Too many songs here move at a glacial pace and seem to take away from Xiu Xiu’s strength: an ear for melody, a love for dissonance, songs that go interesting places and engaging instrumentation.

Whatever these songs lack in immediacy, they rebound with an artistry.

They're also carrying on in the tradition of independent rap artists from the fertile early 2000s, producing whatever they damn please and selling it for ten bucks. An uncompromising approach can lead to disaster, either financially or creatively, but COHESIVE is the paradigmatic fruit of such an approach.

Vile has slyly written pop that enters one's head without leaving much of a permanent mark; instead of a distraction from one's deeper woes, it's chameleonic accompaniment.

It’s not only an addition to 2009’s unassailably fantastic class of ambient music, but in a way is unique to that class for the menace with which it’s threaded.

As a whole, An Empty Bliss is a remarkably cohesive listen and one that achieves its goals, but whether or not it, in and of itself, is an entirely creative work is another question entirely.

A quietly brilliant album.

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.

There is Love in You renders "Ringer" primer, posits itself as perfect solution to messy experimentation, and while it’s hard to find the divisiveness in that, it’s also hard to be truly moved.

The no-bullshit album cover might be the cheekiest thing about delightfully straight-forward Brothers.

All in all, Jarvis a mixed bag. It feels like the sort of thing that Cocker would do just to expunge his notebooks before moving on.

It’s all quite charming and lovely.

You’d think that an album with somewhat conventional music that eschews a conventional sense of arc, narrative or otherwise, would come off awkward or ineffectual, but with Stitches there is aesthetic, textural immediacy and, even more importantly, immaculate craftmanship to help it make an impact from the very first listen.

The pure emotion and aggressiveness isn’t suppressed or transformed into something else, but rather just given room for some thought, allowed to open itself up and find the strange flowers within.

It is a stubborn, patient sharpening of their craft.

How To Dress Well is certainly not the only contemporary act to use nostalgia as the basis for an aesthetic, but Krell's ideas about the past and our relationship to it seem to be considerably more sophisticated than those of his peers.

You can’t really blame Bowie for conforming to 21st-century quality control when it comes to the sound and scope of this record, but it’s not exactly something to be celebrated either. What deserves celebration, or at least indulgence, are the glimpses of sublime execution on The Next Day, as well as Bowie’s skill in maintaining his mystique after all this time.

It simply, like her two (arguably better) albums before them, hurts too good to be ignored.

That’s a comparison that could be made between Burner and Bip’s Blue Eyed in the Red Room (2005): similar, but a little better.

Chosen Lords is... a nostalgic, fun listen for longtime fans and suitable point for new listeners to become acquainted with Aphex Twin’s twisted catalogue.

It's a well-constructed and performed album that sounds great on the stereo.

Despite a couple of weaker links, Somewhere Else is extremely well put-together, and spilling over with appealing melodies, wit, and truth.

It's never pretentious, showy, or fake-tough; it's just Shad, doing what he does, and it sounds earnestly great.

In lieu of an actual follow-up [to The Knife's "Silent Shout"] we get something that manages to make good on two of those three elements [of the decade’s best electronic records]. I’ll take it.

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

Get Behind Me Satan marks the point where The White Stripes music has finally become as charismatic and mysterious as its creators.

It’s not a bad album, and Doom’s rapping is damn near unparalleled; but when you come right down to it, The Mouse & the Mask kinda feels like a throwaway.

It's all very controlled, as any functional dance club record should be, and its quality extends past its single, as any decent-to-good dance club record should be.

With a span of almost three-quarters of an hour, the eight components of III are on the fat side of five minutes per head, though each imbued with sufficient ingenuity to stave off the threat of bloating.

The real nuggets of the album, however, lie in the moments when the inherent melancholy behind Hart’s doe-eyed mysticism comes out.

One of Stern's greatest strengths is that she never relies on any tried and true shorthand when it comes to self-expression.

While Picaresque is a significant step forward, it’s also a logical one. The band’s sonic palette has expanded gradually from album to album, and appears to have come full circle here.

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.

