Come Here When You Sleepwalk is a soporific reverie that wafts gently and beguilingly but ultimately insubstantially.

Kinky has the potential to transcend both the dance and Latin music genres, simply because of their ability to do just a little bit more than what’s expected.

A fantastic revelation.

A record lacking in a substantial amount of soul, grit and sensuality.

Clearly, Gold Chains has a lot to say and a lot to prove, and possesses the means to do so. What this requires is some focus.

Might not be enough to convince disbelievers, but to fans, it’s a gratifying addition to an already impressive repertoire.

If the sound that the original Son Volt line-up cultivated began to feel oppressing for Farrar, it’s clear on Okemah And The Melody of Riot that a return in part to that sound has been good for his musical soul.

Fun and frequently powerful.

With the impressive level of control, it’s understandable when it starts feeling like Adams is holding on a little too tightly.

The musicianship on this album retains a professional, waxed sheen, and that’s part of the problem: Hammond sticks to the basics, employing pedestrian rock setups whether he’s punking along with gusto or putzing around on the beach.

The album moves in gasps and groans, with a steady flow to its twelve songs that weaves together like a symphony.

The album sounds simultaneously familiar, yet alien.

The combination of Treacy’s back-story and the complexity of My Dark Places makes it hard to live with at times; it is a supremely disquieting record.

Sure, this is a very *accomplished* album by a band who can play their instruments: organs, pianos and strings sit gracefully beside each other, and there are some deft vocal harmonies, but The Thrills simply don’t have the songwriting skill or the sheer personality to make this anything more than a passable debut.

Those voices alone are enough to devastate, and they’re the reason this album deserves mention among the year’s best.

Not only is the product musically conservative, chocked full of soul ballads and tame funk workouts, there's nary a trace of the devilish sense of risk that has permeated even his worst material.

The basic songwriting on show here is essentially the same as ever; mid-paced, desperately sincere and earnestly simple, decorated with piano and passionless falsetto, only now with more detours into maximalist, synth-soaked modern rock epics cut from the same cloth as “Clocks.”

The substantive quality of the political commentary found on Ahead of the Lions may not measure up to Rage Against the Machine’s most agitprop knee jerking, but there’s no questioning the sentiment is clearly and loudly expressed with propulsive rhythms, radio-palatable hooks and real production values.

It's not a perfect record, but it's perfected, about as good as the debut from a band that traffics in this kind of music can be at this point.

Idlewild fails in the same places as Speakerboxxx/The Love Below: both feature some stunningly flat crooning and poor pop revisions straight from the mind, body, and soul of Andre Benjamin.

A dull compromise of artistic intent and marketability.

Promise Of Love is chock-full of pretty, melancholic music. In other words money well spent.

Muse write... the same way Metallica write, i.e. just compiling bits of ‘music’ then sticking them together, except they’re more impressed with their fragments (though they’re simpler and duller and even more remarkably similar to each other than Metallica’s), so they make them go on longer and repeat them more times.

The biggest problem with the album is that most of the tracks feel like there should be a rap over them.

Of course, anyone expecting a new Smiths album from this was always going to be disappointed. However, anyone expecting a good album from it is going to be disappointed as well.

The excessive genre-bending of their debut has been exchanged for a dilettantism honed to a much sharper point.

When the Deftones are successful, they seem to slow down time, expanding on floating moments of doubt and mystery. When they’re not busy getting bogged down in all those mini-moments, dragging the album through dread patches of sluggishness that is.

At times its earnestness and self-conscious attempts to prove its own expertise make it seem more like the work of a surly, awkward late-adolescent.

The crisper production gives the music an extra bite.... Paradoxically, though, the increased fidelity also reveals the band’s deficiency with musical dynamics, making a half-hour seem surprisingly long.

As a listening experience, The Tipping Point is a decent album, a rough transition at best and a stumble at worst.

Plague Park shows him mostly nailing the fine bristle of “Modern World” and “Same Ghost Every Night.”

It’s the most lush, symphonic pop music since, well, Wilco’s Summerteeth.

