Urban Turban is consolidation for Cornershop, pulling together old and new tracks and showing as many hands as they can.

Castlemusic is short, at 31 minutes, but diverse enough to suggest real potential.

If you like dub techno - and who among us with a taste for dissociated, repetitive, awesomely deep and gritty music wouldn't? - you're bound to like a lot of this stuff, and love some of it.

Lovely as it is, Bloom makes no big departures and takes no risks. If you wanted Teen Dream all over again, and god knows there are plenty of people who do, this is your record.

Like most things that result from improvisation, it doesn't always sound as new as it thinks it does, but the reggae stalwarts' freshness is timeless.

Gedge's wryly stilted voice and clever turns of hook are still on display, but without the frantic guitar of Pete Solowka from the group's early lineup, the songs are a bit too slow and heavy.

The breadth of imagination, experimentation and diversity on display across these four sides of vinyl is nearly unparalleled in modern non-compositional music... With this record, Dilloway secures his place as one of the great solo figures of modern noise.

Regardless of the art-school pretentions offered up-front, Yamantaka // Sonic Titan deliver the goods.

This album doesn't reinvent the sound, nor does it subvert it--but on its own modest terms, it provides a concentrated dose of smart, verbose pop.

Pretty Ugly is neither very pretty nor particularly ugly, rather a lumpen, unengaging mess.

Da Mind of Traxman marries the soul of the past with the bangs of the future so fluidly that the sound's innately harsh nature has been marginalized, making for an all-around enjoyable experience no matter the location.

Habits & Contradictions is less like a label-released full-length and more like an amateurish mixtape, a work in progress.

The Block Brochure, ponderous though it may be, is curated carefully and put together in a way that will actually hold up over time.

The Block Brochure, ponderous though it may be, is curated carefully and put together in a way that will actually hold up over time.

The Block Brochure, ponderous though it may be, is curated carefully and put together in a way that will actually hold up over time.

The Belbury Tales can be a potent experience at the high points I've just described, but it spends some time at lower altitudes, too, without ever unambiguously erring.

An enjoyable, at times provocative companion piece, this one's a satisfying musical bath.

Lacking a clear story arc or point of catharsis, Kill for Love drifts off into its own gorgeous gloom.

Heartbreaking Bravery is not an especially weird album, certainly not in comparison with Krug's other work, but it's alluring and intriguing all the same.

While Orcas hits on a heavier emotional level than I'd initially expected, that tendency to drift does endure on repeated listens.

R.I.P is Actress continually shifting and exploring, growing and rippling, being himself in the only Statement-less way he knows how. Its 15 songs aren't for everyone and with few overt melodies, it's definitely not for everyone.

The Money Store is Death Grips's next move, and they sound surprisingly ready to engage a wider audience.

Hair works because even when the pieces aren't well integrated, they are often enjoyable listening.

Mostly as enjoyable as it is edifying from start to finish, the program repeatedly underscores that without artistry of expression, associative anger and the demonizing of one's enemy, however righteous, rarely lead to lasting empowerment for a person or a people.

This uneven album takes time to break in, but each successive spin deepens the relationships among the songs and reveals more details.

Whether your favorite power trio is the Minutemen or ZZ Top, part of what makes 'em great is their ability to simultaneously exploit the format's simplicity and transcend its limitations. These guys do both. Each knows exactly what is required of his instrument.

It's a beautiful collection of 'water music' that also serves as a reminder that experimentation often works best when smuggled in, sidereal style, under the canvas cover of pop songs.

As a cohesive statement, this very well could be their best in a very long time, if not ever.

The album is full of superlative performances, and exudes an uncommon level of energy and joy, even at its more melancholic moments, and is a far cry from Roberts' often cold and hermetic (but excellent) solo performances. Despite Morrison and Roberts's being the featured performance, this is clearly a group effort, a fact further underlined by the band-credited arrangements.

It's an encyclopedia of rhythmic assimilation, perfectly executed, nary a lovingly adopted concept out of place. Catchy as hell, too.

