Concept: Dylan redoes the Holiday standbys for charity.

Sound: Please, God, no. People say they appreciate Dylan’s voice; what they mean is they appreciate its attachment to his material. This is not Blonde On Blonde; this is a panicked sprint through the ‘classics’, and Dylan’s voice paints a blood-soaked nightmare with the up-tempo polka rendition of Must Be Santa among other “delights”.

Lyrics: Chestnut Jack Frost Reindeer Presents Goodwill Jesus  Sleighbells Snowfall

Concept: Not all Christmas songs suck; let me make this clear. There are many good holiday tunes which are unfortunately overlooked for their religious emphasis, most of which can be found in the hands-down best Christmas album EVER – The Bells Of Dublin by The Chieftains. All we get here is the greatest songwriter of our time succumbing to some of the very worst. The sound of his voice on these songs is only a fraction as bad as the fact that he’s singing it. You might as well buy a video of your mother kissing Saint Nick — privilege or atrocity? Maybe both. Sounds like Christmas to me. (♦½)

Concept: Rock band plays rock music.

Sound: The guitarist and bassist are pretty frantic, with nice effects to match their playing style. As with most bands starting out, the problem is the vocalist. The frontlady is looking to mimic Gwen Stefani, but she does not have the pipes at all, and is always falling flat and just not giving a very convincing ‘punk’ vibe. There is a huge, awkward contrast between what she’s doing and what the rest of the band is trying to accomplish. Every transition is poorly executed. They could all stand to be a little tighter, too. There is much better album waiting to develop when the male vocalist steps forward and produces childlike lyricism with bluegrass snaps and bizarre ambience, as on Kenneth, or when the band simply resorts to jamming.

Lyrics: Society=bad.

Quick And Dirty: Fit to make major labels, open for Green Day, and go down in flames. Lose the girl and we’ll talk. (♦♦½)

Concept: The second to last album for the 90′s indie rockers.

Sound: The guitarists are pretty worthless, as are the vocalists, but the bassist and drummer have taken off the white gloves and are beating the ever-loving hooey out of this recording. As a band they sound like they’ve lost the ambition to be anything besides Talking Heads rip-offs. Scratch the majority of potential audiences.

Lyrics: Just bad. Blunt, tactless, and trite. They’re trying to be political, but they achieve the same threadbare points as any hackjob punk group using three times as many words.

Quick And Dirty: Should you play in the rhythm section of a local band, this might give you a fresh take on the same old same old. Otherwise, there’s just no point to this album. (♦♦♦)

Concept: Welsh political rockers release their first album to feature lyrics exclusively by rhythm guitarist Richey Edwards, who has since vanished.

Sound: There’s an 80′s arena rock feel to the melodies, although the backing instruments would beg to disagree. Manic Street Preachers have a tight grip on their hooks and know how to use them, as well they should after fifteen years in their craft. This is perhaps the strongest statement on the album; the accomplished musicianship here is a sign of gratitude towards Edwards, and relies on this positivity.

Lyrics: The lyrics of this band are perhaps some of the most overrated in modern music. While forthright, the observations are far from analytical or enlightening or even funny. They often appear to be no more than convoluted puns (Mommy, what’s a sex pistol?/Overjoyed, me and Stephen Hawking, we laugh./We missed the sex revolution/when we failed the physical,) and individual songs often have such discrepancies in topic that the only sane conclusion is that there is no connection, save for the tone of rebellious commentary. This is not typical of their material, but there was never any particular wit in their work to begin with, and this album’s meanderings only uphold the group’s reputation for honesty because they seem innocent in a senile way. Maybe I don’t get it. Maybe the guys who wrote this are political geniuses.

Quick And Dirty: If you enjoy their work, this is some of the very best of it, and a subtly emotional conclusion to their struggles behind the scenes. That’s a context that the album itself doesn’t explicitly contain, though. I maintain that the overt messages are as awkward as the music is catchy. (♦♦♦)

Concept: Brendan O’Brien gives grunge godfather Vedder a pop makeover.

Sound: If nobody else is going to say it, I will — Pearl Jam is getting old in every conceivable way. The only thing fresh about this album is the energy in Vedder’s voice, and that is forced to carry every. Single. Song. The “rock” songwriting is like something out of a Dropkick Murphy’s scrapbook. O’Brien’s glossing of strings and Springsteen piano staccatos do absolutely no favors. Beneath the drum mixing, you can hear the band beating its head against a brick wall.

Lyrics: Eddie was a very good lyricist in his prime. Whatever happened? This stuff provides rhythm to the tunes, but it’s poorly executed themes are 1) ‘I’m not cut out for this stuff anymore’ and 2) ‘Yeah! Alright! Woah!’ It’s Jimmy Buffet meets The Hives!

Quick And Dirty: One of the most forgettable albums I’ve listened to this whole year. Sorry, guys. (♦♦)

Concept: Phil Elverum goes metal and talks to the wind. The wind doesn’t hear.

Sound: In lieu of motion or depth, Elverum tries to characterize wind with soft dirges and scathing metal guitar effects. While some of the heavier tracks have nice harmony and off kilter drumming that brings to mind the electronic kit work of Ghengis Tron, there isn’t ever a very smooth transition between the two extremes, and Elverum’s (boring) vocals go from overpowering to inaudible accordingly. You can certainly see what he was trying to do –return metal to its original purpose of representing supernatural voice amidst a trancelike, meditative position — and it’s a cool idea, but maybe the metal sound he’s going for is too synonymous with gore-strewn hyperbole to fit with most listeners. Good sounds can still be ruined by poor pacing.

