This is a wonderful album, easily as good, though perhaps less immediately accessible, than last year’s "Rites of Uncovering."

The good stuff (those [first] three tracks, and maybe the indignant “Al Green”) provides Kool Keith an appropriate showcase and sounds like nothing else, but for much of this disc, the main man appears AWOL.

Though Patterson is still largely peddling outdated sample-heavy narco-trance, the new disc is quite an improvement from 2001’s career-low Cydonia even if it may share that record’s flaws.

More like faithful reiterations of soul cliches than anything fresh or interesting, nearly every track will remind you of someone else.

Calamity shows the Curtains to be a band of great moments more than great songs, and in this distinction lies the difference between the listener that dismisses the album and the one that holds on to it despite its flaws.

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 sounds like the Good Shoes are tired and mildly sick of it all--and unfortunately, it’s catching.

Dead Drunk on the whole could be taken as noise music, noise music with none of the brutality and half the imagination.

Even with so many strikes against it, however, Seconds manages to be a surprisingly compelling listen.

You can hear him trying to sort out the differences between Aeroplane's past and its/his future without resolving them yet. Appropriately, if you often find yourself unwittingly listening to pop hits from 1975-1985, you are the target demographic of We Can't Fly.

It either needs to at least nod to actual humanity or just be off-the-wall insane, but doing neither, it just comes off as fake. Grey Oceans falls in-between the cracks of the extremes, and while still an interesting album, feels too shallow and too Serious.

Beating Back the Claws of the Cold aims for timelessness with its fusion of chamber pop, indie rock, and popular folk, but falls short as just another likable, ephemeral fall release.

Uncanney Valley looks like a Dismemberment Plan record and largely sounds like a Dismemberment Plan record. But yet, it’s not a Dismemberment Plan record. Not a very good one, anyway.

A messy, disappointing record that would be a miss from any artist, but from an artist of Mos Def’s talents, it’s a minor disaster.

Cosy Moments moves slightly toward pop-and-hook than the last Kinski album did, but more than maintains its integrity as an outsized purveyor of aggressive guitar rock.

Only “Travel Fox” and “RocMarcable” in the second half come close to the usual Marci in his macking mode. But even they won’t warrant revisiting this EP in a couple of years.

The music offers plenty of reasons to feel good about feeling bad; too bad that the lyrics, which suggest these feelings in the first place, evacuate themselves moments after they surface, making for a curiously glossy listening experience.

It's hard to imagine 200 Years standing out, even considering its low-key spirit.

It seems borne more out of logical considerations than organic ones. It doesn’t mean the music is necessarily bad, but rather that it’s animated more out of a lifelessness than anything else. It’s undead music.

This second full-length is like looking at fog through a clean window. There's nothing there, and boy can you ever hear that nothing clearly.

Anywhere I Lay My Head falters on Johansson’s vocals, or lack of a distinctive voice.

I ultimately found Solo Electric Bass 1 as dull as it must have been difficult to play.

It's a conservative, often misguided assault on mainstream dance music.

As Malkmus and Kannberg each find out what kind of musician each one is, the end result is less interesting than when they were in the process of discovering that and were having fun trying out different ideas and really discovering new things together.

Unfortunately, the observational heart of the disc's best rhymes are obscured by manicured eccentricity and musical dilettantism.

Overestimate it for the wrong reasons, and you’ll still get a lot out of A Fool for Everyone; underestimate it for the right reasons and you won’t have to look too hard for a replacement.

The weird and promising thing is that it works without ever feeling natural. The actual coexistence of the earnest and the smoove stops being so striking after a while, but the best songs on Rules don’t let you forget there is one.

The songs here are mostly ponderous, nine-minute long epics with very little in the way of song form, melody, or musical interest.