Transistor Rhythm clearly isn't the full-force, wall-to-wall banger album that many were hoping for, but it does show that Addison Groove can successfully and consistently operate in a more relaxed mode.

Mr. Impossible feels both inquisitive and hermetic, half closed off to the outside world, half chasing noise and patterns to their logical conclusion.

Spooky Action at a Distance is an album with a lot of footholds--different kinds at that--and it spreads them out in a fashion just as lazy and distracted as the songwriting itself.

The whole is so relentlessly nasty and the riffs so good that a multitude of metal sins are forgiven.

Barry Adamson, formerly of Magazine and The Bad Seeds, has released his most commercial-friendly album to date.

The music is something to behold.

The Australian trio feedtime's 1980s recordings, which are collected on The Abberant Years box set, prove them to be traditionalists of the best sort.

Gesturing, though, is just about all it does.

For all its veneer of accessible pop, I Love You, It's Cool is too often bereft of good old-fashioned melody--still too often adrift in the clouds of instrumentation,

It's a collection of veiled promise, but only partial pay-off.

It's not that Scott has nothing to say. Instead, he suffers a fate much worse--he's boring.

Ugly is Screaming Female's Steve Albini record, an inevitability for a group like this, and the trio brings its "A" game to the project.

As an album, Brain Pulse Music feels like two things at once, a dichotomous effort in which the nobility of the endeavor is at the core of its biggest aesthetic weakness.

It's a densely constructed EP, and the more baroque and strange it gets, the more compelling it becomes.

Tallied up, the hits and the misses are about equal. But it would be unfair to describe Interstellar as middling. What the misses lack is not quality but a strong sense of self in terms of songcraft.

Maybe the problem with The Politics of Envy is that these tracks just sounded too good playing back on shiny studio monitors to a roomful of old friends. If he's struggling to say something about the wider world, maybe Stewart should consider a retreat into his own eccentric interior.

The Host is a sun-blessed electronic album drawing from the now, as well as two decades ago, and that works well enough.

Where the debut felt, at times, unnervingly exposed, Iron Gates has a sense of center, balance and calm.

The lyrics (and their alternately crooned and flat-rapped delivery) are nothing new is probably the worst that can be said of them.

It often feels vast, tracking the curvature of the Earth, but it never forgets that music is made by people, and that there is real intimacy in the consort of two individuals relating to each other through simple gestures like singing, or brushing against six guitar strings.

As strong as this set is, it still faces the originality conundrum. Rather than a group of songs individually composed and packaged under the banner of a soul album, Faithful Man can occasionally feel like one extended, vaguely monochromatic exercise in proving the vitality of a brilliant yet aging art form.

From its start, Audience of One diverges starkly from the expected; by its end, the sense of surprise is replaced by that of satisfaction.

What's emerged here is more unpredictable, a transitional record that still feels complete.

As an accidental, definitive document of time and place, Vee Vee is up there with Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, No Pocky For Kitty and the Polvo records, strong enough even to offset the hideous cover art.

The latest full-length from the latest version of The Shins has some amazing songs.... But it also has some of the worst songs The Shins have ever produced.

He may not voice things like Ellington would have, but it doesn't matter. It could never stop, as far as I'm concerned.

The Horror makes for a largely relentless, immersive listening experience.

The result is an album that is as notable on its own as it is in the historical chillwave narrative.

At its best, though, We Are Nobody nails an uneasy mood that feels like a natural evolution of the Chap's acerbic wit: waiting for a punchline that never arrives.

This is the very best kind of post-reunion album, the one that allows you to rediscover things you'd forgotten about a band you always loved.

In this possibly one-off collaboration, Shuford and his pals have dug up an archaic artifact and filled it with powerful intoxicants.

At its best, it's both cathartic and transformative, harnessing the transformative power of empathy to politicize the personal and personalize the political.

He's not playing to his strengths; he's succumbing to preciousness.

Ultimately, what you see here is indeed what you get: amour, imagination and rêve from two men who fell to earth...from the dark side of Méliès' moon.

