Hyperdrama is more impactful than Woman, but not quite as ostentatiously in-your-face as Audio, Video, Disco. The duo sound better for it.

As far as home-listening goes, Alpha is too inflexible to give a dynamic front-to-back experience. But that's not surprising: Alpha was made with DJs in mind. And on that level, the music has plenty to offer.

Like E+E's The Light That You Gave Me To See You, Egyptrixx's latest brings an element of the human and the mundane into his epic, depopulated landscapes. His harsher records were more impressive, but this one invites affection.

This album's been seven years in the making and it shows. Many of the songs, including most of the instrumentals, might've sounded fresh sometime back, but I find myself forgetting them as soon as they're played through.

Excerpts feels like a series of glimpses into Gast's world, where past full-lengths have been an unbroken wander through it.

Repeat listens don't reveal any deeper logic to its tracklist, which remains a collection of intriguing ideas and not much more.

Starfire won't get stuck in your head for days, but you could spend weeks unpacking it and still never quite get to the bottom of it.

You'll have to cherry-pick the best moments from Wonderful Frequency Band, but that's Justus Köhncke. He may bemuse you, but you can never write him off.

As with Exai, no major new ground is broken here, but when the landscape is this vast, fascinating and intractably alien, there's no need.

Thirteen tracks of relatively barebones 808 funk can star to wear, and especially moving at such a (relatively) slow tempo Transistor feels a little bloated by its last third.

At 43 minutes long, Human Energy is so dizzy and quick that it's hard to find your bearings. It makes for a fun, if exhausting, ride.

ESTOILE NAIANT is perfectly pleasant while it’s playing, but you might not remember it so well afterwards.

Caramel is a collection of half-finished songs that force you to fill in the blanks. It's just as frustrating and occasionally enlightening as that sounds.

Some of the best moments on Discreet Desires occur when she's flexing these unexpected songwriting chops.

As the white noise whooshes and the snares roll on Adrian Hour's "Make You Feel Good" (a track that was released on Toolroom four years ago), it's difficult not to sense an artist also drifting in the opposite direction, towards a sound that he'd struggle to call his own.

The melodies have their usual childlike playfulness, but not the haunting quality that's lent them so much mystery and depth in the past.

While some of its tracks were closer to completion than others when she died, the album overall still sounds unfinished.

Its banging moments are the best of Feldwick's career, but the album's dips into gentler territory are confusing drains on the momentum, lazy Sunday afternoon beat music for nerdy kids with oversized headphones.

With arena-size atmospherics and every sound endowed with a fathoms-deep dub delirium, Eight is an album as focused on its meticulous sound design as it is on the musicality.

Very little of Trickfinger could be called surprising, but it isn't without its charms.

This new U&I long player is a welcomed return to form and Leila's most gripping work to date.

There's no doubt you'll hear a lot of records in 2012 that sound like Whispers in the Dark, but you'll rarely hear it done this well.

Burn Slow isn't the most original or exciting work. But it's a thoughtful and personal album that allows Liebing to move beyond his techno reputation with grace.

The flatness of their construction, despite refreshingly warm undertones, means the songs easily collapse beneath the weight of Smith's carefully constructed persona, losing the plot on his apparent quest to let loose. Where they might blossom, the album's new cuts mostly bore holes into themselves.

Gibson's earlier work mixed pop mastery with genuine feeling. Actual Life 3 is the Hollywood remake, with not-quite-convincing lookalikes and a script laden with clichés.

Adult Contemporary might not break any new ground or present any radical ideas, but as the familiar saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Wraetlic has the lingering feeling of prematurity, offering snatches of brilliance too easily snuffed out by its own tendency to hide its features in the dark.

When Lantern hits its high points, it ends up somewhere in the stratosphere. When it falters, it's mostly because it's too ambitious, either thematically, as with the overblown love songs, or technically, as with the roller-coaster sequencing that halts the momentum over and over.

The reason that the DJ-Kicks series has remained relevant is that even at its so-called worst, it was still saying something about the overall state of electronic dance music. With Gold Panda's entry-despite its cleverness and state-of-the-art, diverse penchants-you're left with the impression the famous !K7 cycle has nothing more this time than a muted episode on its hands.

Too much of the album feels restrained, unable to truly revel in the bliss of melody.

The music sometimes suggests inventive new directions, but the strange, tonal weirdness of the vocals doesn't always sit right, and ends up sucking out the individuality from Pharrell and Kendrick Lamar alike.

The brilliance in moments of these tracks doesn't add up to a fully engaging album experience, but Aguayo deserves plenty of credit for continuing to show the imagination he thought minimal lacked all those years ago.

Yoyogi Park is at its best on the tracks where Kersten wanders out of his comfort zone.

It has hooks galore, but embedded in brilliantly strange music.

Pretty Ugly takes the ugliest tropes of UK dance music and flips them inside out without losing what makes them so physically powerful in the first place.

Situated at the border of ambient, new age, techno and industrial music, the album could just as easily fit into a meditative practice as a gritty basement rave. It is also a testament to her technical prowess as an electronic composer. But perhaps more importantly, it lives and breathes her insistence on exploring new sounds and techniques.

Stately though Dedication was, its serious mien and careful composition made it an introduction to Zomby that made his work seem less appealingly messy than it oftentimes is. This seven-song, 23-minute EP remedies that.

Where many similar hybrids are too cerebral or schizophrenic, his album is impressively tactile, and laced with a genuinely passionate pulse.

Overall Passion is an angst-free experience, finely wrought with a view to banishing the black and the blues.

