Overall, it reads like a look through some stranger's photo album-- there are a lot incredible images contained within it, but there are also a few embarrassing shots and the occasional moment in time that isn't framed quite right.

When measured against Four Tet's prior output, this latest effort does come as something of a disappointment; but by most other yardsticks, it's downright brilliant.

Fantasma offers a better introduction to Songs: Ohia than the last couple of proper albums.

A maddeningly spacy, fairly inconsistent, but very rich set of songs that capitalize on the leftover space from guitarist Gibb Slife's departure.

Gold comes off as clean, shiny, and over-the-top as Elliott Smith's XO, replete with strings, horns, and female backup singers. I double-checked the credits. Jon Brion wasn't listed.

Granted, a few tracks here require perhaps too much patience, or never peak as one might expect, or are overburdened with sound. But even these lesser tracks contain the simple, yet stunning affirmations that make Pierce so engaging.

A testament to the influences of their youth; echoes of Lennon and McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel, Nick Drake, and Fairport Convention glide through the album before tiptoeing into a corner and reappearing a few tracks later.

A perfect party. A perfect soundtrack to your perfect party. You'll sleep like a baby, and inevitably wake to realize that Change Is Coming doesn't play so well by the light of day.

Much of Rain on Lens sounds remarkably detached, and the end result is an album that, while musically excellent, lacks the impact of the pre-parentheses days.

Part vibraphone-laden, Chicago-style post-rock, part electronic minimalism, and part pure melodic exploration, Happiness occasionally manages to slip into an immensely blissful groove.

The true beauty of Clinic is that they have, using a relatively standard rock vocabulary, constructed a truly distinctive, energetic, and magnetically appealing sound.

It helps that Labor Days is as terrific a record as anyone could ask for, really, and you should buy it.

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.

Though their approach hasn't changed from the radically orchestral turn of 1998's Deserter's Songs, these songs are far more personal than their last set.

A worthy, but occasionally frustrating album...

Wonderland takes the sound of that last album and pumps it full of the energy that dripped from the band's previous releases, resulting in a record that can oddly be both fragile, danceable, and anthemic all at the same time.

Yes, Mink Car is crap. All the charms They Might Be Giants once seemed to possess have dissipated into a cloud of embarrassing awkwardness.

The Blueprint is possibly the least sonically inventive hip-hop chart topper in years-- stunning and captivating for sure, but still loungily comfortable enough to sleep to.

The Coast is Never Clear sounds a lot like its predecessor, but it lacks the originality and heartfelt delivery that won When Your Heartstrings Break a constant presence in so many disc players a couple summers back.

In ten years, you'll be mistaking their superficial work here for the Chemical Brothers, Crystal Method, or Fatboy Slim's big-beat bullshit.

A fairly nice little slab of French Anglo-pop, and pleasant reading accompaniment if you can reach the skip button from where you're sitting.

The Butthole Surfers have finally become shocking only in their sheer banality, like a watered-down mix of the worst Beck and Perry Farrell material you can imagine.

The most focused Sparklehorse effort yet, the album flows along with the grace of a river occasionally stirred by a rapid or two.

All This Sounds Gas might not have been such a weak effort if Kannberg's lyrics actually had anything to say, but nonsense prose has never meshed well with lush, jangly alterna-rock.

With its illusory, ethereal production, wistful melodies, and oft-funereal pace, this is one of those rare albums that can completely absorb you in such a way as to almost dissolve the world around you, and make you feel like you've been transported to another realm of existence within the course of 58 minutes.

While undeniably beautiful, Vespertine fails to give electronic music the forward push it received on Björk's preceding albums. Rather than designing sounds never before imagined, the album merely sounds current, relying on the technology of standard studio software and the explorations of the Powerbook elite.... Still, Vespertine makes for an intriguing listen, and manages to hold its own after hours on repeat.

Lupine Howl essentially take the bluesiest moments of past Spiritualized records and use them as the starting point for their sound, placing the emphasis on gritty rock rave-ups, and adding another Marshall to the stack for every orchestra member Pierce hired for Let It Come Down.

Getaway sounds remarkably youthful, split between brief, upbeat rockers, and longer, more meditative swaths of noisy psych.