These 13-songs-in-35-minut​es, cut half in 2008 when he was drunk and half in 2010 when he was sober, are shockingly strong for the first eight or nine, which unfortunately include all the drunk ones.

This does wind down into your basic quality country album.

Chugging, grinding, crackling, swelling, bubbling, babbling, these tracks don't sound like part of the natural world, but they do sound cognizant of the natural world.

The six tracks divided evenly between his 20-minute 2011 return and his 30-minute 2012 stride forward, cohere almost seamlessly as the album they become when you don't have to turn any plastic over.

The six tracks divided evenly between his 20-minute 2011 return and his 30-minute 2012 stride forward, cohere almost seamlessly as the album they become when you don't have to turn any plastic over.

A song band and proud, they turn down the boogie so we're sure to get the lyrics, which except for the two Eddie Hintons are laid out as well in a booklet so handsome the habitual downloader may want one for himself (or herself, I wish).

Her male partners Bob Stanley and Peter Wiggs provide reliable disco-inflected pop or vice versa that the remixers on the optional bonus disc trick up with more wit and fidelity than we who avoid remixes sagely expect.

The three strongest tracks on Waits's most rocking album ever all feature not just Keith Richards but Tom's drummer son Casey.

Every mean word delivers, and with cameos from Tyler the Creator to 50 Cent it's as if he never went solo.

The quirky murmurs, yelps, and coos of his head voice, a high end of unequalled softness and give, sound responsive where Jackson's sound willed. There's a girl there, or just as likely a grown woman. And whether or not El seems manly to you, he's turning her on and vice versa.

Predictably, Jay's power is more interesting than Ye's, which was funnier and sicker on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Think the patron's proximity made the protegee nervous? Think the patron figured it would? I do.

Part of its delight is how naturally the disparate parts fit together, but another part is how they add up to phantasmagoria if you let your attention wander (and don't be a tight-ass‑-you should).

Committed to synth squelch and chary of synth tweedle, it's basically instrumental except when transforming Mayer Hawthorne into the generic soul falsetto he was born to be and M.I.A. into the cheeky disco dolly she's too conscious to become.

What it sounds like is the redemption of Young's lost mid-'80s‑-the countryish album Old Ways was supposed to be, neither rote like Re-ac-tor nor static like that sacred cow Harvest.

Mature my patootie--and that's a good thing.

So much better than a Ferrari that never needs a tune-up, muse I. In the studio they're less accident prone, and they still tintinnabulate some. But now they also grunt.

For once drum'n'bass's impossible Conlon Nancarrow beats, which Plug does pretty well with on those EPs, are the bed where the real music crinkles, crashes, chimes, swoops, swells, squiggles, gurgles, cracks wise, and just generally hooks you.

Euro synth duo, tuneful and sometimes haunting, always droney fun‑-textured, beaty lines under an unnaturally high-voiced girly-woman singing lyrics of no importance when you can make them out, which isn't often.

[I'm] prouder, frankly, when this likable size 12 lets her voice crack all over the big fat scarewords "feminist" and "sexism" on an album that gets dissed for its simplistic songwriting as if that wasn't the point.

The musical craft on this almost sampleless album is so even-keeled that there's no song here as forgettable as "There Will Be Tears" or "Dust" either.

Sometimes we believe we care, what happens in the tuneful drywall of her shambling dreams.

Bouncing off each other like loaded dice, they could make you cry once you're away long enough to think about it.

Their seventh album opens with a simulated big-pop anthem and maintains that size and momentum without compromising their ability to play the new songs live.

Six songs-with-lyrics, each with its own vocal signature although there's not a proper singer to be heard, and six instrumentals, some straight and some avant and one a loving yet crudely irreverent "Take Five" cover, converge toward the same goal: demolishing your musical illusions.

Elsewhere it's just sweet sensation. Succumb‑-succumb.

Soon Hammond's "You Smoke Too Much" is fitting right in. As together as can be expected, and as Miller requests with a hint of desperation, "Please Hold On While the Train Is Moving."

This isn't up to The Fame or The Fame Monster. But both of those keep growing, and with its mad momentum and nutty thematics, this one could too--despite being laid down on tour trailed by 28 semis.

Their quietest and most fragile album is also their most orchestrated.