If you listen to this album a lot, you may spend the first two or three times through snorting at odd phrases, recoiling from the venom and viscosity in Smith’s vocal delivery, but as you go, you begin to pick up the ferocity of the grooves underneath. No one else balances articulate, convincing hallucination with freight train propulsion like the Fall does, and this album, they take it further towards the edge than before.

There’s something Spinal Tap-ish about the reach for grandeur here--not that it’s bad exactly, more that it seems not fully justified by the material.

[Mould's trademark] coupling of aggression and tuneful economy is one of the chief attributes sometimes compromised on Body of Song.

There are two fairly strange intermezzo experiments and a few heavier-hitting sing-a-longs thrown in to excite ardent fans of their self-titled debut, but overall the album sacrifices listenability to broadcast and hint at Payseur’s “I will say what I will” evolutions to come.

Where earlier tracks tended, endearingly, to drift and wander, these new ones move not faster but with more purpose, as if they have somewhere to get to.

A solid, if not predictable emo-tronic excursion.

Kowalsky’s chants are more meditative than elegiac, more active than atmospheric and don’t have any air of scientific inquiry about them.

These aren't songs simply notable for their attitude or irreverence--they're a fine collection of songs, period.

Drone Trailer comes off as one of MV & EE’s richest conciliations of primal rock impulse and agrarian drift – the kind of record that a confused major label would have leaked out into the world in the early 1970s, the last time the underground had any chance of seriously warping the mainstream milieu.

Maybe Butler was aiming higher than simply "dance music." A laudable ambition, but one that sadly isn't matched by the content of Blue Songs.

Biasonic Hotsauce is broken up by some campy skits that buffer the genre hops, and after a few of them, the record turns toward electro.

You’ll Be Safe Forever is a wormhole backward in time. It’s also a timeless reminder of how valuable both Mark Van Hoen and WFMU are to the contemporary music landscape.

It’s a serious, earnest “lighten up, kid” that returns to Francis’s strongest mode, the slightly stilted personal journal; like the rest of Li(f)e it’s honest, sometimes brutally so, occasionally just brutal, and it’s hard to ask for more than that.

The record doesn’t sound much like a free improv session, but it retains the crucial dynamic of starting from zero and seeing where it goes, and there’s enough going on here to make me curious where they’ll go next.

The emotions channeled here are wrenching, but they’re also honest, and this album’s victories feel earned.

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.

Trying to meet somewhere between the dancefloor and the bedroom, between the realm of communal delight and solitary reflection, Booka Shade just wind up in the middle of the road.

This is great for obsessive fans and for the remnants of the Elephant Six community, for with Electronic Projects they can get a more complete picture of the band. But why make them pay for it?

Its melodic songs lack the fiery drive and urgency of rock and roll, consciously recalling an era of music of interest only to people looking for something truly vintage.

Costello stays away from pop hooks here, concentrating instead on a tentative but engaging marriage of words and melody.

Clearly steeped in the great tradition of the British folk song, yet able to combine its structure and ethos with rock rebellion from both classic psych and more recent guitar rock, Erland & The Carnival's Nightingale is a distinctive exemplar of folk revivalism for the age of indie.

This is a hard record to get a hold on, but its vapors make you dizzy.

There's no arguing that it's pretty entertaining.... But there's the nagging sense that it's all sound and fury.

Not quite the revelation of the seamless debut, and missing the duck-down mentality of the Beady Eye in his prime, The Formula is the hip-hop definition of maintaining.

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.

Its vaguely experimental ambitions and occasionally interesting musical flourishes don’t do much to separate it from the mass of baroque indie already circulating, amassing often unwarranted critical acclaim.

III is something to be appreciated and savored, but not necessarily obsessed over.

Burning Daylight's best songs emerge from an ominous fog of sounds.