While Grace/Confusion may lean too heavily on Hawk's production, it's a hair better than Player Piano. But it's hard to call it an "improvement" or "progression" considering it's hardly outside the scope of what Memory Tapes has done so far.

Shifty Adventures feels more like a collection of gadgets than songs.

Kin is not an assertive album, nor is it surprising, but it's as solid an aesthetic as you can expect of two artists mostly new to this genre.

Mellon Collie is a Smashing Pumpkins record that just so happens to be 28 songs in length, stunning in both its stylistic range and overall excellence.

Connected is far from being the first record to make a virtue out of spinning in place, but there's a discipline and control here that's rarely heard, a feeling of two musicians utterly dominating their craft.

If Butler falls slightly short of convincing that this particular brand of old will be made new again, it remains hard to find fault with his survey of all the fun we could have had.

Everyone on the album sounds engaged and happy to be in the room.

"New Day" has a transformative effect within the album, whose middle is as strong as any sequence of songs Keys has recorded.

The question that all improvisers have to answer is whether something you play once can be worth listening to more than once. Experience and forethought ease the answer toward yes, and Drumm has both at his command.

While Pangaea and Hessle's peers have resorted to mealy, house-music gruel (Hotflush) and thinly veiled populism (Hyperdub), Release offers willful, self-conscious antagonism of the purest variety.

As much as it can sound like it stands alone, Bish Bosch is part of a tradition of music that tried to find new ways to articulate that same old misery.

These are dance songs so strident that no one could ever hope to move to them, pop songs so thin that no one could choose lines worth singing along to, rap verses so fumbly that practically anyone could rewrite them and make them better.

While each song could pass for a portion of a larger jam, they all get to the point rapidly.

A lot of what's here doesn't really demonstrate what they can do to Philip Glass, but what Philip Glass has already done to them.

Allah-Las are ultimately preoccupied with sound above all else. So long as there are 12-string guitars, four-piece drumkits, and lots and lots of reverb, the rest of the world can go away.

Frankly [add-ons would] just be a distraction from the underlying theme that becomes clear once you get absorbed into the music, which is that Blue Lines is still Blue Lines, and most of the world is still trying to catch up to it.

It's an enjoyable detour, one that affirms how well these producers have honed their approaches to sound.

The dozen takes are every bit as crafted as those on Kylesa's increasingly excellent five studio albums, with tones both enormous and exploratory and vocals both large and enthusiastic.

There is dark humor and interesting angles--even joy--to be found in basic realities and mundane commitments.

Though he's still not the best rapper (his refusal to abide by traditional rhyme schemes will be frustrating to purists) he's made great strides here and is helped along by a NYC underground producer showcase.

The key to Dagdrøm's daunting mystique: You're never really sure if what you're hearing is the calm before the storm or the storm before the calm.

Sloppiness has crept into their once-perfect attack, and there is a certain any-era-of-modern-rock, unstuck-in-time vibe to the production choices and songwriting.

True, a thematically consistent whole, sounds like the product of a lovingly forged artistic bond.

On Reservation, Angel Haze shows herself to be the rare rapper who has copped a great deal of contemporary popular hip-hop and R&B and come out the other side as purely herself.

Like Hardcore, A Wrenched Virile Lore features 10 tracks, though it only references eight of the originals. However, even the mixes that draw from the same songs are different enough in approach and sequenced in such a way that the reappearances feel like purposeful reprises.

Unlike the meticulously pleasant Songs for Christmas, which more or less sounds exactly like what a casual fan (or detractor) might expect a Sufjan Stevens Christmas box set to sound like, the music inside Silver & Gold can be as downright strange as its accompanying accessories.

The Alchemist's beats on Rare Chandeliers are perfectly good, but they do little to amplify Bronson's character.

The measurable failure is the album's music. On a track-by-track basis, the songs make for dull labor, not worth our time and not befitting Rihanna's talent.