Kala is the sound of a hugely creative, angry, head-strong young artist reaching well beyond her means, both musically and politically, and coming up short, though, to be fair, it still manages to contain a few of the best songs of the year.

It’s entertaining, sure, but also empty and a bit soulless.

LCD Soundsystem is mostly too afraid to be balls-out fun, but too unambitious to make for a really rewarding artistic experience. Essentially, it sits awkwardly in a no-man’s land between artistry and actual dancing fun, like guess-what-demographic.

The strategy is the same: start with a basic, inoffensive and unambitious melody, repeat it over and over again, toss on a few scatting horns (between three and five notes only, please, and let’s keep dissonance to a minimum) and whatever other trinkets are in the studio, and voila! An instantly forgettable pop breeze.

In total--and there is absolutely no other way to absorb this album; if it lets up it will lose itself--the sentiment is hostile, championing a mismatched, bitchy pile of allusions to alienation, dissatisfaction, and indifference that begs for attention and respect but is too passive to amount to anything but a wan wash.

This is the third album in a row where Snaith seems to have devoted most of his effort into submerging his own unique voice deep within the musical persona he's adopted, I just don't really get what I'm supposed to do with it. Like, should we get him some water wings to keep his head above the water?

Grinderman isn’t angry and it isn’t raw, just a careful concoction of licentiousness and braying disdain ultimately monotonous and unexciting after the first four cuts.

As a Caribou album, this is mediocre. Not bad, but it's not much of a Caribou album anyway.

While B’lieve I’m Goin’ Down, at least as far as its words are concerned, is more interesting than it appears on the first few spins, that’s not quite enough to make it a memorable listen.

You leave Nine Kinds of Light completely unaltered, neither enlightened nor offended, simply having experienced a series of first-person statements: Adebimpe in his doorless (and not terribly interesting) tower of self.

What’s particularly interesting about Demon Days is not that they have half of a good record--there are plenty of albums that can’t even manage that--it’s that it’s so clearly the first half.

Favourite Worst Nightmare seems warped and contrived, bearing all the signs and watermarks of a band trying not to feel uncomfortable.

Fun and fresh enough on the first couple listens, it remains to be seen whether Vampire Weekend can find long-term favour with the listeners and critics so taken with them at present.

If only you didn’t spoil these tender moments that seem to make my heart want to burst out my chest by goofing around all the time.

Most of that sonic rage is in absentia on It’s Blitz!, which is part OK electro dance record and part atmospheric boredom courtesy of producer nerd David Sitek, who, it’s becoming increasingly clear, saves all of his best ideas for his main squeeze TV On the Radio.

Why Vampire Weekend seem uninterested in being a no frills pop band is a mystery. They slather what would sometimes be solid songwriting with such production doodads, intertextual namedrops, wry smirks, and defensive irony that the songs themselves are crushed under the weight

Whatever its origins, Psychic Chasms extols no actual reasons for being those ways, instead touching on now-expected tropes and empty gestures to fund a handful of ready-made critical anecdotes and popular opinions.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor offer a majestic, beautiful coda for a version of protest that is dated and unhelpful today. I missed having their music around, but I wonder whose eyes they're opening with a record that sounds like a document of yesterday's anger.

Ruff Draft is subtle, full of muddy melodies, magical synths and crispy snares, all typical of Dilla beats that aren’t on major label releases.

Engineers is a promising if frequently innocuous first time out, with its excellent production and musicianship bogged down by weak-kneed songwriting and idiotic sequencing.

Let The Blind never pitches badly or throws up a truly terrible track to mack on and leaves me with the potentially duff argument that this record is really good at what it does, but what it does so exactingly reaches for breadthlessness that its under-ambition ends up under-cutting what made the songs pleasant and amenable in the first place.

2 seems to merely scratch the surface of what DeMarco can do; a record of what-ifs and wishes, 2 is only a partial glimpse of a guy we know too little about.

Although there are a few individual moments where those qualities round-off and transcend any qualms anybody might have about Lekman's style, that style on its own, minus a map or even the faint corners of a box, can only elicit the slow smile of admiration, not genuine, passionate interest.

It’s a lot of slickness that adds up to little, though, as a culturally myopic Roots Manuva audibly struggles to feel out the changed face of hip-hop; he sounds unsure of what tone to take and what words to say.

If this is EitS attempting to summarize and compact their three previous albums into one easily consumable package, the results merely drag the listener along through series of “catastrophic” cues that tell them what they should be feeling.

It’s a counterfactual, of course, but I’ve got to think that Monsters of Folk circa 2005 would have come up with something a bit more substantive than this.

Mostly, what made Blackalicious’s last two proper albums so engaging was how Gab chose to reel in the tentacles of his glossolalia, and what makes The Craft such a disappointment is how he forgets that restraint, instead opting to crowd the tracks with ceaseless, pretentious sound.

Rising Down is pretty much same old same old.

