It feels crudely stitched together. [Mar 2011, p.49]

In the end, it's the aural equivalent of skyscrapers built out of wattle and daub. [Mar 2011, p.49]

The music is so devoid of anything to grab onto, listening to it is rather like plummeting at speed through the artificial landscape constructed for the film. [Mar 2011, p.48]

This may be the first solo Eno work that is entirely without interest. It is bafflingly below par. [Dec 2010, p.45]

There are several memorable songs here, but the offhand, one-take atmosphere makes the project slighter than it might have been. [Feb 2011, p.50]

As a prank or a statement, Expekoration is a particularly lazy one. [Dec 2010, p.50]

These are worn vintage sounds, but the songs here lack the choruses and hooks to invest them with fresh life, and Buttery's voice is forgettable. [Dec 2010, p.46]

'Corporate Cannibal' is the exception, and Jones, a miracle of nature at Meltdown, proves more fallible on Hurricane. [Nov 2008, p.64]

The music veers between between a kind of funk slop with trippy organ squelches and good ol' fashioned rawk with biblical overtones, It feels a little like drowning in a bath of Jack Daniels, but not in a good way. [Sep 2010, p.53]

There's nothing on their fourth album that couldn't have been recorded in the early to mid-1980s. [Sep 2010, p.50]

Ultimately, though, one crucial element is missing: El-P's voice. His desperate, throbbing-forehead-vein rapping is as vital as his sound as the synths or the beats, and this disc would have been vastly improved by even one bilious verse. [Aug 2010, p.61]

He telegraphs all too simplistic rhymes schemes and rarely offers subject matter beyond deeply cliched braggadocio. He's rapping like he doesn't want to be there. [Oct 2010, p.67]

It all slides down very easily--but there's isn't much of an aftertaste. [Aug 2010, p.66]

He frequently seems bored with his own raps, rarely breaking his monotone and indifferently fluctuating between bragging about the quality of his weed and bragging about nothing. The record's saving grace comes with reemergence of producer Ski Beatz. [Sep 2010, p.68]

The feeling of opiated depressive inertia that weighs it down is compounded by the sugary viscosity of Danger Mouse;s production. Yet it's these slower songs, shaped by Linkous's Country-inflected enervation and Danger Mouse's attention to sonic detail, that work best, while the more up tempo, rockier tracks come off as perfunctory. [Jul 2010, p.53]

The results are mixed. The album never fully escapes the feeling of rootless hipster genre-rifling. But the skill of Mast and Stroud at engineering riffs cannot be denied. [Jul 2010, p.60]

This mood of rocking-chair wistfulness becomes soporific, and there are times when, frankly, the mind, unjabbed by the sort of stimulus that was once Byrne & Eno's stock in trade, begins to wander. [Oct 2008, p.54]

Hebden is clearly striving for dancefloor impact--but Reid's drumming is so untethered and, frankly, messy, that it sucks the explosions out of whatever bombs Hebden's trying to drop. [Dec 2008, p.60]

It all makes for an album which is strangely boring; the baroque detailing becomes an inaudiable blur. [Dec 2008, p.65]

Car Alarm strips away the exotic and the curious. [Nov 2008, p.70]

Though you'd be justified in hanging this writer for conflating person and persona, you're asked to contemplate the uneasy positivity that chacterizes Paper Trail's three mot popular songs. [Dec 2008, p.74]

A usually sharp MC, Murs sounds conflicted throughout, a little too anxious to be loved by everyone. [Dec 2008, p.74]

Keith's industry gripes are implicit from his two decade career as the Absurd Outside Rapper--so it's a shame he feels the need to come so blunt. [Dec 2008, p.74]

Unfortunately, for all the insight, this willingness to play victim often overshadows the incisiveness of the MC's observations when it come to the beats he has chosen to rail over. [Sep 2008, p.66]

It's a shame that such moments [lyrics that objectify and highlight abuse toward women] can so completely mar an album, as Banner is on sparklingly articulate lyrical form elsewhere. [Sep 2008, p.66]

The mixes (on the second disc) reinforce the strength and weaknesses of Pyramids, not only showcasing their craftmanship in the surface of sound, but also insinuating that there might not be much beyond these sculped surfaces. [July 2008, p.55]

These guys mean well. [June 2008, p.63]

There's being reflective and then there's navel-gazing, and unfortunately Alopecia is too frequently guilty of the latter to really engage either the mind or heart. [Apr 2008, p.66]