The tone is set: They Want My Soul gives pleasures immediate and unlocked, a freshly bitten peach dribbling sweet nectar down your chin.

Together these four pieces create a single, near-breathless listening experience, robust enough to envelop but varied enough to leave you both craving and curious for more.

It feels self-contained, wholly its own, and this is what allows it to hold up such a pristine and vast mirror to the scenes that surround it.

But the real appeal remains Zedek’s humbled insights, a worldview informed by an affirmation of our common suspicion that “there are some things you can’t see / with a roof over your head,” and, having lived as such, her solitary cold comfort: “if you don’t like the answer / maybe you shouldn’t ask.”

Gira's half is solid, but Akron/Family can't help but demand most of the credit for the record's artistic heft and overall cohesiveness.

Though these variations are often enjoyable, particularly on an individual track level, taken as a whole they're just too slight, making Civilian difficult to fully engage with.

Inch by inch -- concept, production, groove -- Scale will measure your desires and dole out exactly what you want: depth, politics, creativity, or club-ready curios.

Burst Apart, while far from perfect, is sort of a special album.

Ultimately, Avatar’s change in direction is hardly an unpleasant one, partially because it’s really fun to lip synch “Let it burn / Let it bleed!” while playing the air guitar on your knees, but mostly because it still rocks frighteningly hard.

It may be hell for him, but it’s compelling listening for anyone smart enough to shitcan the Kanye comparisons long enough to sit down and give this record the attention it deserves.

It’s a fun and somewhat liberating thing to listen to, a horribly frustrating thing to try writing about.

Wilderness is nothing if not consistent, and even its dullest points are palatable given the right mood.

Monomania is the sound of a healthy and aware group of musicians who have experimented with artifice and ultimately moved beyond it.

Andrew Bird has thrown down his gauntlet brimming with post-structural imagery, swirling entropy, a truly floral arrangement of genre pieces and genre mixing.

Like any Books album, The Way Out is best embraced as a headphones record, but it could also work at a party, on a morning commute, over dinner, under a squeaking bedframe--it's the poppiest ambient album I've heard in some time, surprisingly accessible given the band's track record.

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.

I am aware that I am giving the following guy an 85% on Cokemachineglow. The thing is, he deserves it.

CUD aren’t the first or best among many, but what you can hear when you listen to Boca Negra--in addition to a really excellent neo-jazz record--is the sounds of a band improvising while actually not really improvising. They’re unconsciously pulling from something rich and energetic and fundamental to the way we appreciate music.

It's just wonderfully consistent, satisfyingly familiar.

He may no longer be the novelistic observer of Black on Both Sides or the fearless explorer of The New Danger, or even the wised-up star of True Magic, but The Ecstatic is still imbued with all that and not making a big deal out of it, perhaps the first truly mature thing Mos Def has ever admitted.

A record that progresses as a sequence of dislocated sounds, an expressionist's puzzlebox that comes alive when distanced from one's preconceived notion of what a Built to Spill record should sound like.

No shocking directions or paroxysmal about-faces, but Lie Down In The Light is still some glorious stuff, expectations met and mettle once again tested.

The songs, sometimes overtly formalist and stylistically unadventurous, are invigorated by the enthusiasm and character of their delivery.

Like all of his records before it, Devils & Dust sounds at once like everything and nothing Bruce Springsteen has ever released.

Assured in its fastidiousness, with enough schizophrenia to make whiplash a factor, Los Angeles cements Flying Lotus’s status as the best producer in a burgeoning scene bursting with talent, categorization eluding whatever scene that may be, whatever it means to be a producer.

It provides the kind of visceral excitement absent in so many of those other albums.

It takes more getting used to than their previous work, but it rewards even more for it.

Though the tracks are lengthy, they’re not indulgent but patient, moving at the pace of Frank Sinatra’s September of My Years (1965) rather than the National’s Alligator (2005).

They’ve managed to produce the best American rock record of the year so far.

He’s made a honed, handsome piece of work, never too arresting and never too fickle.

