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.