t often betray him.

The Fallen Leaf Pages starts strong and tails off, but even that would be more forgivable if Putnam’s writing was as distinctive as it used to be.

This is the kind of post punk that loves The Specials and XTC rather than Wire and Joy Division.

Ultimately, Meltdown isn’t as dramatic a failure as its title seems to be begging me to pronounce it--in fact it isn’t really a failure at all. It’s just a crucial dip in momentum.