His taste in sounds and sense of what to do to them is unimpeachable, but the album's greatest strength is its resistance to categorization.

A genuinely engaging and fun album.

The title is Norwegian for "poverty," but its rewards are as rich as they've ever been.

It's always interesting to hear artists develop, but one can't help but question the conviction here.

Lamar has once more asserted a great and formidable talent, and good kid is triumphantly and unmistakably his, but the artists that stick around longest are the ones who let us make their art our own.

The results, which are generally not very good, fall into the same aesthetic gray area as the majority of mashups everywhere: laudable ambition, misbegotten audacity.

Cold Showers uses that cavalier attitude behind such a simple bedrock of references--Joy Division (a song called "New Dawn" all but writes a countermelody to "Insight"), The Church, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Strokes, Interpol--that creates a level of tension across Love and Regret that sustains them far better than any of their peers.

This Dreamless Sleep, is often beautiful, but short on such surprises, and it becomes a bit of a snooze as a result.

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

For a collaboration that could've easily become a Cocoon of styles and persons past, The Orbserver in the Star House plays surprisingly spry.

The guitar is the wild card in these tightly reined-in, metronomically repetitive cuts. It rises in fits and starts, jabs at solid masses of beats, tests the outer limits of rigorously defined song structures.

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

All these songs drown together, dissipating like wet Kleenex as soon as they're done.

Psychedelic Pill is earnest and perverse, simplistic and complicated, epic and underachieving--guess the old cuss still has it in him after all.

At just 37 minutes, World Music is wisely edited--most of the songs hover around the 3-minute mark, so they speak their piece and move on before you get tempted to start peeling apart the layers to see what they're really made of.

The musicianship, melodies, and performances are sound, but hollow. Everything does what it's supposed to do, without ever fully engaging on any real emotional, human level.

Honor Found in Decay, the band's 11th or so studio album, is an organic, humanizing refinement of said retooling, one that is very subtle yet undoubtedly informed by guitarist Steve Von Till and bassist Scott Kelly's forays into the fandom and unadorned tribute exercises regarding the late Townes Van Zandt.

For post-apocalyptic strains of electronic music, there's no one better at the moment than Andy Stott. Luxury Problems makes for one hell of a calling card.

Scheidt is a capable acoustic guitarist with a flair for ornamentation, but well-wrought filigree does not an album make. Confronted with the choice between hearing this record again and taking a nap, I'd opt for the snooze.

Aside from the chopped vocal of the title-track, the mind-warp of "R in Zero G," and the woodpecker rhythms that liven up "Fraction" on the back end, the album feels dated.

The end result is as fascinating as Silent Servant has ever been.

[Animator is] the sound of a group taking a familiar sound, segmenting it, and discovering that the results can be infinitely compelling.

While a somewhat trained ear could tease out what came from where, it's a lot easier in this case just to sit back and enjoy work that seems to value interesting textures and arrangements - but not at the expense of the songs themselves.

The balance of melody to unease is rarely this well maneuvered.

As a whole Book Burner may be as focused and relentless as anything they've yet released.

GEM isn't just a fresh take on an old sound; it's an audit of the constraint placed on female artists in the past and a table-turning journey into what might have been possible if musical freedom meant more than obedience to parents, husbands and record producers.

Provider isn't necessarily going to settle old scores. Its a notable release, though, both as a new work by a talented singer-songwriter and as one of what one can only hope will be several satisfying postscripts in the narrative of a great band.

Wolfe seems out in the open for the first time--overall, though, she's more interesting when she's deep in the woods.