Declaring a genre dead is the worst, least imaginative sort of proclamation, so let’s call it zombified: it moves, it takes up space, it looks powerful from afar — with oodles of bands working hard, and some even making money — and garish up close. It lacks nutrients. How else to explain the critical consensus around a band like Foster the People, whose album, “Torches” (StarTime/Columbia), was one of the most lauded rock albums of the year by an emerging band, even though it did little to add to the soul-infused lite-rock of the 1980s. And what of the Black Keys, who have committed themselves to undistinguished garage-soul and have cruelly outlasted their onetime peers the White Stripes? Their latest, “El Camino” (Nonesuch), is one long airless, swingless jam, a flat boogie primer for foreigners and marketers. Or take a less acclaimed but still popular band: the colossally dopey Hot Chelle Rae, which on “Whatever” (RCA) recalls the early breakthroughs of pop-punk bands like Sum 41 and Blink-182, though with sprinkles of power-pop and hip-hop.

These bands at least are doing their best to resist the tides around them, borrowing from different influences than their far more numerous neighbors. Those bands — Nickelback on “Here And Now” (Roadrunner), Chevelle on “Hats Off to the Bull” (Epic), Disturbed on the B-sides collection “The Lost Children” (Reprise) — all released big albums this year that work the post-grunge rock spectrum, to varying degrees of success but with equal amounts of innovation, which is to say little. The burly guitars are the same, as are the melancholy choruses, the assertive but not affirming drumming and the sense that this has all been done before, and better (in some cases by Nickelback itself, several years ago). Daughtry almost fell into this same trap, as it has in the past, but avoided it by taking its morbid power rock and moving toward Bon Jovi hopefulness on its new album, the largely enjoyable “Break the Spell” (19/RCA).

Even for those whose version of arena rock didn’t lean so heavily on groaning, this was a terrible year full of creative flops, and often commercial flops, by long-reliable acts that failed to arouse even their typical level of interest: Evanescence’s “Evanescence” (Wind-Up), Blink-182’s “Neighborhoods” (DGC/Interscope), Coldplay’s “Mylo Xyloto” (Capitol). That’s to say nothing of the airless comeback albums by bands well past their sell-by date: the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “I’m With You” (Warner Brothers), Limp Bizkit’s “Gold Cobra” (Interscope), R.E.M.’s “Collapse Into Now” (Warner Brothers), Sum 41’s “Screaming Bloody Murder” (Island). There was also the outrageously fraught “Lulu” (Warner Brothers), by Lou Reed and Metallica, which defied most categorization yet somehow still falls neatly into this one.

Scale in and of itself need not be a deterrent to creativity; look at hip-hop, where plenty of sonic innovations take place on the biggest stages, proffered by the biggest stars. Even major-label country, no firestorm of originality, has been riskier in the last decade than major-label rock, which is hiding out in a few comfortable modes, hoping no one will ask much more of it.