They don't sound like a mélange of other bands anymore; they sound like Early Graves, and that's a damn good band to sound like in 2012.

Read is full of great, idiosyncratic house tracks and Jummy is packed with them.

Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors is on the one hand a genre-busting statement of artistic restlessness but it's also a mess.

Hill's work is steadily gaining its own hue, and this album is a step toward a recognizable Umberto sound that won't instantly be tagged with all the influences he so adores.

It has a facing-the-beast quality of a punishing spiritual quest, as if Elverum steeled himself and left his house at midnight, barefoot, and just kept walking.

At its best, this music feeds into a similar sentiment, pushing close to the kind of deep introspection at the heart of Jarmusch's films.

On the whole, it's more entertaining than resonant.

As a stylistic culmination of sorts, Vanitas is a fine place to start.

For contemporary metal fans, Lights Out might sound more like Wolfmother--or a supercharged version of the Black Crowes--than an actual metal record.

With Lovelessness, Bison B.C. prove that rudimentary doesn't mean uninteresting or trendy.

It all sounds so serious without any real reason for it.

While Grace/Confusion may lean too heavily on Hawk's production, it's a hair better than Player Piano. But it's hard to call it an "improvement" or "progression" considering it's hardly outside the scope of what Memory Tapes has done so far.

Shifty Adventures feels more like a collection of gadgets than songs.

Kin is not an assertive album, nor is it surprising, but it's as solid an aesthetic as you can expect of two artists mostly new to this genre.

Mellon Collie is a Smashing Pumpkins record that just so happens to be 28 songs in length, stunning in both its stylistic range and overall excellence.

Connected is far from being the first record to make a virtue out of spinning in place, but there's a discipline and control here that's rarely heard, a feeling of two musicians utterly dominating their craft.

If Butler falls slightly short of convincing that this particular brand of old will be made new again, it remains hard to find fault with his survey of all the fun we could have had.

Everyone on the album sounds engaged and happy to be in the room.

"New Day" has a transformative effect within the album, whose middle is as strong as any sequence of songs Keys has recorded.

The question that all improvisers have to answer is whether something you play once can be worth listening to more than once. Experience and forethought ease the answer toward yes, and Drumm has both at his command.

While Pangaea and Hessle's peers have resorted to mealy, house-music gruel (Hotflush) and thinly veiled populism (Hyperdub), Release offers willful, self-conscious antagonism of the purest variety.

As much as it can sound like it stands alone, Bish Bosch is part of a tradition of music that tried to find new ways to articulate that same old misery.

These are dance songs so strident that no one could ever hope to move to them, pop songs so thin that no one could choose lines worth singing along to, rap verses so fumbly that practically anyone could rewrite them and make them better.

While each song could pass for a portion of a larger jam, they all get to the point rapidly.

A lot of what's here doesn't really demonstrate what they can do to Philip Glass, but what Philip Glass has already done to them.

Allah-Las are ultimately preoccupied with sound above all else. So long as there are 12-string guitars, four-piece drumkits, and lots and lots of reverb, the rest of the world can go away.

Frankly [add-ons would] just be a distraction from the underlying theme that becomes clear once you get absorbed into the music, which is that Blue Lines is still Blue Lines, and most of the world is still trying to catch up to it.

It's an enjoyable detour, one that affirms how well these producers have honed their approaches to sound.