Though he's still not the best rapper (his refusal to abide by traditional rhyme schemes will be frustrating to purists) he's made great strides here and is helped along by a NYC underground producer showcase.

The key to Dagdrøm's daunting mystique: You're never really sure if what you're hearing is the calm before the storm or the storm before the calm.

Sloppiness has crept into their once-perfect attack, and there is a certain any-era-of-modern-rock, unstuck-in-time vibe to the production choices and songwriting.

True, a thematically consistent whole, sounds like the product of a lovingly forged artistic bond.

On Reservation, Angel Haze shows herself to be the rare rapper who has copped a great deal of contemporary popular hip-hop and R&B and come out the other side as purely herself.

Like Hardcore, A Wrenched Virile Lore features 10 tracks, though it only references eight of the originals. However, even the mixes that draw from the same songs are different enough in approach and sequenced in such a way that the reappearances feel like purposeful reprises.

Unlike the meticulously pleasant Songs for Christmas, which more or less sounds exactly like what a casual fan (or detractor) might expect a Sufjan Stevens Christmas box set to sound like, the music inside Silver & Gold can be as downright strange as its accompanying accessories.

The Alchemist's beats on Rare Chandeliers are perfectly good, but they do little to amplify Bronson's character.

The measurable failure is the album's music. On a track-by-track basis, the songs make for dull labor, not worth our time and not befitting Rihanna's talent.

There's a sense of discovery to Quarter Turns Over a Living Line, with Andrews and Halstead unveiling the slow evolution of their sound over its 40-minute runtime.

If you simply want a rap album that will inspire all-caps quote sprees on Twitter or hourlong Gchat exchanges with your fellow microphone fiends, it really doesn't get any better than Reloaded.

Times changed; Dntel, less so. Aimlessness, his third album of new material, arrives without context, scene, or convenient narrative.

For the second time in one year, both on a large label and on their own, they've released a record ruthless and rewarding enough to animate that image.

Feed Me Diamonds is best, though, when it gets emotionally heady.

Appropriately named, Movement feels like a progression and challenge from one of the year's most exciting new voices, producers, and composers.

The problem is that the strangely smug We Don't Even Live Here feels more like P.O.S. preaching to the converted than attempting to make a believer out of anyone, lacking any palpable resistance necessary to justify the constant underdog pose.

Ghost demonstrates well enough Ferreira's versatility, certainly her stylishness, but even more than those, it shows her empathy.

The Odds is, in every way, the product of scaling down operations rather than of giving up or throwing the fans a nostalgia trip. It's fair to say that the Evens have set their target low and close; you could also call that intimacy.

Pale Fire doesn't command your attention so much as wait patiently until it drifts into your view and then goes away.

Right now Sequitur feels like a step forward for a genre that could happily stay the same forever.

For all of the stylistic hopscotch being played, the individual songs on Nebula Dance cohere into an impressively solid whole.

As big and bold as it can sound, there's little here that's especially flashy or blatantly attention-seeking.

The group's first album since 1996 just sounds like the one they would've churned out in 1998.

Few can match their feel for arrangement or sense of structure.

The tracks themselves are, per Reznor and Ross's pedigrees, immaculately pieced together, richly detailed and suitably moody. Maandig, however, continues to stick out of this mix.... She still hits all the right notes, but brings a generic prettiness to her delivery that doesn't gel with the moody futurism going on around her.

He's no longer hiding in clever loops or layering. This sensual album suggests a producer at the height of his powers.

Despite its three-disc bulk, it exhumes too few buried-but-necessary takes and does little to illuminate what Isis did, why they did it, and what it all means.

Though imperfect, Hill's intensifying sonic clarity presents the Babies as a group that still believes in rock'n'roll as a powerful language, one that can help sort out mortal complexities and say something about the way we live.