He establishes grand lyrical arches, overworked symbols, and Deep Meaning. Problem is, he forgets any of the emotion, realism, or originality that would make anyone care.

[The] drums generally sound weaker and lazier than anything [he's] done before, [the] songs lack strong structure and hooks, [and his] topical matter’s a bit one-tracked.

A much more mediocre, boring, phoned-in, lyrically tripe-y batch of tip-toeing Brit-pop snooze-o-rama-fests.

Hip Hop Is Dead’s fruitless and one-dimensional rhetoric is sure to depress the Nas fan more than any of his didactics.

It's the sound of all the band's weapons unceremoniously blunted.

The lyrics and musicianship are of the quality to be expected from Hayden, but something’s a little... boring about Elk Lake Serenade.

The problem lies in the fact that it’s extremely accomplished, but ultimately boring; there's just no emotional or musical development.

The album is frontloaded with its best numbers, and they seem to descend in quality as the album progresses.

These songs contain all the accoutrements of anguish and despair: he sings the words, he screams the words. So why does it all sound so fake?

If anything, this is an effective teaser for a new Broadcast album, since many of the tracks here could easily be part of great Broadcast songs, but in this form, they aren’t, and it’s clear that we both know that.

There are songs on Nouns that seemingly defy you to listen, and not because they’re loud or crass or due-heavy on true-dat market-maneuvers and what I guess we can now safely call “aural assault”; and not because of the bad vocals, bunkered mix job, or the hundred and one other things that would make your parents, my professors or Celine Dion hate this album.

Half of The Sun Awakens is vigorous and wonderful; half is abhorrent and stultifying.

Goldfrapp have shed the sex-Moroder-robot-Bolan-fuck-disco like a used condom and re-tooled themselves as a whimsical psychedelia and pastoral folk outfit for the disappointing Seventh Tree.

This is Beach Slang’s core problem: they are constantly telling, never showing.

While it’s very good at what the Band of Horses does best--providing a soundtrack to whistful moments or memories--unlike Everything all the Time there’s nothing here to grab onto, its songs merge together, and it’s so innocuous in the band’s trademark comfort that it can pass almost undetected.

Inoffensive, largely listenable, and accessible, the album is still stunted, and so never reaches the peaks of "The Civil War," still their best and most fully formed effort.

There is nothing here but a band very awkwardly trying to have a good time, and that’s the kind of party you always leave early.

If this record had come out in ’94 it would have been groundbreaking. ’98 and it would have been good. But it’s ’05 now, and there aren’t many reasons to be impressed.

On Cassadaga Bright Eyes sounds like John Mayer.

Inevitably, most of the studio design on each song is greedy and belabored. Everything is in its right place, but everything is too obvious or too proportionally gaudy to warrant more than a signatory “lo-fi” moniker.

All of this provides a great recipe for exactly one good listen. That one listen is best the volume down though, as Death Magnetic might very well be the most distorted, punishing mastering job since the advent of the CD. After that, the charms of the album become significantly reduced.

An overcooked vanity piece from a band inflated by praise, Odd Blood heads in every direction at once.

I’ll be as straightforward in my assessment of his Trouble in Dreams as I can: this is his tenth solo album of the same old shit.

It’s inoffensive, painfully so, with the smell of something run through focus groups from the get go, written and produced by committee to sell the greatest number of copies.

You won’t hate this record; you won’t be any more capable of hating this record as you would a particularly aesthetically pleasing houseplant. But the record’s greatest achievement is that it’s happy with just not being hated.

It’s a middling album that managed to get the best of collective consciousness.

Fantasies is, rather unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, just another Metric album.

The record can get a bit dull or just plain hokey.

An album of pasty songs, severe missteps and bizarre overreaches, but an album nevertheless shimmering occasionally with the inherent sometime-genius of its creator, Volta is one of those pretty-bad records that may stick around, may sound better in a few years.

Ted Leo again falls a few hands short of the definitive statement we insist on expecting.

This is the New Year. And there’s plenty of Bedhead in the New Year. Just not enough, unfortunately, in The New Year.

Nothing Hurts ends up being its own worst enemy: it obscures its biggest strengths, choosing not to showcase them but to drown them out in a familiar and uninteresting haze.

Here we see the often-resourceful Deacon approaching a big canvas with too little paint, and the result is a record which feels bloated, overlong, and ultimately empty.

Forgiveness Rock Record doesn't provide anything interesting to talk about in and of itself. Its actual thematic talking points, as far as I can tell, tend toward political pedantry.

Really, the sad emptiness of these raps needs little explication from me.

By now, Sage Francis is emo; however populist you cut it, he’s treading familiar paths, rhyming in familiar cadence, arguing with the asshole authority of an artist much too comfortable with his niche.

This might sound like a blunder, but Diplo can never be criticized for not being adventurous enough; though he can be criticized, magnanimously, for Major Lazer.

