She continues to prove herself anyway, again and again: here throughout twenty songs, and throughout thirty-five years and beyond.

With Black Noise the trance is too sporadic to even really exist, which does make it a much more appropriate record for a casual listen--but sometimes a listener just wants to get utterly lost.

Franz Ferdinand have slightly tweaked the neo-Brit-pop genre – mixing in funk, dashes of punk, and a bit of disco – and come out with a sophomore album even more confident and hungry for glory than their debut.

Long and Kroeber deserve sizable praise for avoiding the pitfalls of such practices, even with some inevitable shortcomings that are to be expected from a relatively young band with big aspirations.

That’s the first thing that’s striking about The Sunset Tree: the arrangements on this record are spectacular.

While previous records had some fascinating collaborations, perhaps Carboniferous hits so hard because it pares things down to the core trio a bit more.

LIVELOVEA$AP absolutely scorches from front-to-back; its author's ability to command a variety of sounds allows it to sound unified without drifting into monochrome territory.

The best songs on Music Tapes For Clouds And Tornados feature just Julian and banjo.

This is the best music Jay-Z can make as a human--at least by my (his) definitions of what he (we) can do.

It's a rare thing how it manages to be both accessible and inclusive without giving in to any of the current trendy concessions, all the while demonstrating the practiced purist's taste for measured, genre-specific experimentation.

Pulling every sound to its limit, Adem’s debut is glorious in its scope, maintaining a contemplative stride through bare instrumentation.

It’s music that, outside of a live setting where one has the benefit of watching her assemble her loops, calls for patience, and it’s difficult to anticipate under what circumstances her techniques could lend themselves to something either more ambitious or longer in form or structure.

It’s still style over substance in a lot of cases, but it manages to be so exciting while being so listenable that I think it demands repeated listens -- even if those are at cocktail parties.

Like on that grand finale the production on Black Up is meticulous but furtive, always pushing forward, often unwilling simply to loop. And Butler's rapping sounds perfectly at home in this sometimes chaotic environment, kicking it amidst the kinetic verve of his beats.

XXX is something much more complex, challenging, and rewarding than a dirty joke.

Tweedy's lyrics have recaptured much of their surreal, grammar-defying, sinister charm, and he has mercifully spared us the smug, privileged nihilism that Clayton so rightly lambasted in his review of Wilco (The Album).

It is, more than anything else, the sound of a band having too much fun being good to try being great.

Transgender Dysphoria Blues isn’t a perfect record, but goddamn if it isn’t an important one, and more worthy of your time than ninety-percent of the more fashionable sounds coming out of whatever Bushwick loft party the Times scopes this weekend.

Most of the songs show the band in top form.

Teen Dream is just such a fantastic pop record because it never seems to try to be: it’s almost as if the duo had intended to make another mopey shoegazing affair and accidentally stumbled upon something transcendent.

As fun and crafty a debut as you’re likely to hear this year.

Overpowered is both impressive and incredibly fun, but fun in a way that "Ruby Blue" wasn't: you don't have to think here.

For East of Eden to be such an assured sophomore release, Victoria Bergsman has a kind of steely reserve to take herself further out of the picture on records to come.

The kid is hugely talented-his flow is tight and, in a pleasant change from the Dizzee model, about 90% intelligible-but in trying so many different things he never quite succeeds at any of them, and so he comes off as a bit hollow.

It’s a pleasant collection, comfortably consolidated and comfortably nice, despite the lack of anything earth-shattering.

The record builds a whole new feeling of intimacy, and it's a ravishing enough record to, in its final breaths, break free of its own confines.

There’s some really wicked ideas buried in the mud here, but between some humdrum instrumental passages and a lot of nu-metal lite-style singing and the general mess of sonics trying to pull them out is like forcing yourself to listen to Joe Satriani for the cool parts.

New History Warfare has enough range that it seems to have opened up a whole new fanbase that might otherwise have no interest in avant-garde music.