Hope is brought together by Pemberton's distinct vocal style and lyrics, which perfectly capture the disaffected, post-millennial, iPod-DJ, over-tweeted, quarter-life-crisis condition.

A couple of lifeless slower numbers bring the album to a crawl midway through, but they ultimately add balance to all the smart, uptempo rockers.

Once you get over the lack of choruses, you'll find a very solid, satisfying melodic techno album.

Garbage still have a knack for placing sticky hooks behind walls of guitar sheen, but when they slow down on Beloved Freak and the title track ballad, the results get a bit cringy.

he best songs on Rize Of The Fenix address that real-life redemption story....Still, it's hard to ignore the fact that the joke is kind of stale.

I Predict A Graceful Expulsion is not only immediately accessible, but also rich and nuanced enough to survive repeated listens.

At times it feels like she's stuck in one gear, but her energy refreshingly and irresistibly recalls the un-cynical era of old-school breakbeat and hip-house.

Killer Mike is the Jäger shot of rap: efficient, acrid and totally devastating.

The results turn out to be lifeless instead of uplifting and accessible as they'd hoped.

Ufabulum won't blow the mind of anyone familiar with his work, but it's a decent entry point for new fans and a very satisfying collection of light-hearted left-field dance music.

Brazen Bull is a cohesive, if lengthy, album that offers only occasional audio reminders of who was behind the board.

Just 30 minutes long, Castlemusic demands repeated listens.

Tillman's voice sounds sublime delivering lyrics about sexy graveyard encounters, ex-girlfriends and the dark side of California living.

It's not particularly deep, but it's energetic, buoyant, fun and more than a little infectious.

The results are surprisingly engrossing.

Bloom is consistent in quality, and there isn't a single bad song. It just feels like they spent too much time worrying about production and not enough time songwriting.

As always, the main appeal lies in how honest and real it all feels.

It's intentionally confounding and endlessly ambitious, but also eminently listenable.

While Adventures In Your Own Backyard can't be described as instantly catchy, its songs wend their way into your memory as if you've always known them.

On Electra Heart, Diamandis trades her cabaret post-punk vocal histrionics and thrift-store chic for an unconvincing Jacqueline Susann bombshell image and more overtly top-40-friendly sound.

Little Broken Hearts is held back by a lack of intimacy and the unemotional stiffness we associate with Jones. Still, it's almost a great album.

Pluto nicely refreshes current rap trends and offers some genuinely forward-thinking hooks.

Mr. Impossible is easily Black Dice's most accessible album yet, but that's not saying much. It's still very uneasy listening.

If Kill For Love doesn't make you a Chromatics believer, nothing will.

Despite the limited instrumentation, arrangements are thoughtful, and the 10 songs build slowly and hypnotically through repetition. Just when a sameness begins to set in, a handful of tunes near the end ... tip us off to the fact that we've glimpsed just a fraction of Mares of Thrace's capabilities.

There's tons of potential here, even if the disc feels like a work in progress.

My Make-Believe is a refined continuation of Santi's dubby, militarized, post-punk experimentation.

There are a few moments when Auerbach's production touches threaten to distract from the grooves, but the overall quality is so impressively high that the occasional misstep is quickly forgotten.