True, only "60 Miles an Hour" sounds like a candidate for New Order's pantheon of hallowed singles; still, Get Ready might be the group's most consistent album from top to bottom.

For the first time, Milk Man finds such a sound seeming not like the product of a collective caprice, but a formula that they're following, with the few songs where they get lost in total tonal abstraction seeming like didactic decisions to ditch the rock instruments and remind everyone they were once filed under difficult listening.

And flaws there are, with many of the tracks sinking into a midtempo morass with decidedly underdeveloped melodies and daft instrumentation.

Like early arcade-game programmers, Ratatat are working with a greatly reduced palette, and the synth reductionism means they're never going to escape cute.

Aside from Riches' rich language, there's not much traditionalism on the album, it being more concerned with stumbling in melancholy fashion through murmured countryish balladry.

Overall, the album lacks the cohesion that would make it a keeper.

The New Danger is overambitious and undercooked, adventurous and bland all at once.

Take[s] their haunted-house shtick to frightening extremes.

For those who had grown used to Boredoms' percussion-orgy period -- from Super Ar through to Vision Creation Newsun, with OOIOO's Feather Float in the middle -- such intermittence will give the album a broken feel, making it feel like its indulgences in improvisation and its ad-hoc demeanor are acts lacking discipline.

Much of this dreary lyricism will be seen as English-as-a-second-language charm by so many -- and the album's lyric sheets, which put forth all the spelling-mistake-riddled broken English with pride, seem to be of the same belief. But loving that about this disc is like so much faint praise at best, and a pernicious kind of cultural condescension at worst.

The spell is broken, however, by pieces like "Tears From the Compound" and "Oscar See Through Red Eye," which get lost in the marshes of their own hypnotic rhythms, sugar-sweet synths and lo-fi, breathy drones.

Tortoise have, in the past, asked more from their listeners. This time they let us off a little too easy.

Where their prettiness was once cloaked in a shroud of bashful melancholy, with [producer Joshua] Eustis on hand things get a little more grandstanding.

The tracks fail to hang together in a convincing way -- often giving the impression that they were more or less strung together on a whim.

The album succeeds in creating a dreamy mood that is both soothing and slightly unsettling. And yet this mood is relentless, and, ultimately, all the songs begin to sound the same.

All too often, this new material fails to leave much of an impression.

While the album is pleasant, it takes awhile to open up. And once opened up, it's nice, but hardly revolutionary.

An album that, despite all its misty melancholy, is filled less with lyrics of heartache, and more with words of warmth and romance.

Often, it's all too much -- too many synths, too many drums, too much reverb; it's as if every subtlety of that first record was magnified in the production process, its once lithe and supple frame vulgarly pumped with steroids.

Lacking both the musical and counter-cultural thrill of the Brion recordings, this album turns away from a certain artistic "rawness" in the original recordings, razing away counter-melodies and acoustic decay for a well-polished delivery that presents the photogenic songstress in a more "flattering" light.

For all it lacks in the pop-song department, it's not a bad pop record.

They're sure punching with more punch than they did when resuscitating the stand-and-deliver sexlessness of analog-electro past with blank face and vacant stare.

Their record runs through a range of instrumentalist archetypes and quietly surprising turns-for-the-worse, from electrified screech to tape-op minimalism, through pastoralism and soundscapery, to numbers where they knock out all manner of feigned sturm und drang.

Hypnotic Underworld is, paradoxically, actually the least hypnotic and least underground album Ghost have made thus far.

This final record is neither focused nor infallible, instead a rarer glimpse at a man whose creative doorways, once the source of so much hope and inspiration, had become outnumbered by his demons.

In stripping things back Mercury Rev suggest that in their case more actually was more, that bereft of the digressions and expansions they're just another band with a nasal, naïve-sounding singer, a way with a hook and a penchant for using the studio as an instrument.

The disc essentially finds the now-quartet cleaning up and living right and letting the world see them as they are; their tracks are marked by much clean-fingered guitar playing (the added guitar meaning there's six-stringing back-and-forth) and only a recreational use and abuse of wah.

There is nothing here that thrills with its audacity, beauty, beat or lyrics. Instead, we are given a solid batch of songs that for any other artist would be a crowning achievement, but for Beck is just mediocre.