For just over seven minutes, Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust may be the most wonderful, jubilant listen you’ve had yet this year, and, within those two songs, Sigur Rós’s fifth proper album plants the most exciting, empirical stipe of artistic direction the band has forged in over six years or so. The elation doesn’t last.

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.

Her efforts have crafted a soul album that is resistant to any claims of mere charlatanism, a record that brings a modern tongue to a classic style.

Here, as on their last effort, probably the most well fitted referent is Andrew Bird, but Forest flattens the jubilant hop of Pale Young Gentlemen into a cluster of songs much darker and more expansive.

This might be the last material we hear from Dilla that echoes the endlessly fascinating turn his music was taking before his passing, and it couldn’t be constructed more appealingly, its jittery creativity augmented by one of Dilla’s esteemed contemporaries, himself a fan and close friend.

The tracks feel quickly and easily produced but fucking delicious.

Matmos have created something dense, complex, puzzling and potentially meaningless to anyone but themselves and those who listen to music with their head instead of their gut, their hips or their feet.

Like an unsettling dream, Actor will stay with you for quite a while, but it isn’t listeners or critics that will be discomfited by the eccentric sophistication here.

The sobering after-party to Wolf Parade’s debut.

Patrick Carney and Dan Auerbach deliver a much more consistent and musically varied album with Rubber Factory, yet don’t sacrifice the guitar rock that made their previous two albums so much fun.

The album ups the ante on everything that made Up in Flames so astounding, and adds more pop structure to the chaotic bliss-outs, resulting in what is probably his biggest achievement to date.

Leslie Feist has managed to produce an even more intriguing character, one with depth and doubt and apprehension and dread and all the other things that make up the other, harder, larger half of the human experience.

Dragonslayer is a shockingly good record, but it’s no surprise that things ended up this way.

The point is that all of the Hidden Cameras is in here, but it’s not all shined to a high polish and adorned with neon lights, and that works an interesting effect.

There's lots to love about WIXIW, but it is all so much the band's own creation that anything less than experience falls severely short of capturing it.

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.

What makes Anniemal such a strong pop effort is its refusal to drop its high standards for production, melody, and hooks.

One of his strongest and most focused albums to date.

Someone needs to tell them that just sounding important doesn’t mean they actually are important.

The second half of the album is a little bit less direct in its approach, leaning more on the natural beauty of Lipstate's sonics rather than pronounced melody, but there's plenty of detail to turn over here as well.

For all its seriousness, it's the absence of big moments and Hadreas' refusal to give in to easy outs that make what he does so compelling.

As one may ascertain, the world of the Caretaker is a potential rabbit hole of nostalgia, anxiety, and all manner of undisclosed obsessions, but a distinct sense of calm washes over the best of this material.

While moments off Bonfires have already proven hugely worthwhile, predominantly because of the textures Mel Draisey adds, it still lacks the cohesiveness, the clarion voice, of a band singularly in control of a well-tread sound.

It is often silly, occasionally ridiculous, always catchy as hell, and as loose as an album with this kind of production credit can be. What more could we ask from a pop record?

Another wildly uneven affair.

Instead of just latching on to the sonic palette of The Beta Band (a group they seem intent on emulating), they could embrace the Beta mindset: the creativity, playfulness, and refusal to ever bore the audience that made that band so frustratingly brilliant.

Specifically though, Rebirth absolutely boasts some of the best tunes that Cliff's recorded since his string of successes surrounding the international releases of The Harder They Come.

Her confessionalism hits harder with the muscle of her band behind her words.

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.

A relatively safe debut where much of the takeaway is the salivating at Grande’s potential.

It suffers less from a lack of competence than a general lack of inspiring tracks and the consistency of swiss cheese.

Listening to Yuck is kind of like having a conversation with someone who agrees with everything you say. Pleasant at first, it eventually and quickly feels useless.

Embryonic works so staggeringly well because it's so unafraid to place itself in the lineage of unapologetically over-the-top rock album.

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.

Pretty but not boring, eclectic but not overindulgent, Cyrk is the work of an artist still messing with all the possibilities in front of her.