What we’re left with, speakers humming with aftermath, is the possibility of a real and significant realization: that between Hecker and Mountains, 2009 suggests a sea change--and I can’t think of a more appropriately grand term--in which ambient music may just enter a post-Eno peak.

While previous records had some fascinating collaborations, perhaps Carboniferous hits so hard because it pares things down to the core trio a bit more.

I’m finding these chocolate bar grooves and dark, open spaces in Watersports a pretty nice place to be, and if the guys in Mi Ami have mellowed a bit with age, they haven’t gotten any less interesting or vital, still embroiled with the spirit and verve that supposedly ended at the Black Cat not all that long ago.

It is markedly less frenetic and more cohesive, and for that it is pitch-black and menacing, and for that it is head-and-shoulders the better record.

My point is that topping already listless, dreamy tunes with even more listless production can make it difficult to perceive any dynamics across the whole album. Odawas do make inroads towards changing it up, but it’s hard to hear anything but the relentlessly slow pace and saccharine production.

Mother of Curses feels suffocating: it’s experimental but constrained and bleak but not humanistic or relatable.

I am aware that I am giving the following guy an 85% on Cokemachineglow. The thing is, he deserves it.

It’s Not Me It’s You is neither grating or annoying. It’s merely boring.

Immolate Yourself feels like a transitional record from an act that was almost ready to make itself crystal clear.

Dent May has a firm grasp on his ukulele, debuting his skill through an adept, kitschy, brief, and rarely but sometimes resplendent album, but he’s still forevermore a novelty.

The album’s accompanying trappings do little to dull its impressiveness or the band’s command of its lineage.

Beyond simply being a fantastic musician, he’s a master of imaginative storytelling, and manages to perfectly capture the feeling of such a cruel yet contemplative season.

While hardly the evolutionary leap forward that the band had suggested was afoot, Tonight is still, inarguably, fine for now.

This isn’t progress, it’s pleasant, capable, effortless stagnation; the dream’s already finished and we can’t, for the love of everything, recall what it was about.

Dälek have refined their work but their work has no reaching trajectory.

Animal Collective keep getting better.

The Crying Light may prove to be too precarious to hold up on its own in the future, but for now Antony & the Johnsons have provided a perfect gateway to their music.

Even with their glut of talent (Bejar not included), the band is sputtering for ideas.

Noble Beast overcomplicates what should be a simpler formula; the meat is in Bird’s performances, the virtuoso skills at his disposal, not the antiseptic display of distorted guitar tones that the album’s best song unfortunately resorts to in its final section.

Essentially, Blood Bank is one pretty song--the titular, opening track settling somewhere close to what Damien Jurado’s doing these days--and two similarly pretty experiments in stretching Bon Iver’s sound.

Skin of Evil is hardened, seamless, and totally unrelenting, everything full-bodied and visceral about Frog Eyes squeezed until it sublimates. This is scary, ethereal shit. It’s also a gorgeously captivating half hour of bedroom pop pushed screaming out of bed.

So, um, good? Yeah, but in the same way grilled cheese sandwiches are.

This is a power-pop album released by the biggest Fall Out Boy-ish band working today, on a major label, but it’s also 50.4 minutes of Fall Out Boy music--an extended, incomprehensible and surprisingly marketable clamor, ambulance siren loud, of contradictory signifiers.

This isn’t a bad release, and chances are, if you liked Cross, you could like this just as much. But it’s not going to contain any new revelations, and the extra reverb and applause are not enough to justify the release of a live album.

Circus is a saddening step back to her glossy yet unengaging "In the Zone" era, which is a shame.

The terrible truth of this album hangs stupidly overhead--that it’s a yawner.

This is a record of a plump stomach, a belch, a bit of acid reflux; the by-product of Kanye’s indulgences? More heartburn than heartbreak.

Theater of the Mind is a disappointment and more--snickering through both high-minded social consciousness and insipid cash cows, the album, so flat and fucking boring, serves absolutely no one but Ludacris himself.