While The Fool doesn't fully capture their brain-melded performances, it's a worthy simulacrum.

North is definitely Hyperdub's most pop-friendly release, but it's also one of its most conservative-- not a bad thing, just an interesting one given the importance label integrity plays in the electronic dance music world.

The particulars of the feelings evoked here will vary from one set of ears to another, but above all, Knoxville offers an opportunity to lose yourself in a rush of highly detailed and overpowering sound. And the spaces it builds come across as beautiful and celebratory, no matter how crazy things get.

Given the history he's forged with them and Ponytail, Wong likely won't sit still for long, and even the most rigid parts of Infinite Love suggest he's got a lot more ideas to draw on.

It's a good album, and without the pressure of making it under the Roxy Music name, Ferry has made a confident and remarkably fresh-sounding record simply by doing what he's done best for over three decades.

Incidentally, this is what the title Innundir Skinni translates to loosely in English-- "under the skin"-- an apt description for Arnalds' gentle, peculiar and powerful music itself.

Down There is less accessible than latter-day Animal Collective and harder to wrap your head around, but it isn't a callback to the more difficult sound that marked the band early on.

As is the case on most of the album, Hill's distorted vocals can sometimes seem like an afterthought, but perhaps they are intended to be just one of the many ingredients squashed into the album's vibrant mixture, to be heard as one final act of creation-through-destruction.

His latest album, a collaboration with the saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and the violinist Ros Stephen, is again evasive, seeming at once defiantly old-fashioned and defiantly quirky.

With that title, Songs for Singles practically announces itself as a stopgap release, a breather after the breakthrough. If it doesn't shake the earth the way Meanderthal did, it's not really supposed to. But the EP does show that this band remains in fine working condition, and another full-on album from these guys would be a welcome thing indeed. Until then, this will do just fine.

That stuff was fun on their debut, 2002's Thought for Food, but today those easy jokes seem like a waste of their skills. Better to seek out the greater mystery of those weird and splendiferous sounds, and those voices that seem so close and so unknowable in the same breath.

Write About Love is a grower -- the sort of record you need to play repeatedly, listening to how it fits together, before it can really ingratiate itself.

Such an ambitious sophomore outing is a lot to take in, but with its blend of live drumming, textural guitars, skittering electronics, and wistful harmonies, it's worth braving Jojo's, uh, storm.

Hurricane is classic Jones.

United Nations of Sound arrives with a Sunday-school sermon's worth of resurrection rhetoric that conflates Ashcroft's return with that of J.C. himself.

Is Collins fully recovered? Overlooking his ongoing physical struggles and instead focusing on Losing Sleep, the answer must be a resounding and inspiring yes.

Outside of its immediate context, Lights is a sometimes great, always promising debut. It's an album about leaving home, and it works best when the contrast between the folk singer and the pop production chimes with the tensions between the pull of home and the allure of the city.

We Can't Fly's stylistic knuckleballs lack just about everything we'd grown to love about Aeroplane: namely luxurious grooves and effortless cool.

It can't be said that Senior fails to meet its modest wallpaper-ish aims, yet it hardly represents the best Royksopp has to offer.

Earth vs. the Pipettes sounds like not just a different group, not just a lesser group but, in sadly off-putting ways, almost an opposite group.

Blues is as thoughtfully and carefully constructed as either of Matsson's albums, revealing the nuances of his sound and subtly putting the lie to the notion that he needs anything besides his weathered voice and beat-up guitar.

Maybe Funstyle will be liberating for her; maybe, as with Self Portrait, her deck-clearing exercise will let her shake off aspects of the way she's understood that she finds burdensome. At the very least, it's a shrewd way to lower expectations. After this, whatever she does next can only be a pleasant surprise.

Love Remains, because of its construction, feels like music that comes from inside, as if the act of listening completes it.

Without much variety to spice it up, the overall sluggardly pace is energy-sapping. An album of the sort of tracks on which Eskmo earned his reputation might not have gone amiss before he ventured a more songwriterly statement, but there's no reason he can't regroup and pull that off yet.

As important questions about music's worth in the age of free continue to swirl around him, Sufjan's still combating instant-gratification culture the best way he knows how.

Wayne has already done better versions of almost every song on I Am Not a Human Being, which was released on his 28th birthday last week. It's not exactly what we're looking for now.

Swanlights might be Antony's richest album yet, with musical and thematic charms that take their time to take their hold.

it's still not quite as successful as the Orb's classic material, and a little too subdued, lacking both the goofy sampleadelic grandeur and the ear-grabbing pop pulse of the Ultraworld era. But it's still the most focused and listenable Orb album in years.