What is absolutely impressive about MF Doom is his ability to craft unique, memorable characters with each consecutive album release while still imbuing a sense of unity and dynamic interplay.

While everyone else tries to steal from the greats, The Icarus Line have done an impressive job at continuing the great traditions in rock music.

I think Keveikur will, for awhile, make a lovely soundtrack as I walk along the shore.

What makes these songs so positively delicious, in the same way that going on a bender can be a welcome alternative to crying into a pillow, is that Barnes realizes how seductive misery can be.

The sound of loving is consistent, even as it appears in radically different instances. The mechanism of love song fits all bodies, all modes. It lands on ears, it laps and licks and it does no harm.

The Age of Adz is an outrageously fun and messy masterpiece.

It's unlike anything else in Lopatin's discography, not just a bold step sideways, but something like an epistemological break from an artist whose work increasingly bears the weight of something like hegemony.

Ay Ay Ay does veer closely to the edge of overextending itself by its completion and, by result, making a strong case for listener fatigue--but who said dancing was easy?

It's conflicted, ambivalent, complex.

It shouldn’t offend, but it might be slow to engage.

While no one could accuse Sylvian of playing it safe, the exercises that make up Manafon are neither experimental nor aesthetically pleasing enough for me to recommend this album.

It’s a slicker, more professional, and more abstract matrix-y record that might put off any fans of the singer’s lo-fi confessional work.

If you’re fond of the curious, Icky Thump is the choice White Stripes album.

If you let it work its magic, it will--no matter how unfashionable or cloying it may seem at a glance. It’s music to get absorbed by.

If the album feels too familiar sometimes, it shouldn’t really throw you off much.

Although these five tracks embody their own specific form, shape, and pattern, they work as appendages to the previous LP as opposed to a collection that builds upon new ideas, and if the debut album weren't such a marvelous success then that might be a problem.

The biggest pleasant surprise here, though, is the vocals.

Although I quite like some of the tracks here, overall there just isn't enough here to keep me interested. [combined review of both discs]

Ratchet is one of the most purely pleasurable records I’ve heard so far this year, and one of the strongest debuts in several years.

There are some redeeming qualities, but for every success there are one or two failures.

It's a subtle album about an unexpected range life, full of slow talk and afterglows, the work of a confident and comforting craftsman. If this is what it means to grow old with Stephen Malkmus, faults and all, then bring it on.

As evidenced by their name, The Body is seeking something more basic, using techniques that link us on a primal level to that most universal of human certainties: death itself. Together, they give us both the forest and the harpies, the tortured and the torturer.

Letting themselves go with greater frequency would turn what is a pretty record into one that actually breaks ground; it'd be sexier that way.

It's a mix that works just as well on the dance floor as the bedroom.

The music in this album slowly shapes the surrounding substance of the listening space, building a reticulated, synth-orchestrated architecture with countless perspectives.

While the Actress tracks were, by most accounts, club tracks exposed to organic erosion and presented in sequence as an endurance test, KOCH is more bizarre and less aggressive.

So, caveat auditor: this album is deep and often rich, but it definitely wants, even requires, you to pay attention.

Taking a step back and struggling with that always-expected "hot band" dilemma, Why? is coming to terms with his career as a musician. Judging from the quality of these eight songs, he appears to be handling it well.