At its best, Have Fun With God works well as an experiment and as a listening puzzle to work through.

Even at it’s best, TWFB is mostly just a well-crafted collection of genre exercises; a few too many tracks, like the motorik double whammy of “Das Selbstgespräch” and “Idee, Prozess, Ergebnis” and the ironically-titled “A New Direction”, are standard-issue deep cuts that offer little in the way of surprise.

There is not a single second of new or unreleased music waiting for you inside this handsomely designed object.... His three studio albums have settled into cultural totems, albums that anyone hoping to know something about rock history buys sooner or later. Even 40-odd years later, their thumbprint remains unique, a strange and compelling mix of timeless poetic melancholy on the one hand, and cloistered, pampered schoolboy modernity on the other.

Fabriclive 73 is complex and confrontational but resolutely unshowy, an honest indication of the kind of pummeling 3am set you would have heard McAuley bang out over the past 18 months; all told, a worthy completion of the Hessle triptych and an excellent standalone in its own right.

They try to create atmosphere in an airlock, lumbering instead of fostering groove, failing to generate any heat or friction as nearly every interesting turn on these songs happens within the first minute.

With its deliberate, languorous pleasures, this is an album to live with, settle with and be crisply rejuvenated by.

Musically, Strong Feelings reiterates Constant Companion, which is fine, because it’s a good formula and Paisley’s songs are stronger this time.

s an aural analgesic, it goes down smooth and numbs what it needs to. But instead of tearing open the passageway between this world and whatever lies beyond, it shrinks that portal to the size of a keyhole.

The album is less concerned with asserting a specific worldview than examining the difficulties of keeping one’s moral compass steady in a society that’s becoming ever-more indifferent to the things you value--and how one must remain all the more resolute once kids enter the picture.

Mogwai’s cautionary approach all but drowns out the faint echoes of the once brave band struggling to get out from within.

Alternate/Endings is tempting, smart, and raw enough to make me wish he'd set up camp somewhere more permanent.

These songs sound full and finished even in their austerity.

The intimate nature of Has God Seen My Shadow? thus illuminates those qualities that often get overlooked in Lanegan’s high-profile pairings: his grace, tenderness, and self-deprecating sense of humour.

Throughout Static, Big Ups come across as a band in complete command of their sound, fronted by a guy on the verge of losing it.

A record whose middling between arena aspirations and headphones listening feels less of a fusion and more of a compromise.

The four new songs here are less blank than the four on the first, if only marginally.

For a "studio experiment," it's exceptionally listenable.

Hidden World is the work of a band that sounds much older and more assured than it should.

Give the People What They Want is a pretty short 10 songs, though its breezy half-hour leaves plenty that sticks and plenty more worth revisiting when it doesn't.

Between the carefully plotted reference points and the not-exactly-gripping lyrics, Forever tends to run together over the course of its 39-minute runtime. Still, taken song-for-song, there's no shortage of takeaways.

As a proper third album, Marci Beaucoup doesn't stack up to its precursors, but as an advertisement for Marciano's services as a beatsmith, it's much more successful.

Blank Realm is still bent on mixing the diamonds with the rough, and on Grassed Inn that particular swirl is at its most intoxicating.

Until the Colours Run works just fine for an all-purpose wallow, but it’s simply too ponderous to be the galvanizing social commentary to which it aspires.

An unwelcome presence, Morello is simply the most obvious of many elements on High Hopes that just don’t work. It’s all the more unfortunate given that there are actually some redeemable songs here, along with some brief glimpses of Springsteen the rock'n'roll storyteller.

The pleasurably gnashing dissonance of Music for Shut-Ins' past/present collision suggests that the L.I.E.S. label's what's-next surprises are far from growing stale just yet.

Each of these tracks is indeed summery in its own way, as is most of There’s a Dream. But there’s one thing that neither this collection nor Hazlewood ever forgets: The brightest sun always casts the darkest shade.

At the heart of his music is still an inimitable bittersweetness—the light shrug that follows the realization that in time all things will die and pass. His best songs have always felt like ballads, regardless of tempo. There are some of those songs here.

Beyoncé seized the powers of a medium characterized by its short attention span to force the world to pay attention. Leave it to the posterchild of convention to brush convention aside and leave both sides feeling victorious.