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

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

If Share the Joy is the direction Vivian Girls are going in, I'm interested in seeing how it plays out.

This isn’t so much the first AMC record in awhile as the sturdiest, most bottom-heavy Eitzel record in awhile.

March of the Zapotec and Holland won’t get people as stirred up as "Gulag Orkestar" but they do suggest some interesting new directions.

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.

Lamping has some catchy songs and some interesting lyrics, but feels too inconsequential, too easily sloughed off.

Despite the occasional filler and silliness, Guns Don’t Kill People...Lazers Do! takes dancehall, club music and a genre that can probably best be described as “Diplo” to new and very interesting places.

Thankfully, the rest of Black Noise manages to maintain an elegant balance of the concrete and the ephemeral.

Though the harsh synth textures and borderline-disjointed edits from the EPs remain, the record as a whole is simultaneously hazier and more distinct: more fine detail in the cavernous reverb, more impact with every tumbling, hypercompressed stack of drum samples.

Matmos have created a digital manifestation of their own personality, one that would be done more justice through psychoanalysis than musical description.

While not a rapturously groundbreaking record, Cold of Ages is a rock-solid entry.

Quarter Turns Over a Living Line is neither an easy, nor comforting listening, and absorbing the entire album can occasionally leave the listener gasping for air. However, as a portrait of a dystopian 21st century musical landscape, there is little better than this brand of pure British blackness.

Subtlety is clearly not a strong suit here.

He puts together a good melody for each of these songs, as effortlessly as Ray Davies and in as nasally a voice.

Luckily, the songwriting on Minks' debut hits far more frequently than it misses. It's a solid establishment of a noteworthy sound--the proverbial "encouraging first album."

Beast Epic is a good album. In some senses, it’s satisfying. It just doesn’t get to the concreteness, to the creation that makes it something more.

As inconsistent as it is, Every Kind of Light, the first full-band Posies record of the century, curbs the pair’s excesses enough to reward repeat plays.

While Feorm Falorx may have some of the duo’s more simplistic songwriting, it’s well worth a spin for its textural delights alone.

It [“Walk Through Fire”] jives together with machine-like precision and fluid grace. The rest of the EP is pretty good, too.

Despite the less-successful entries, Saint Dymphna is commendable. There's substantially less chaos and abstractness and more pop quantization, but Gang Gang Dance are still overflowing with ideas.

There's a strength in what these four musicians are capable of together, and the best moments on Tidelands explore the boundaries of such an approach.

His songs flash by in vivid, disconnected mental images, floating on an underlying current of mood. What we see passes by. What we feel about it lingers, evocatively, just out of reach and often filtered through digital mechanisms. ... The album’s lyrics are about all kinds of things, but its sound is about being isolated and frightened with contact only through digital interface.

The end result is the 11 songs on Unlearn, which I'll save you the frustration of calling "eclectic" and opt for the even more euphemistic "well-informed."

This album is more grounded in sounds recognizably made by physical instruments. It’s also, in places, openly archaic in its devices and treatments.

Les Savy Fav has finally delivered an album worth shrugging about.

They’re no longer one of the torchbearers of a perceived trend, but they continue to grind out records of a style and overall quality that are still hard to come by (whether we need more of them is certainly up for debate).

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.