Too many songs here move at a glacial pace and seem to take away from Xiu Xiu’s strength: an ear for melody, a love for dissonance, songs that go interesting places and engaging instrumentation.

Whatever these songs lack in immediacy, they rebound with an artistry.

They're also carrying on in the tradition of independent rap artists from the fertile early 2000s, producing whatever they damn please and selling it for ten bucks. An uncompromising approach can lead to disaster, either financially or creatively, but COHESIVE is the paradigmatic fruit of such an approach.

Vile has slyly written pop that enters one's head without leaving much of a permanent mark; instead of a distraction from one's deeper woes, it's chameleonic accompaniment.

It’s not only an addition to 2009’s unassailably fantastic class of ambient music, but in a way is unique to that class for the menace with which it’s threaded.

As a whole, An Empty Bliss is a remarkably cohesive listen and one that achieves its goals, but whether or not it, in and of itself, is an entirely creative work is another question entirely.

A quietly brilliant album.

Most of that sonic rage is in absentia on It’s Blitz!, which is part OK electro dance record and part atmospheric boredom courtesy of producer nerd David Sitek, who, it’s becoming increasingly clear, saves all of his best ideas for his main squeeze TV On the Radio.

There is Love in You renders "Ringer" primer, posits itself as perfect solution to messy experimentation, and while it’s hard to find the divisiveness in that, it’s also hard to be truly moved.

The no-bullshit album cover might be the cheekiest thing about delightfully straight-forward Brothers.

All in all, Jarvis a mixed bag. It feels like the sort of thing that Cocker would do just to expunge his notebooks before moving on.

It’s all quite charming and lovely.

You’d think that an album with somewhat conventional music that eschews a conventional sense of arc, narrative or otherwise, would come off awkward or ineffectual, but with Stitches there is aesthetic, textural immediacy and, even more importantly, immaculate craftmanship to help it make an impact from the very first listen.

The pure emotion and aggressiveness isn’t suppressed or transformed into something else, but rather just given room for some thought, allowed to open itself up and find the strange flowers within.

It is a stubborn, patient sharpening of their craft.

How To Dress Well is certainly not the only contemporary act to use nostalgia as the basis for an aesthetic, but Krell's ideas about the past and our relationship to it seem to be considerably more sophisticated than those of his peers.

You can’t really blame Bowie for conforming to 21st-century quality control when it comes to the sound and scope of this record, but it’s not exactly something to be celebrated either. What deserves celebration, or at least indulgence, are the glimpses of sublime execution on The Next Day, as well as Bowie’s skill in maintaining his mystique after all this time.

It simply, like her two (arguably better) albums before them, hurts too good to be ignored.

That’s a comparison that could be made between Burner and Bip’s Blue Eyed in the Red Room (2005): similar, but a little better.

Chosen Lords is... a nostalgic, fun listen for longtime fans and suitable point for new listeners to become acquainted with Aphex Twin’s twisted catalogue.

It's a well-constructed and performed album that sounds great on the stereo.

Despite a couple of weaker links, Somewhere Else is extremely well put-together, and spilling over with appealing melodies, wit, and truth.

It's never pretentious, showy, or fake-tough; it's just Shad, doing what he does, and it sounds earnestly great.

In lieu of an actual follow-up [to The Knife's "Silent Shout"] we get something that manages to make good on two of those three elements [of the decade’s best electronic records]. I’ll take it.

Why Vampire Weekend seem uninterested in being a no frills pop band is a mystery. They slather what would sometimes be solid songwriting with such production doodads, intertextual namedrops, wry smirks, and defensive irony that the songs themselves are crushed under the weight

Get Behind Me Satan marks the point where The White Stripes music has finally become as charismatic and mysterious as its creators.

It’s not a bad album, and Doom’s rapping is damn near unparalleled; but when you come right down to it, The Mouse & the Mask kinda feels like a throwaway.

It's all very controlled, as any functional dance club record should be, and its quality extends past its single, as any decent-to-good dance club record should be.