It's not as gratifyingly raw as 1983 or as paradigm-shifting as Los Angeles or as self-important as Cosmogramma, but it's more expansive and refined taken in one sitting.

It is full of unusual clarity and purpose and seems to have benefited from a certain amount of restraint.

Incorruptible Heart really is a wonderful album and something beautiful to listen to, but I find myself having a very difficult time emotionally connecting to it.

Maybe people with better audio equipment or a more jaded approach to electronic music have been enjoying him this much all along, but the remaining 47 percent are in for a surprise.

It's an album that makes the most of its contradictions--the gulf between its most rhapsodic elements and its contemplative ones provides its share of thrilling moments along the way.

For a band who made their name on straightforward, meat-and-potatoes indie pop, Strapped is all over the place.

During these 18 minutes, you can sense a tension between the darker atmosphere and the pop inclinations. That's a combination that's yielded its share of greatness, but the two don't fully merge here.

Sagittarian Domain is an intriguing offering from Ambarchi, if not something with a great deal of potential for repeat success.

Runner signal a return to the "heritage" S&C sound, balancing motorik pulse and unbridled delicateness, regaining some of the spirit and intention that had begun to flag in the process.

Krell seems like a victim of his own good intentions. There's a kernel of an idea here.

Many of these tracks--indeed some of the most interesting--are more snippets than fully developed destinations. But there are real skills on display here.

While a lot of their peers have attempted (unsuccessfully, mostly) to beat down the doors of California's psychedelic myth, Sic Alps have taken their time and found their own way there; in doing so they've created one of the best records of the year.

This austerity is reflected somewhat in the duo's avowed debt to the ambient tradition of Harold Budd and Brian Eno and, whilst that's not bad thing at all, it does mean that, at times, Ursprung tends to fold itself into the background.

It's furious and raging and exhausting, and the end result is exhilarating.

Eight is both more concise and more varied [than his last outing, Drawn and Quartered].

Listening to the album, the weirdness is never off-putting, and the pop elements don't feel like concessions to a wider audience.

This album certainly sounds more produced, but the band's investment in studio time mostly means sighing washes of prismatic reverb rather than a new architecture of synths and drums. Still, many of the album's best moments are its most... well, not beat-driven, but beat-bedazzled.

It's full of complexity and contradictions, and trying to grasp it is impossible. But what a joy to attempt.

Silver Age is a very good album, one that recalls, in all the right ways, Mould's best post-Hüsker work, and in particular his Copper Blue.

Standing at the Sky's Edge is Hawley's first major misstep.

It takes time to acclimate to the album's frenetic fog. In that sense, Centipede Hz is both a return to and rejection of form.

While Breakup Songs is hardly less fractured than Deerhoof's other albums, it's also one of their more coherent efforts.

Antibalas is charging ahead, poised for continued recognition and celebration among Afrobeat devotees, as well as first discovery by world music dabblers.

Wild Peace is a work in progress, a document of a band on a very fast track, but still figuring out exactly who and what it is.

It's engineered, in a feature-article-friendly way, to embody its creator's personal development and comment on it in a way that's slick, weightless and easily disowned. For the first time in Marshall's career, lighter equals better

If he's not making his most important works of his career, it may well be his best.

Finders Keepers has managed to extract another handful of diamonds from a shaft seemingly unsafe for further exploration.

Guantanamo Baywatch is a pretty good all-instrumental surf band with a terrible singer. Chest Crawl... puts vocals on all but three of its 11 songs, attempting Cramps-style, reverbed rants, Trashmen-esque shouted call and response, Elvis-y 12/8 balladry and hiccuping rockabilly vamps and sheep-bleating, vibrato'd yelps, all badly off-key and dreadfully recorded.