One of the best and most refreshing albums released in a long time.

This material is as inconsistent as anything off their past few records, but when they do hit upon a good moment, it tends to be really good.

Hotel Morgen finds To Rococo Rot with a modestly updated sound, the sort of slight seismic shift that may take millions of years to have its say. They understand what classical composers knew: the next symphony won’t bring utter revolution, but as long as it carries the emotional impact of your intent, it’s a grand success.

Load Blown does more than enough to keep "very" and "awfully," respectively, in the mix.

The Kings of Convenience don’t stray too far from their basic formula of guitars, upright bass, twinkling piano, viola, cello and soft percussion in the background. It’s consistent and it works.

The impeccably crafted Different Days is at its best when it exploits the vocal strengths of Anderson and Costa.

The Fratellis are beyond infectious.

Young for Eternity is the record that US labelmates the Von Bondies should have made to follow-up Pawn Shoppe Heart, and the album that the White Stripes should make period.

Whether the songs are merely half-developed or the sugar-sheen production simply washes them of any potential grit, it seems apparent that the dreaded second album curse hath struck again.

The little things are annoying, of course, like the “that'll do” pointless pop culture punnery namedrops that litter (“Starz in Their Eyes”/”Alicia Quays”), or the way they take up so much time with vocal samples from (old documentaries/self-help tapes) in the same way that a struggling student quotes increasingly large and irrelevant passages of text in a desperate attempt to meet a word count.

Whether it’s the end of an era, the beginning of a new one, or just a lucky break in what looks to be a still-incessant deluge of output, From a Compound Eye bypasses the earlier seven LPs-plus released in his name to mark the emergence of Robert Pollard as a solo artist proper.

Their best album since Dubnobasswithmyheadman.

Hocus Pocus is comprised mostly of fleeting moments of brilliance where it all just coalesces for a moment, and then returns to its MOR state of undeveloped garbage.

This is North London collection-plate-pub music of a very high calibre.

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

It certainly doesn’t stand up to Dig Your Own Hole or half of Exit Planet Dust, but Push the Button is much better than I’d hoped it would be a few months ago.

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 Horrors aren’t horrifying and Strange House is nowhere near strange enough.

Cuts Across offers a surprisingly persuasive clutch of rock ‘n roll that beg for barnstorming live performances.

She’s found the perfect collaborator to match her voracious appetite for all things pop.

The areas where Try This falls down are those where P!nk eschews the eclecticism of the stronger tracks and instead produces bog-standard pop-punk or R&B tracks.

A more straightforwardly uplifting listen.

They sound like little else you’ve heard before.

It's not bad; it just feels like a stopgap to hold fans over until Enon has recorded enough material for a new release.

News and Tributes is a solid album, and its high points are worth listening to over and over. Unfortunately, some of the weaker tracks were given primetime slots.

Certified may be a cinematic holding pattern but it’s a holding pattern in a place--both geographically and artistically--that we can’t hear enough of.

Playtime Is Over is exactly what we've come to expect from the garage sound of grime. It isn't trying to be anything it's not.

A worthy addition to the catalog.

There's no denying that Pollock has an uncanny knack for distinctive melodies, but the album's main problem is that she often misjudges the parameters of 'pop' and in doing so errs on the side of safety.

Get Evens is the aural embodiment of the sublimated rage of their debut. Though the instrumentation is still spare, it's meatier and more aggressive.

His last two efforts weren’t as focused, but this time he’s got about half an album’s worth of quality work.

It can safely be said that Dresselhaus has nothing to learn about the instruments of technology, but a lot to learn about the ability to write a catchy tune.

There's "Karma" and "I Don't Know Your Name." You and your iPod know what to do.

Sounds like a retreat.

Short, blunt, and skitless, A Gun Called Tension seethes with everything post-aught genre-fucking needs.

It’s a highly idiosyncratic album that very few will appreciate every facet of. However, even with a very minimal knowledge of the source material, there’s much to love.

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

The songs are breezy to the point of vapidity.

