C.A.R. is an excellent, devastating record, a chronicle of the amiable pessimism and occasional nihilism of a rapping Bukowski who can't seem to find a way out of the condition in which he finds himself.

The seven songs on In Motion #1 were commissioned as alternate scores to seven short avant-garde films, and without those inspirations unspooling in front of the listener, there's a strange incompleteness to most of them.

Though often disjointed, when some of these fragments manage to really connect, it's hard not to imagine Supreme Cuts as being able to hit a decent stride in the future.

Even when they're digging into the grit of a country's flaws or society's problems, the synth-driven hooks can be outright jovial.

[Graceland] was unique in its total, and totally natural, synthesis of musical strains that turned out to be not nearly as different from each other as its listeners might have expected, and the result resonated strongly around the world and across generations.

It's nice to see that a band can organically develop its sound while still maintaining a home-grown sensibility.

When they wanted, Múm could already do abstractly affecting without also tipping into cloying sentimentality. But since the bulk of the compilation is so second-rate and saccharine, an obvious learning experience put on tape, Early Birds is inessential.

For its breadth and complexity, [Blur 21] actually tells a simple story: Blur are a band that did an astonishing amount of different things really, really well.

[The Merge reissues of Copper, Beaster, and FU:EL] are a wonderfully presented document of a punk legend [Bob Mould], starting over creatively and emotionally in a brief window he helped open, and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations.

There is still some great music on God Forgives, but it is somewhat overshadowed by higher-profile misfires.

Instead of justifying or summarizing two decades of work, Tyler and McDonnell set them aside and come up with a concise, lovely album that, like a gentle tourist, takes only pictures, leaves only footprints.

The paradox about them is this: With two people, Om sounded expansive; with more, they sound comparatively weak. The music is unmistakably theirs, but the intensity of it feels lost in the arrangements.

Hints of humor are often symbolized in Scholefield's artworks, but here they have an unbalancing effect, only serving to detract from the portentous musical renderings of the uneasy symbiosis between digital glitch and the natural world.

Country Funk re-creates this shift smartly, compiling songs by white artists playing with black sounds and black artists playing with white sounds, all without drawing neat parallels between these musical traditions.

If in the past [Fallon] managed to transform similar icons [Ginsberg, Van Morrison] into a communal mythology, here it too often sounds like regurgitation, as though the reference were an end in itself.

Even if this is an album that defies obvious lineage and needs a roadmap to uncover the specific sources from Joe Barrite's archive, there's an inescapable sense of emotional impact here.

Their self-titled debut EP for Warp and LuckyMe spans 16 minutes of some of the year's most brazen, positively huge hip-hop sounds.

In keeping with the album's title, Never is uncompromising and direct.

Tipped Bowls feels like a minor record, partially by design. It never grabs you by the throat. It never gives you something totally new to consider. It's also highly listenable, and has a way of slipping in through the side door that I admire.

Shrines is not about range, instead offering subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. You might think of the album as a sculpture, and each track offers a different vantage point... compulsively listenable.

Major's reliance on words rather than riffs doesn't quite feel as effective or unique in conveying its highness on life. It doesn't sound notably more polished or expensive than its predecessor, just more restrained.

The impeccable cool of Sadier's approach freezes out political engagement in lieu of a brand of fashionable leftism to match the sofa.

Anyone can manufacture hope through a slogan, but there's an empathy and humanity that simply can't be faked as Angelakos tries to figure out how to stay atop his life. It's hard to think of a more noble goal for a pop album.

The band acquits itself amazingly well, mixing in a few originals with a well-chosen selection of Golden Age songs, folk tunes, and Azmari troubadour songs.

It's hard not to think that Jackson would have made a better case for this music if he'd put together one blinding disc of stomping giants and polyrhythmic oddities, rather than padding things out with so many wannabes and never-could-bes.

It's best to turn off those imaginary filters when you pump Limbo, and just let it be as entertaining as it clearly wants to be.

The level on which Russian Roulette works best is experienced in a stoner's sound-design-obsessed bubble, where each crackle of a record and particular melodic line of a funk, fusion, soundtrack, or novelty sample seems to contain a cavernous importance simply for displacing air with sound.

This remastered Collection of Rarities is intriguing beyond its archival purposes, as it traces the evolution of an artist over the course of 11 years.