Though Madlib's restless joi de vivre keeps Beat Konducta moving at a quick clip... the lack of MC firepower considerably limits its real-life enjoyability.

The fact that this dorkiness has enveloped a few usually-on-point guests (MF Doom, Mr. Lif & Akrobatik, DJ Shadow) is unfortunate enough; that it's being perpetrated by two MCs who've been consistently great since the early- to mid-90s just makes it more frustrating.

I'd never wanted Calexico to change, but the new direction suits them well, proving that even in the face of radical metamorphosis, they remain as stunning and distinctive as ever.

Pl3dge is constructed simply as a sturdy platform for one of rap's fiercest and most incisive voices, and it achieves that goal completely.

Ward's real saving grace on Parodia Flare is the guitar, which he utilizes in unexpectedly welcome ways to propel his compositions, keeping them from dissolving into murky keyboard washes.

Everything Wrong Is Imaginary never quite feels like the career-culminating record it should be.

At four songs, Ringer is economical, but the diversity within its half-hour run time makes it surprisingly robust as well.

Bits is streaked with irreverence, whether for C&W formality (the intuitively simple melodies of 'Featherbeds' and 'Young Love Delivers'), instrumental tightness (at times, they can make No Age sound like the Famous Flames) or lyrical artifice.

That kind of less-is-more approach, where all the clutter is shaved down to a paper-thin framework, is where Ices produces her most affecting material, potentially sketching out a new strain of inspiration for her to follow next time out.

Like its predecessors, Dodge and Burn can leave you wishing for more interaction between the two leads--the duets are always the highlight of any given Dead Weather record, the moment when all that simmering tension boils over. But Mosshart once again handles the heavy vocal lifting with menace to spare.

Her voice, raspy and harsh against the gently ringing acoustic guitar, makes you expect a gloomy, even maudlin disc. But that can distract from what makes it great: its ambiguity, the way she expresses herself in such strangely personal terms yet never settles on an emotional tone.

The music offers few surprises this go around, relying instead of the tried-and-true guitar arpeggios, atmospheric noises and orchestral, rainy-day crescendos.

A worthy, but occasionally frustrating album...

A maddeningly spacy, fairly inconsistent, but very rich set of songs that capitalize on the leftover space from guitarist Gibb Slife's departure.

Wonderland takes the sound of that last album and pumps it full of the energy that dripped from the band's previous releases, resulting in a record that can oddly be both fragile, danceable, and anthemic all at the same time.

As a whole, Have a Nice Life stands as a decent collection of songs that, while palatable, casually floats by in a sea of average beats by Jesse Shatkin, who produced much of the album.

The music is infinitely interesting, possibly more so than the artist singing it. But then again, you shouldn’t count out anyone releasing an album like Nightride.

Their 10th album, Medicine at Midnight, adds very little to their extensive catalog of interchangeable power pop and hard-rock sing-alongs. But you can’t hang them on their own music, because Foo Fighters would never dare to give you enough rope to do it.

More color-by-numbers post punk that uses too many grays and not enough pure blacks.

Morningside is what happens when a bedroom pop record gets too big for just a single room, but all the while never loses its intimacy.

There is no pretense in their simple arrangements, but you can hear their motor revving, and you know they'll never run out of gas.

Sunflower Bean are excellent song-crafters with a blurry point of view. But there’s some new dimension here that makes the band more than just parrots of politics and sound.

Despite their comfortable distance from the industry machine they came up in, Aly & AJ still gravitate toward brightly-colored, big-hearted pop: an old-fashioned stance that dulls the shine of their new direction.

The album as a whole is more suited for seated, solitary brooding than for anything as lively as moving your body.

As it is, the album feels slightly cluttered by a surfeit of dry minutiae that calls for a cutting room floor of its own.

Not the Actual Events turns out to be so slight, at just five tracks with no dramatic shift in form. It’s the least essential non-instrumental album the band has released.

On When I See the Sun, they seem to want to prove they also recognize great songwriting, and it turns out they not only have impeccable taste, they also have an instinctive understanding of the type of songs that tend to increase in mystery and intimacy when swaddled in an impenetrable fog of guitars.

Matched to this sophisticated, admirably restrained music, Turner's Submarine songs have a backwards-looking quality, a guy who's been through it calmly reexamining the scars and renavigating the pitfalls.