Despite the overbearing length and the sometimes lazy lyrics, Kidnapped by Neptune is a strong release in a year of strong releases.

If you’re so inclined toward this type of music, you’ll assuredly love Precious Memories. But if you think you’re not, you may be surprised.

Clearlake are clearly talented and still capable of making a groundswelling record. Amber, however, is not only not it, but it’s reason to wonder if they’ve lost their own sense of identity in an effort to sell records to pint-swilling British punters.

The songs are immediately accessible, with a classic rock/modern pop delivery that’s every bit as lively and exciting as the very first disc this band released.

For the first time it sounds like Royal City is stuck.

In Split the Difference, Gomez has not lived up to, but surpassed, their initial success.

Does Summer Make Good maintain the peak established by its predecessors? In a word: no. But that doesn’t mean it’s not good, because it is; it’s just not quite as magical as the others.

Fortunately, the good songs outnumber the bad; unfortunately, the veteran Costello has made the rookie mistaking of frontloading the disc.

Not just a great record, but a much-needed dose of country-rock reality.

They’re obviously enjoying success and using it to explore a wider musical range, but they haven’t translated that admirable tendency into a coherent vision.

Ultimate Victory may find Chamillionaire a little confused about his strengths, but in terms of establishing him as someone whose heart's in the right place, it does its title proud.

The sad fact is that this rarely makes good on the promise of 2000’s masterful Mama’s Gun.

This clearly isn’t rave, or even a reinvention of rave. They’re an indie band with a half-decent gimmick.

There isn’t a track on Live It Out that stays fresh from start to finish. Some takes wrong turns along the way; others simply wear out their welcome a tad too quickly. Still, all but a couple contain individual moments or elements strong enough to overshadow the weaker links.

Nash keeps herself resolutely in the background of her songs, revealing precious little of her own personality or emotion, and it’s this reservation that makes her fail as a popstar, at least right now.

They sound old. They sound past it. They sound, and this is one word that nobody would have ever thought could be used to describe the Beasties, irrelevant.

All you have to do is plug Coral Fang in and turn it on to experience [Dalle's] greatness.

While not entirely successful throughout, it still contains enough majestic moments of sheer aural bliss to qualify as one of the most beautifully melodic down tempo-instrumental albums you are likely to hear this year.

Current yet sounding potentially classic already... Reznor forces himself further into the mainstream with With Teeth--but on his own terms.

Voxtrot remains a compelling enough statement to justify the inordinate amounts of excitement thrown around the band, yet nowhere near a fulfillment of the enormous potential they’ve shown.

Rather than show true sympathy by exploring the nuance of even the superficially simplest lives, Bazan makes drearily deterministic morons out of his supposed objects of pathos.

The one thing you can't accuse Under the Blacklight of is being boring, but it abides by an either/or sort of mentality that presumes that a complete lack of substance is the only alternative to the kind of music Rilo Kiley and their pals made in 2002.

For all its surprises, Creature Comforts marks one of the first times Black Dice has sounded like a band in transition, and consequently lacks much of the serendipitous splendor of their previous efforts.

That these songs sound like mashups to my ear is both their strength and their weakness--they’re good enough to remind you of the best work of the parties at hand, but the term implies that you’re not going to hear anything new, just two songs mashed together.

The fascinating thing about Gwen Stefani’s record is not how different it sounds from No Doubt, but how similar it sounds to the producers that she works with and how their collaborations usually fall flat because of the rehashing of tired ideas and plodding predictability of her arrangements.

Broken Ear is limited and bogged down with its exacting and overriding sense of rhythm and lack of true sonic experimentation.

Those looking for the instant gratification of the first side of YFIIP--the “Almost Crimes”s, the “KC Accidental”s, the “Anthem”s--will be grossly disappointed. This is a collection for those of us who dug the album’s second side--meandering, experimental, but ultimately just as urgent and just as rewarding.

They ape New Order's "Movement," surely that combo's most static and dullest album. Dengler and rather good drummer Sam Fogarino don't get many chances to shine, letting guitarist Daniel Kessler create the kind of textures that often get mistaken for progress.