It is familiar. It is, despite whatever priggishness keeps some publications from printing the band’s name in full, safe.

What's the same is bigger and broader, bringing its faults into stark relief. This is, I stress, Best Coast's Proper Album, and so rather than Where The Boys Are's loosely defined "songs" we get Songs: feeble, noise-soaked throw-back translations of everything from doo-wop, girl-group, pop-punk, to pseudo-grunge.

From admittedly unsympathetic ears, it’s a fruitless mess caked with vanity and smothered by its own insular delusions of prosperity.

Songs in A&E retains all of the weight of its self-imposed seriousness, its capital A artistic gravitas, but unfortunately leaves the uplift of invention to the memory of Spiritualized albums it so readily evokes.

Although they have some serviceable indie disco hits, Clor are merely the latest production line band to explore a niche in the market, though their attempt at nerdy, computerised post punk rubs one off as a flawed blend of, of all things, The Downward Spiral and Zwan.

Flavorless.

Anything ends with all expectations met, but little else. Martina Topley-Bird has the kind of voice that deserves beautiful and strange accompaniment, and as such, most songs beg for so much more.

Begone Dull Care spans eight aimless, meandering slow jams--each averaging a bloated six and a half minutes--and, returning to the pacing issues that threatened to put "So This Is Goodbye" fans to sleep, there’s simply not enough to distinguish one track from the next.

Year Zero massively benefits from lowered expectations. Reznor channels his anger, focuses it and takes a much-needed breather from his tried-and-true formula of nihilism and the question of self-destruction, but at its core the album has very little to teach us or anything original to say.

Feed The Animals isn’t much of anything at all. It’s just another clip show of all your favorite records.

It’s sad when a band runs out of ideas.

I could go song by song and come to the same conclusion with pretty much each one: the dedication to this carefree whimsy of youth ultimately stands as the most impressive thing about Passion Pit, and it wears thin quickly.

The title Attack & Release implies the best aspects of the Black Keys’ music, all sweat and hurt and sweat and ecstasy, but the album neither gives nor takes, neither emotional nor sweaty but still clammy-handed.

This band simply isn’t the same without a little darkness to balance the overwhelming light, and rarely do the songs pick up the slack.

Clearly, this record is boring. Whether or not that’s a good thing remains up to your discretion.

Let Us Never Speak of it Again is bor-ing.

This isn’t a bad release, and chances are, if you liked Cross, you could like this just as much. But it’s not going to contain any new revelations, and the extra reverb and applause are not enough to justify the release of a live album.

They are a talented, enthusiastic and timely band; I feared that it’s ageist of me to suggest that their debut album isn’t great because they’re too young.

Faith in the Future disappoints in its lackluster melodies and overall vibe. The highlights here are the more ambitious songs.

The Odd Couple from its superior predecessor (just: the writing is a bit weaker, the arrangements sleepier, the production effects a bit thicker) and so its most glaring flaw is that it simply lacks St. Elsewhere‘s invigorated tone, following the same blueprint with cheaper components, producing off-putting retreads whose only appeal lies in their similarity to more effective tracks on Gnarls’s former effort

Tiger plays like a huge pastiche of past releases.

Whatever thematic consistency existed on Yoshimi or Soft Bulletin is completely absent here. Or just so vague and bloated that the sentiment’s useless.

It is logically a bloated, uncomfortable, saturated throwback to no genre, time period, or movement in particular.

Amok is a palatable piece of 21st Century electronic pop that generally sounds complex without really being that complex at all. It’s as smooth a surface as Yorke has ever painted, without grain or contour. It seems designed to say little, to equivocate, to slither around the perimeter of our expectations.

Another World desperately labors to keep fans satiated and ends up overburdened, somewhere nicely between all its scattered intentions.

Each of these eight leftovers can be divided into rote, by-the-numbers Modest Mouse rock jams and meandering pseudo-experiments that feel, uncharacteristically and disappointingly, like nothing more than filler.

The Secret Machines are still super tight, Josh Garza’s still got restrained guitar awe on his side, every song’s arrangement is still an ebb and re-ebb of soaking synth and organ drone, and the lyrics still battle with neo-adult ennui. Is it any wonder, then, that there comes a time when this can just get dull?

What keeps Consolers of the Lonely from being an outright shit affair is, predictably, the assembled chops of its musicians, a group never so much fussy as amicable, wide-eyed about the righteous licks and insensitive tempo shifts they solder together so tightly.

The terrible truth of this album hangs stupidly overhead--that it’s a yawner.

This is a record of a plump stomach, a belch, a bit of acid reflux; the by-product of Kanye’s indulgences? More heartburn than heartbreak.

Nothing is really very exciting here, or very interesting.

As formulaic and boring a rock album as you’re likely to hear in 2005.

+/- have abandoned their bipolarity, which I was willing to call “complexity” or “potential” until just now, for a straightforward record that yields none of the possible benefits of a straightforward record.