Rick Ross would like you to know he has sodomized women in Acapulco. Lord knows we all aspire to such Olympian heights, but in that admission lies the crux of the impotence of Rawse's extensive discography: this is all pretty unnecessary.

In the end, This Week suffers largely from the hype---there’s no way this album could be as good as it was supposed to be.

These songs contain all the accoutrements of anguish and despair: he sings the words, he screams the words. So why does it all sound so fake?

Let’s get two things about Government Commissions out of the way. The first is that the set is utterly inessential.... The second thing is that the first thing doesn’t matter.

There's a stunning balance between fluid variations and deviations that in total feel like improvisation and the strictly confined, loping-in-circles gait of traditional hip-hop-a process which then lends itself to being described as simultaneously dynamic and hypnotic, loose and hard, jam and the jam.

Dedication is definitely an accomplished record and a milestone for Zomby, rewarding continued personal investigation in the same way that Where Were U In '92? found its success in laser beam focus and visceral appeal.

It's thus a relief to see something, anything, resembling a coherent full-length emerge from that group of musicians, and for it to be as good as Shapeshifting is. More than anything, though, this is a success for Young Galaxy, who prove themselves far more versatile and open than they ever did before, and, as such, are likely to win over a new whole new audience.

Until the group learns to keeps pace or more effectively makes space for Thorpe, their singer will remain the first, best, and only reason to listen to Wild Beasts.

Compared to All That You Can’t Leave Behind, it’s immensely sincere, well-thought out, and meaningful... [It] also happens to be loaded with hooks.

If anything, this is an effective teaser for a new Broadcast album, since many of the tracks here could easily be part of great Broadcast songs, but in this form, they aren’t, and it’s clear that we both know that.

This is a step forward, and the new studio approach is a constructive development.

The Imaginary Adventures of Pardon, Mannerfelt, and Co. just happen to be a wonderfully suitable and measured vehicle for the dense and compelling work of Roll the Dice, and In Dust is sure not to leave anyone wanting for a more promising wilderness to explore.

Really, everything is utterly in its right place on The Eternal, which is also its most glaring flaw, and its this lack of the new that makes it kind of a bummer, though, at the least, a pleasant one.

Six Demon Bag’s a romp, short but sprawling, careful but passionate.

Sexsmith’s got a knack for melody, and Froom’s got a knack for bringing it out.

The finest songs here are as solid as any other rock music you’ll find in 2013.

So Living With Yourself is a lot like, well, living by yourself-comfortable, unchallenging, plenty of time to get introspective and think about things that once were.

Their latest, Castle Talk, isn't a staggering improvement on that front. It feels--and, in its middle section even more than on Power Move--not so much a cohesive, self-contained album as a collection of Screaming Females songs that will sound very good live.

It’s the Casiotone defence mechanism: take your innermost awkward lumps and bathe them in rose-tinted easy listening. Ashworth successfully translate this to his new instruments no fewer than nine or ten times on this eleven track set.

One Life Stand hasn’t brought Hot Chip completely out of the deep hole they dug for themselves one album earlier, and it’s still not as consistent as the inimitable, career-defining The Warning, but it’s unquestionably more “Boy From School” than the histrionics of “Shake a Fist,” and that’s a good enough reason to stay with this band not just for the kids.

So yeah, the cheese gets awfully thick, but unlike most other groups purposely pushing the boundaries of bad taste in the past few years, Dan Bejar remembers to at least bring along some great songs.

For every elastic, tuneful, vacuum-packed “Phantom Limb” or “Australia” -- pop craftsmanship of the highest order, redolent of Chutes’ front-to-back triumph, crystalline, flawless and packed so thick with thoughts and words and hooks that they unravel marvelously indefinitely -- there’s an obvious b-side.

Gloss Drop shows a band still well ahead of the curve in terms of how they perform music, and one that understands how an aesthetic can be stretched to its most experimental limit and retracted to a simple confection without a wide chasm between the two modes of expression.

In the end, we needn’t concern ourselves too much with the machinations of some emotionally arrested Peter Pan of pop. Moz will always have the last word, anyways, which makes the barb from the album’s closer all the more appropriate: “This might make you throw up in your bed, I’m OK by myself!”

Thing is, though, that for every failure Graduation puts me through it has many a saving merit that only the nigh witless audacity of Kanye West could afford

Every song on this album is outstanding.