Let it be said here first: Kasabian is indisputably one of the most important albums of 1997. Unfortunately, it’s 2005, and we’re left wondering just what the hell they're trying to pull.

All I hear is vague honesty in place of actual emotion or considered writing, and frail vocals smeared across the whitewashed wall doesn’t compensate for a severe dearth of substance.

A seriously solid and enjoyable album.

Black Mountain is as mundane, bleak, and hollow as the cover art would suggest.

I err on the side of good rap, something Unexpected Guest is full of.

Return is largely bereft of the chintzy, minimal Zaytoven beats dominating previous Gucci releases, and in their stead exists the dense ominousness Luger peddles so brilliantly.

[Espinoza] takes the predictably disappointing low road through fanboyville with cruise-controlled caricatures of one of indie rock’s most deified stars.

So it’s possible that the songs on Wait For Me will end up in the same coffeehouses and car commercials and other small, sterile environments as those on Play, but Hall’s drawing inwards as hard as he can, to the great benefit of his compositions, and Wait For Me is unabashedly majestic.

To Coldplay's credit, amidst the over-production they still manage to reach their quota of flag-waving festival rock songs, some of which could be considered career highlights.

These Arms Are Snakes have clearly created a distinct sound and are doing something only the Blood Brothers can come close to right now in terms being interesting, inventive and still rocking hard.

Where Dios felt structured, (relatively) focused, and clever, dios (malos) just is let to drift in a mess of under-developed songs, odes to drug abuse, and unfocused guitar strumming.

The Beets’ simplicity was one of their strengths, but N.A.P. is the sound of Wauters realizing that in music, as in life, complexity brings richness, and often greater rewards.

It’s hard to fault the album for a little flab when the band’s trying new things and mostly doing them well; hopefully they’ll realize that underproduction simply isn’t their style next time around.

The Brave and the Bold is an awkward, lumbering affair, of passing interest to fans of the artists’ work and no one else.

Felix’s uses the second-person address and the confusion it--as well as conventional instrumentation played in freer forms within more confined song structures--creates to produce an engaging, if harder to parse, take on something similar.

All said, the album’s capably produced by Tony Doogan, Secret Machines aspirations and all, and it’s a debut wrapped in sophomore expansion, a third of a universe away from anything deservedly cosmic and anything appropriately full.

With Get Lost, McGuire has nudged toward both goals, and while in many ways, for long time fans, this is exactly what you'd expect a 2011 Mark McGuire album to sound like.

Gemini is an effort so manic and unfocused that it barely coheres enough around it's stilted little center to be called an album.

What actually lies inside Prince’s twenty-somethingth album is more than disappointing; it’s thinly if grandly produced, tapped with a veneer so dumbly decades behind any sense of interesting or intriguing taste that one can’t help but sit back and swallow the benign whole, thinking all along, Who the fuck even makes music like this anymore?

It’s not [her] strongest performance so far, and that comes basically down to song choice and production.

The Blueprint's vaunted resuscitation of sample-based boom-bap rap production is replaced here by big corny synth wipes, a sometimes-fascinating corollary to Jay’s corporate sense of purpose.

Pretty dull.

The album fails mainly in its inability to set itself apart; for a Warp release it’s dull, Beans isn’t enough of a rapper to carry the show by himself, and the beats feel like they would have been interesting if they didn’t just remain stagnant through pretty much every track.

Razorlight is nearly everything wrong with rock and roll today.

Many of the songs lose their indelible glow being snail baited and cleared up like this.

Aesthetically the album is an equally awful collection of pabulum, completely derelict in its offerings of arrangements and tones, sanded smooth of its personality and as derivative in its every moment as the bands it’s most derivative of.

Skin of Evil is hardened, seamless, and totally unrelenting, everything full-bodied and visceral about Frog Eyes squeezed until it sublimates. This is scary, ethereal shit. It’s also a gorgeously captivating half hour of bedroom pop pushed screaming out of bed.

Instead of being doomed to tread a certain set of glossy, shoegaze-littered paths, and in that doom come off desperate to change, they search within their well-worn sound for a collection of songs with no aspirations to be anything more than the best at what they are. Now that's some progress.