At its best, DJ Quik and Kurupt’s BlaQKout is a disarming and unexpected update of the West Coast sound made entirely and staggeringly relevant in a long post-Coast rap landscape.

Excessive length aside, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark constitutes a solid rebound from the overly scattered A Blessing and a Curse.

while on a different album “Healter Skelter” might have been a wonderful bridge between some of the more structured stuff Shining used to do; on Black Jazz it’s just the most weird and interesting version of the same track we’ve already sat through three times.

Wild Flag is concise but jumpy, perhaps a party record in that sense.

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?

It all adds up to blatantly catchy, deceptively simple wannabe-clever, can’t-help-but-be-cheeky art-punk.

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.

Not the first single (“Rockin’ That Shit”) or the second (“My Love”) but hopefully the third, the title track of Love vs. Money is the sole moment where The-Dream’s artistry is actualized through, how else, an epiphany of self-loathing and regret.

What we’re left with, speakers humming with aftermath, is the possibility of a real and significant realization: that between Hecker and Mountains, 2009 suggests a sea change--and I can’t think of a more appropriately grand term--in which ambient music may just enter a post-Eno peak.

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.

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

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

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.

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.