Eternal Turn of the Wheel is as captivating as most any stretch of black metal you'll hear this year, even if it possesses a lifetime of questions that deserve to be asked.

Port of Morrow doesn't sound like it belongs to any particular decade or style, instead hopping around like some fully loaded AM radio dial that cranks out gem after gem.

Valentina is essentially Gedge and his current sidemen doing a very solid impression of the Wedding Present as they were circa 1990.

After spending 15 minutes sounding like preordained headliners, Tribes trudge through half an hour of perfunctorily composed and performed verses and choruses that are all too deniable.

Frying on This Rock mostly finds White Hills with their freak flags hoisted well above half mast, with any and all overtures toward coherence obscured by billowing clouds of feedback.

It's one of the least distinctive things he's put his name on, a step backward into Southern-rap exercises that point you away from K.R.I.T.'s music and toward his heroes.

Framing Pretty Ugly as a broken-beat album helps account for its pleasures, but can't entirely absolve its pitfalls, perhaps because much of what is true for funky remains true for broken beat, namely, that the flight into syncopation should not be heedless.

Form & Control immediately shows the band's strengths and their weakness: It's a smooth, utterly precise study of the formal elements that make disco and electro-pop tick, but with far too little of the body heat that actually gets that stuff going.

It is a wearying listen, overcrowded and too loud and too harsh, and to engage actively with it is to feel your knuckles whiten with effort.

Between the innocuously rambly music, Fite's toned-down vocal mannerisms, and this pencils-up-the-nose persona, Ain't is a record that's hard to dislike, but nearly impossible to imagine loving.

The record functions as a well-executed sampler of the magnified pain and horror we've come to expect from this band.

The Chap couch this darker subject matter in their sleekest, most elegantly crafted songs to date, wherein the influence of pop's reigning sardonicists, Steely Dan, becomes as much musical as it has always been spiritual.

Music that's both haunting and life-affirming, something to make you dream and think.

We All Raise Our Voices to the Air sounds less like a tour document than a greatest hits, struggling to sum up the band's career and find some new direction forward.

10 tracks of the kind of fierce, instrumental, no-bullshit techno that was as left-field popular in 1988 as 1998 as 2008. It's often witty, with a kind of robots-running-amok charm, and always attention-grabbing, at least in small doses. But friendly it ain't.

Too much of it drifts into generic 1960s-nodding garage-rock territory.

After these frontloaded highlights [Andrew in Drag, God Wants Us to Wait], it doesn't take long for Love at the Bottom of the Sea to become a rain-boot-worthy slog through water-logged mid-tempo material.

Tyga isn't a gifted lyricist, but he has a few key things going in his favor: a workmanlike ability to ride a beat, a solid singing voice, and a great ear for melody.

Milk Famous falters by creating an Uncanny Valley effect by adopting the most easily replicable aspects [of Spoon's sound] without maintaining any sort of human element or offering anything that's identifiable as their own.

The Clearing feels lovingly erected, fashioned bit by bit.

The communal, freewheeling looseness is one of the album's greatest assets, as you feel as if you were a party to the making of the record in Eagle Bay, too.

The production isn't a disaster, but most of the stylistic flourishes can feel gimmicky or, at worst, like dry history lessons... There's also the tugging sense that Springsteen and Aniello are trying to cover up some of the album's lackluster songwriting.

Never Ending Nights contains just enough detail to save it from pastiche and in doing so offers a glimpse into Willner's influences.

A Victim of Stars doesn't offer much to anyone already immersed in that world. For everyone else this is an engaging scratch at the surface of a wide-open mind.

Most tracks here make no bones about aiming straight for the radio. Choruses are airy and open, melodies are sticky and straightforward and tend to lodge in your head with or without your approval.

It all amounts to a constructed world that sounds outré at first but winds up being a startlingly astute reflection of our own as you settle into it.

Open Your Heart is smartly sequenced to metabolize genre and morph like a masterful DJ mix, subtly rationing out its true peaks even while seemingly going full-throttle throughout.