It's a great trick of rearranging that pulls back the curtain dramatically, but nearly every other song on Midnight Boom seems to be waiting for this kind of moment, losing it to a pile on the cutting-room floor.

Orange Juice's debut You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever is beautiful because of its innocence, whereas Understated is bruised by the many experiences that came afterward. It's no lesser record for it, just one that feels like a part in the purging process rather than a place where Collins feels fully at ease.

MellowHigh is not disorienting but rather frighteningly familiar.

Nothing much happens in The Soul Is Quick--it's possible to wander in and out, picking up a thread you left dangling a few minutes before. That's where Willner excels, in creating these supple moments where you can get totally enveloped in what he's doing, or check out from the world for a while, or just leave him running in the background and marvel at how slowly he moves through time when your focus returns to him.

Most of the time, they do a pretty good job.

At its best, Love Hates What You Become rattles with perfect intensity. Roberts’ sawtooth snarl is commanding, while John Congleton’s production is hyper-attentive to shifting moods, pulling back to sparse piano or pushing into total distortion as needed.

This is pop music made with synthesizers, but it's not what you'd call normally synth-pop--even when Diamonds builds his minimalist beats into proper grooves, the songs are tense and twitchy.

The four songs are pleasant enough, but in comparison to the unruly sounds on Live in San Francisco, it feels like a bit of an afterthought.

There's a sharp contrast between the twin peaks of Coracle and the rest of its material, especially when they try to pointlessly channel Spacemen 3 circa "Honey" and shackle that sound to some perfunctory beats on "Ecstatic Truth".

So it's not the jaw-dropping affirmation of the Posies' non-break-up that we might have hoped for, but Every Kind of Light is ultimately a decent record spiked with a few classic moments of patent posies pop ecstasy.

How can I is not as thematically coherent or straight-up enjoyable as IF U WANT IT, but it is considerably more inspiring in its experimentation—a challenge, perhaps, to a house-music scene too happy in stasis.

The Century of Self turns out to be every bit as stubborn as its predecessors, even as it goes a certain way towards justifying them.

One could hardly expect a three-disc set of Low's castoffs, demos and flipsides to dazzle.

This is an album's album, magnetic over the long haul, as Raposa's careful, nuanced tension between placidity and chaos accrues force.

Had Cult of Luna attempted to make the same record six times during the last decade, maybe they would have condensed it into a tight 30 minutes by now. That would be neither captivating nor interesting, though, and Vertikal is quite often both.

Its introspection and chest-thumping are just enough to keep the stakes reasonably high.

Sundark and Riverlight is like the thumbnail version: everything compressed, details lost.

Joey too often comes out looking like someone who’s already grown weary of the system, an 18-year-old curmudgeon, a sharp contrast with the energy that 1999 promised.

When the production is as over the top as Peck himself, it can be easy to excuse—if not quite ignore—these affectations, but whenever he’s relatively unadorned, as on “Let Me Drown” and “City of Gold,” his unsteady, amelodic quaver is difficult to ignore. All these tics were on Pony, too, yet there they added to the charm. Here, as part of a grander spectacle, they become a distraction—a nagging element that keeps Bronco feeling earthbound.

NY's Finest, Pete Rock's fourth proper solo album since 1998, has just enough comfortable tricks for the one of the grand old men of 1990s New York production to maintain warm feelings.

The consistency of Solex material is potentially the agent of its own downfall. Play Solex vs. the Hitmeister after Low Kick and Hard Bop and you might think that they were recorded at the same time, rather than four years apart.

If Magic revisits the subject matter of previous career crests, it unfortunately recalls "The Rising" in its sound: Brendan O'Brien returns to the producer's seat, once again shuffling most of the E Street Band to the music's margins and focusing his attention squarely on the Boss.

If you've ever wanted to hear classic cuts from the dawn of hip hop turned into hallucinogenic setpieces that knock and clang like glitched-up King Tubby, Echo Party should justify whatever the hell it is Edan's been doing with his time over the past four years.

The Love Invention introduces “Alison Goldfrapp, house diva,” a pivot she doesn’t totally sell. ... The record’s best moments are its quietest.

The artistry of her voice lies in those moments of versatility and charisma, but they’re too isolated across Joyride to land with the kind of impact they deserve.

Plants and Animals have created something beautiful, even if it's not wholly original.

Planet’s Mad careens through its bungled cyber narrative, tingling and whirring, daring you not to take it seriously. The planet warms, the pop stars reel, and we’re still trying to dance.

If It Feels So Good When I Stop expands his abilities as a writer, it'd be at least interesting to hear a record of his that does the same for his skills as a musician.