Ultimately, what you see here is indeed what you get: amour, imagination and rêve from two men who fell to earth...from the dark side of Méliès' moon.

Sly winks at a complicit listener are replaced by a troubling disregard for the audience, and The Magnetic Fields sink to the bottom of the sea of self-satisfaction.

While the overall sound here isn't exactly unrecognizable from the band on Leave Home, there's definitely way more going on in terms of range and risk-taking.

More often, Disappears's new sound plods--especially by comparison with the frantic, loopy movement through spacy echo chambers that characterized much of the group's material on Lux and Guider

The result is not a great leap forward but a stationary jump--with one foot forward, another backward, and a hard landing on both feet.

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.

While Beaus$Eros retains his playfulness and wordplay, and while the songs are without doubt catchy, Farquhar is out of his depth.

The simple wallops that make up most of Personality suit him surprisingly well.

If you're bored with what they do, this won't change your mind, but if you're ready for another round, it's reliably strong stuff.

This is one record that gets better when you play it on shuffle.

For the uninvested outsider (neither lover nor hater), it's distinctively spooky background music with a few satisfyingly jarring surprises, nothing to get terribly worked up about. For Patton's large army of obsessive pupils, it's an essential document of the Master at his most conceptually obsessive.

Mark Sultan breathes fire into genres that, in most hands, only gather dust.

Sakamoto and Fennesz don't say how you should take their music, but its piano-forward sound aligns it with decades of delicate minor-key melodies that have accompanied countless images of rain on window pains and lonely pining lovers.

It's a pleasing set on its own terms, but it's just as interesting as a contrast to contemporary electronics, to hear what traits and effects have faded as its evolved so rapidly.

Porcelain Raft's airy concoctions work best when you're not thinking about them.

Everything on this oddball album demands your attention, often in unexpected ways.

Though it's well produced and confident, and goes deep into its web of influence, it seems so rooted in this moment that it feels transitory.

I don't suppose this is an album for the ages, but as tasty trifles go, you could do far worse.

Jurado and Swift are onto something in the conjunction of rough-hewn folk and atmospheric electronics, and if anything, they have gotten better at integrating the two elements into a whole.

It retains Mountain's dense production, but swaps out its calculated affectations for raw sexual urgency, deep-black humor and desperate foreboding.

Some of the best songs that the Louvin Brothers ever wrote.

These songs still jangle, still twitch, still pulse, but there's an undertone of serenity and philosophical acceptance that makes them resonate, too.

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.

No One Can Ever Know is quite a good album, not as fresh as the debut, but more complicated and premeditated.

Beautifully played, immaculately recorded and bloated to the gills with 1970s album rock pretensions, it's a throwback to a time that most people don't remember very well (and few of those have any desire to revisit).

On Lambchop's more ambitiously simple albums, such as Mr. M, that darkness is all the more affecting.

It's not a bad album by any stretch of the imagination. But it also feels (not necessarily is) like someone forcing a turn in their art instead of allowing it to naturally come out of them.

Acoustic guitar, electric often played clean, and politely-tapped drums have never married pop beauty and frightening moodiness like they do when Supreme Dicks hit a stride.