These songs are history, and have now become it again, renewed.

The M.O. is so resolute, the beat so constant, that even after 17 years it is unimaginable to think that a new GAS album would sound like anything but this. As with the forests of Voigt’s childhood, it’s a comfort and a moment of disquiet to confront something so perpetually, hauntingly still.

This is an unfettered, deservedly ecstatic victory lap that’s riddled with in-jokes.

Although by the record's second half the brassy, treble-kicked sound wears a little thin, there are enough gems to keep the release fresh through the end of its 35 minutes.

They are radically transformative and marvelously sublime.

In House of Sugar, Alex Giannascoli relinquishes the ownership in authorship, providing a venue for those voices that regale him to decompress, elongate, saunter. It is roomy in House of Sugar, where possession recedes into usufruct.

Halcyon Digest might be an easy listen, but it takes effort to digest. Brief moments of transcendence break through the album's cracked, depressed facade, though even those are fleeting.

Jlin has provided us with evidence of veins untapped, an obscure map of zones still to be colonized in the name of the dance. If you care about footwork at all, you need to hear this album.

While nothing wholly spectacular, 'Sno Angel is no less an exceptional effort from a charmingly earnest, yet still somewhat self-conscious, lyricist and singer.

A memorable, impermanent joy, it restores, rather than disturbs, the equilibrium--a feat of engineering in the service of artistry.

Such is the exquisite control he holds over his music, his vision evident even in the weakest moments of Space Is Only Noise.

While LCD Soundsystem is grounded in the past, quality and talent make it an album deserving to be listened to for years to come. Talk to me in a few months, but I think this one won't be beat.

One of the most masterful things about the album is the way it flows, highlighting fugitive detail the way clothing highlights body parts, abandoning the traditional ups and downs of verse/chorus structure. Double Negative owes this poise to its intentional construction--a collaboration and a transferring of creative heft

Drawn In Basic is an enjoyable electronic pop record, one well-suited to late, sleepless nights. With echoes of a distant club resounding in its subdued beats and hushed vocals, this is a dreamy record of lullabies for the dance-floor set.

It is heavier on quality than most Bright Eyes albums I could name -- both musically and lyrically.

Cosmogramma is futurist in form, rather than content. Reliving the future's past through a constellation of references to cosmic jazz, psychedelic funk, hip-hop, and techno, the music of Flying Lotus never fixates long enough to crystallize; any groove that spontaneously emerges is quickly subverted, churned up in favor of a creating new maps and new vectors.

Kiasmos has the feel of one of those albums that electronic heads will continue to celebrate with each passing decade, a work incomparable to any of its contemporaries that elevates the conversation for them all.

No longer a statement and certainly abandoning the vanguard, it’s still some sort of map of some sort of territory, a specific body and a specific sexuality in a specific sonic present/presence.

From All Purity at once epitomizes Indian’s sound and represents a leap forward into new levels of intensity.

Explosions In The Sky are the only instrumental post-rock band that matters, and The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place is proof.

It hits very close to musical documentary with very few of the abstraction perils that usually haunt artists in converting ideas to their medium.

It sits in the top tier with other indie folk/rock live albums, like Bill Callahan’s Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, Ryan Adams’s Live at Carnegie Hall (the full version), the Elliott Smith bootleg Live at Studion, and, of course, Kozelek’s Live at Biko. But there’s something worthwhile about these albums that goes beyond their technical mastery and the songs they contain.

For all its signs of progression, the record is never heavy-handed with its ambition. Its unforced attempt at making sense of the fraught present, at finding shelter without resorting to convenient escape, is a rare and, dare I say, sincere feat.

Unlike the greatest movements of his previous albums, Wings of Love’s diversity is its greatest fault, as 14 tracks visit musical fads long forgotten and ill conceived.

Simple Songs works as an antidote for clutching at straws by adding a layer of depth to an otherwise indiscernible character; it offers insight into the workings of a prodigious mind, and it comes off sounding triumphant.

Popular Problems, his 13th studio album, has everything of which a latter-day Cohen album is popularly known to be composed: the amelodic, magical croak of Cohen’s own finely aged voice; the hyper-melodic shine of his singers, who have become as integral to Cohen’s project as he himself; a loose, blurring approach to genre and tone.

Hecker's freshest exploration of the life of rave death comes thoroughly recommended.

Its best songs are the ones that maintain the spark of originality that has always threaded through LCD Soundsystem’s work,.