Lyrics: Although Phil’s relative wisdom and poetic imagery are notable, they aren’t well presented in the song structures he’s designed. His sometimes wordy abstract descriptions flop over the chord progressions, and unfortunately he’s occasionally a little too ‘meta’ for his own good, like when he talks about how even force and the hereafter will be dust on the wind. This particular notion (the wind’s going to wear everything away, and then we’re in it) is a key presence that becomes very way too extra overemphasized.

Quick And Dirty: The concept, stylistic approaches, and thoughts presented are all good. It’s the synthesis of these things where everything goes wrong. (♦♦♦)

Concept: Seriously? Okay.

Sound: Scarlett’s voice isn’t bad, and it’s definitely not the kind of lip-sync wail you get out of most Hollywood crossover scams. She actually seems to be shooting for Billie Holiday a lot of the time, which is a good choice. That’s not to say it’s even close. The obvious selling point of her stardom only makes it easier to picture her singing dusky, watered down jazz standards in a casino; it’s about that quality. This is the kind of appeal she exercised in film by being whoever the producer wanted her to be: the masochistic girl next door with jerk boyfriends. Instead of a jerk boyfriend we here have Yorn, whose work is equally lazy as Johansson’s deeply unnecessary Tom Waits covers. They get by constantly giving the impression that they could do better, but of course they never do. It’s a gentrification of mainstream music, Disney for dads…does that make sense? Is reviewing music driving me insane?

Lyrics: You get a lot of ‘cute’ duets, where I’m mad at you and you’re mad at me but not really. They read like a made for T.V. movie where nothing’s offensive or all that stupid, but it’s still hard to believe somebody blew money producing it.

Quick And Dirty: Better than you’d expect, maybe, given it remains sort of pitiful. (♦♦½)

Concept: Mike Kinsella would like to share his feelings with us; getting out of undergrad, losing friends, relationships, etc.

Sound: The acoustic work is diverse, and traced well by thoughtful electric melodies. It can get Hallmark-y, and sometimes brings modern pop country to mind, but it’s cozy and more engaging than these things most of the time.

Lyrics: Mike’s writing is something out of a diary…I will call it diaretic. The monologue never stops, whether he’s laying out a backdrop or listing the twee images he’s picked out of Wes Anderson films lately. The songs so become more of a one-way conversation than an actual song. Although it’s all about growing up, and there are some decent thoughts on that, both explicitly and implicitly Mike is stuck in the past, and he’d rather not leave. It seems like nobody ever told him that second-person tense makes for a tenuous narrative, or that autobiographical songs should include something genuinely personal, or that lyrics should at least strive to value subtext over wordplay.

Concept: For baroque pop easy listening, it demands quite a bit in the way of sympathy. Stay for the riffs, pay no attention to that hipster behind the curtain. (♦♦♦)

Concept: Classically trained frontman? Check. Dystopian concept album? Check. The band wants to be your savior? Check.

Sound: Guess what made Absolution Muse’s most popular album? I’m betting bottom dollar it was the rocking bassist and dance grooves, not the challenging piano cadenzas and apocalypse hype. Muse got big in general for having a vocalist that sounds like Freddie Mercury mid-puberty, so naturally if they were to imitate Queen to the end of their days they’d do pretty well for themselves. Here they make a focus on message, again beginning with a march and breaking up their Chopin covers — I mean, their slow songs — with cheesy Green Day power ballads. What’s really funny is that their best work, namely Showbiz and Hullaballoo Soundtrack, goes unnoticed while their melodramas waste space on Top 40. Not even the ‘symphony’ that makes up the last third of the album really warrants the concept or mediocre guitarwork.

Lyrics: Hey, anybody ever notice that the U.S. is, like, 1984? We’re not gonna take it. No, we ain’t gonna take it.

Quick And Dirty: We’re not gonna take it anymore. It’s good for just three guys, but it’s the same album they’ve been remaking for the past decade, and it’s not getting better. (♦♦♦)

Concept: Dan Bejar rides the fame he gained beside The New Pornographers into the longest track of his career, punctuated with cosmopolitan anecdotes and poeticisms which are apparently supposed to describe the invasion, although most of the narrative occurs long after.

Sound: The self-diagnosis of ‘ambient disco’ is more or less appropriate. I’d call it one of the most boring things I’ve ever listened to. Occasional guitar strums and bare beats are spread so sparsely you can tell Bejar wants desperately for you to listen to whatever he half-sings.

Lyrics: Bejar may cement himself in a painful stereotypical French atmosphere, but he’s still from Vancouver and he’s still catastrophically interested in listening to himself talk. He spends his ‘epic’ piece breaking straw men and recalling personal events which are left to stand on their own, uninspired and uninteresting:

“So now I live well. I live in the mine. I’m still slinging mud at the towers all the time. I took a walk and threw up in an English garden.”

“Love is a political beast with jaws for a mouth. I don’t care.”

“A crumbling beauty trapped in a river of ice. A crumbling beauty trapped in paradise. Oh, it was paradise.”

“I was 20 years old in 1992. I was bathed in golden sunlight, alright!! I was ripped on dope.”

Quick And Dirty: A parade of outdated pretension. (♦♦)