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.