Sly winks at a complicit listener are replaced by a troubling disregard for the audience, and The Magnetic Fields sink to the bottom of the sea of self-satisfaction.

While the overall sound here isn't exactly unrecognizable from the band on Leave Home, there's definitely way more going on in terms of range and risk-taking.

More often, Disappears's new sound plods--especially by comparison with the frantic, loopy movement through spacy echo chambers that characterized much of the group's material on Lux and Guider

The result is not a great leap forward but a stationary jump--with one foot forward, another backward, and a hard landing on both feet.

These songs are smart and ingratiating, and slightly squeamish about the world of privileged, post-collegiate ennui they inhabit, and... that's what they are.

While Beaus$Eros retains his playfulness and wordplay, and while the songs are without doubt catchy, Farquhar is out of his depth.

The simple wallops that make up most of Personality suit him surprisingly well.

If you're bored with what they do, this won't change your mind, but if you're ready for another round, it's reliably strong stuff.

This is one record that gets better when you play it on shuffle.

For the uninvested outsider (neither lover nor hater), it's distinctively spooky background music with a few satisfyingly jarring surprises, nothing to get terribly worked up about. For Patton's large army of obsessive pupils, it's an essential document of the Master at his most conceptually obsessive.

Mark Sultan breathes fire into genres that, in most hands, only gather dust.

Sakamoto and Fennesz don't say how you should take their music, but its piano-forward sound aligns it with decades of delicate minor-key melodies that have accompanied countless images of rain on window pains and lonely pining lovers.

It's a pleasing set on its own terms, but it's just as interesting as a contrast to contemporary electronics, to hear what traits and effects have faded as its evolved so rapidly.

Porcelain Raft's airy concoctions work best when you're not thinking about them.

Everything on this oddball album demands your attention, often in unexpected ways.

Though it's well produced and confident, and goes deep into its web of influence, it seems so rooted in this moment that it feels transitory.

I don't suppose this is an album for the ages, but as tasty trifles go, you could do far worse.

Jurado and Swift are onto something in the conjunction of rough-hewn folk and atmospheric electronics, and if anything, they have gotten better at integrating the two elements into a whole.

It retains Mountain's dense production, but swaps out its calculated affectations for raw sexual urgency, deep-black humor and desperate foreboding.

Some of the best songs that the Louvin Brothers ever wrote.

These songs still jangle, still twitch, still pulse, but there's an undertone of serenity and philosophical acceptance that makes them resonate, too.

The music is too monochromatically saccharine (whether cheery, wistful, or both) to faithfully conjure anything more than a narrow and fleeting slice of human experience.

No One Can Ever Know is quite a good album, not as fresh as the debut, but more complicated and premeditated.

Beautifully played, immaculately recorded and bloated to the gills with 1970s album rock pretensions, it's a throwback to a time that most people don't remember very well (and few of those have any desire to revisit).

On Lambchop's more ambitiously simple albums, such as Mr. M, that darkness is all the more affecting.

It's not a bad album by any stretch of the imagination. But it also feels (not necessarily is) like someone forcing a turn in their art instead of allowing it to naturally come out of them.

Acoustic guitar, electric often played clean, and politely-tapped drums have never married pop beauty and frightening moodiness like they do when Supreme Dicks hit a stride.

["General Hospital" is] a rare mis-step on a collection of songs that's beautifully judged, possessed of an idiosyncratic melodic logic that few can equal.

It is a very accurate document of Wire's 2011 live set; its strengths and weak spots correspond exactly to the ones of the concert they played in Chicago the same year.

It remains delightfully messy and is all the more viscerally resonant.

This third Zomes album is far more static, yet the statis itself is arresting.

Six Cups is a busy, urgent and joyous trip that sidesteps categorization, a feat unto itself in field where new micro-genres are described every few months.

It's a fantastic body of work, as vital and fresh-sounding now as it was when first released.

he's made one of his strongest, and certainly his oddest, albums.