I’m deflated again, as all Gonzalez does with this blank canvas for electronic experimentation is cycle two chords over and over with a little synth sprinkled on top.

Widow City is by far the band’s toughest-as-nails record yet, with Matthew incessantly setting fire to the stage.

Every track on Axes offers something exciting for those who care to listen.

The overall air of the album would probably be more new-wave influenced trip-hop but Lock's sure and steady raga forges Rawar to a more funky-dub feel.

On “Fuck Me Out” and “Billy Not Really,” both these dissections of Ride and the brutal rearrangements of Björk’s vocal and fidgety programming would push the ensemble’s rough, nasty but compelling sound to new levels if they hadn’t already perfected it on The Money Store. Instead, what is achieved on niggas on the moon is something that speaks differently but through the same terms.

For the consummate BSP fan, Valhalla Dancehall will likely be met as a sufficient new entry in the band's growing discography, but for a fella like me on the periphery, I'll need a lot more of the standout experimentation of Living Is So Easy to convince me.

The one knock on this record is that it just isn’t very dynamic, as too many of the tracks fail to strike with the impact of truly great efforts. There are exceptions, of course, and the drumming on the fantastic 'Skeleton Man' propels the track with a driving momentum that’s too often missing on The Evening Descends.

With Moon 2, Ava Luna modestly succeed along the same rubric that we apply when we listen to Steely Dan or Daft Punk: the result is impressive, pleasant, and inventive, but ultimately feels too insubstantial for us to garner much from it.

Though hardly a radical departure from the baroque-pop template set by that debut, The Orchard is more mannered, fussy, and prim than its predecessor, exact and instrumentally articulate in ways that evoke no one more than Ms. Bush.

It's more pleasant than arresting.

The Fiery Furnaces have made one of the most ambitious and, quite likely, one of the best records of 2004.

Although everything here is at drum-and-bass tempo, White approaches each track from wildly different directions.

This is no walk in the park, it has to be said, but Wolf is going to be remembered as the record that sees Tyler deploying his tact as an astute beat-maker and a producer more than allowing his reputation as a Satan-worshiping neo-fascist to swell any further. Musically, it’s a step in the right direction.

Lantern comes off like Birchard wallowing in an uncharacteristic and blissful tedium.

Sequitur contains powerful resonances with the past, and it certainly reorganizes some beautiful moments that have been left behind, but some of these moments were left there for a reason.

Even though …and then you shoot your cousin never quite betrays its allegiance to either criticism or satire and is consequently an awkward, variable amalgam of both, it offers something important in its efficacy to disrupt that logic and pave out a new line of progression for a mature act.

Dry Land Is Not a Myth fails for two reasons that could have been easily corrected: (1) rock albums, especially rock albums purporting to be "psychotropic," should never be produced by artists whose primary working medium is the remix, and (2) Church's weird, pinched vocal delivery, which the editor remedies with a variety of fixes characteristic of overproduced music (see point 1).

Wilson continues to rehash southern California culture with increasingly less perspective, further eschewing the untamed adolescent aesthetic by including stuffy musical theater elements and a top-down point-of-view that’s more clumsy analysis than sincere memoir.

Despite expectations, it’s an utter joy to listen to--a simple display of what 21 Savage sounds like when he’s having fun rapping.

These Days is full of potentially enlightening ideas, and its beats and hooks are often mesmerizing, yet Ab-Soul spreads himself too thin here, his abstraction resulting from a kind of undertaken emaciation, a renunciation of tangible substance in favor of nebulous spiritual impressionism rather than from a perspective-driven distortion of this album’s strong central themes.

Despite its many retreads, Semicircle is still occasionally enjoyable, and that it manages to exist without a modicum of urgency or intellectual rigor is okay with me.

What Emblems lacks in youthful charm it makes up in its confident and solid delivery.

She's just as accomplished as a woodsy singer-songwriter as she is a synth-pop Star.

This game of literal musical chairs completely cripples The Most Serene Republic’s musical aims to the point that the album’s 40-minute runtime feels 20 minutes too long.

It's a solid reminder that it's tough to grow your rock up, but worth working toward, and Fantastic Explanations is a solid record demonstrating the results.

The album as a whole falls short of offering us anything new or of exceeding quality in relation to either Porras' other projects or the work of similarly-minded artists. Still, Black Mesa is an unmistakably effective, quality genre piece by an artist highly invested in the form.

It sounds promising at first, but then it slumps into a bed of mediocrity that Toro y Moi has already proved he is more than capable of avoiding.

While his contrived sonic and visual aesthetics do much to explain the thinness of Smoke, they do not justify it.