So we have an artist who's found a very comfortable groove, continues to produce from it, and plenty of people love him for it. It may be an enormous cop-out to say that if you like Recondite you'll probably like Dwell, and if you don't like Recondite (or you're a music writer) you probably won't. But, like Brunner's music, some things really are that simple.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but Fatima Al Qadiri, Nguzunguzu and J. Cush have delivered a surprisingly solid record with a global outlook and more than a few surprises surprises up its sleeve.

Like all good pop, News From Nowhere is brief, never falling victim to the temptation to get lost in soundscaping. Instead, it builds those immersive realms in just a few minutes with each track.

Designed to be listened to as a continuous mix, From Deewee is as much about the flow between songs as the standout anthems.

Brandt Brauer Frick's contribution to the series, while not a classic, is still a little treasure trove.

It's all meticulously crafted with a keen ear for mood and emotion, and yet Creatures has trouble moving beyond a pastiche of Castex's record collection.

They draw from the immigrant communities to make a sound that, to them, is completely at home.

If there is one main flaw you could attach to Rapprocher, it's how Harper sticks so slavishly to the template laid out by her dance pop mentors.

For what is essentially a composite of three "live" performances (all produced on a deliberately limited set-up of two modular synths, two sequencers and a mixer), Whorl is surprisingly cohesive.

If such moments [a typically slurring yet splenetic Prefuse 73 contribution or Siriusmo's "Modern Talk,"] constitute the highly enjoyable base level here, then the best moments are staggering.

Where Bad Vibes had a dynamic range of feeling, Dark Red is melodramatic to the point of being alienating.

For sure, Animal Collective still have plenty of whimsical creativity left in them, but on Painting With they mostly color inside the lines.

Unpatterns is very now, yet by employing key electronic music touchstones it sounds classic as well.

The album's mix of chipmunk samples, sound shards and tender melodies sounds contemporary, but it fails to bring out the ingenuity and energy of Carnell's best music. On Value, he bares his soul, but we don't learn much.

Krell's still part of a pop vanguard, but his music is more than ever a welcoming gesture.

It's appealing stuff, but dig deeper and you'll find there's not much beneath the pristine surface.

For all their strange angles and squeaky sonorities, these songs satisfy in the way that pop has always satisfied, no more and no less.

The album as a whole is accomplished, but it still hasn't entirely caught up with the precision of his visual multiverse. Still, I am glad that Labyrinth offers another glimpse of Kanda's alternate realities.

Darby has always had a good grasp on what makes this music so addictive. EPHEM:ERA just looks at it from a different perspective, highlighting the curvatures of grime's fundamentals.

This collection gives a certain joy that a hyper-specific brand of record collector gets from the "not gonna make it easy on you" type of inspiration.

What I Breathe feels like both a jumping-off point for dance music newbies and a feast of great ideas for those who have been around the block a few times. It's all held together by great pacing, frankly amazing production and a lack of cynicism that feels refreshing, open-hearted to the very last moment.

Photek's DJ-Kicks might sound like a long, dark night of the soul, but at least a soul is there.

Dusk & Blackdown have an idiosyncratic grip on texture and structure, which Dasaflex wholeheartedly emphasizes.

The result is a record that's sensually stark, with not one extraneous moment marking its naked contours.

At times Weird Drift's afternoon daze softens into formlessness.

Pattern Of Excel succeeds during those little moments that capture Bannon's way with mood and melody.

The album is overproduced and polished to a fault, often vague and uninteresting. It's the defining characteristic of Become Alive. The individual performances are undeniably full of flavor and complexity, but put together they can overwhelm.

Despite his mainstream flirtations, Cashmere Cat is more about delaying pleasure than instant gratification.

Audio, Video, Disco may not be as clever and as original as Justice think it is, but it definitely isn't as terrible as everyone else would want you to believe.

It's a fascinating mosaic in which every tiny detail lends colour and depth to a work of real, high-minded seriousness.

They make some mistakes, sure--the vocal spots from JODY and Yen Tech are fumbles--but they're more adept than ever at stewing their idiosyncratic set of sounds into one deliciously strange brew.

Halo tackles these chunky themes and textual cacophony with a score that never sits still, folding synthetic sounds into acoustic recordings and darting across time and space with the efficiency of a jump cut.

A surprisingly coherent record full of vignettes that feel alternately archival, ethnographic and as usual, flickering and ephemeral-glimpses of musicality that flutter away just when you get comfortable.

Amid all this diversity, Abaporu is a remarkably steady work, with Boratto's consistent sound palette and knack for melody running strong throughout.

Vibert's turned in a brazenly colourful, glitter-dusted and streamer-throwing affair, so have fun with it.

Where 2012's Tracer experimented with house and techno, 8AM recalls their debut, 7AM, but with a more refined approach.

Further Out Than The Edge's vibrant cast of characters, lively experimental rhythms and rich improvisation underlines why Speakers Corner Quartet are so firmly embedded within South London's musical landscape.

Whyte has made an LP that rises and falls gracefully, proving that even his brand of everything-all-the-time dance music has room for nuance and subtlety.

As you unspool slowly into Aimlessness, you can't help but wish for a more mediating human touch.

They! Live is a lovely, highly listenable release, flowing effortlessly in a way that most house music albums can only hope for.

These are synthetic sounds that have a sense of natural decay built into them, but Prudhomme unleashes them with such carefully built momentum, the music can't help but feel optimistic.

There's an excellent 12-inch (or two) hidden in Addison Groove Presents James Grieve.

It's clear that Hello Happiness is not the full album experience. Still, a few easy summer hits from Khan are a treat.

Those few powerful moments [on Boy] are the exception rather than the norm. Their rawness is an essential element that could have lent Skilled Mechanics the sort of organic, internalized anxiety that once defined Tricky.

Overall, like the California sunshine, it's an irrefutable tonic.

Clearly, Stewart's future does not lie in crossover R&B--he should drill down into his musical imagination to open up ever weirder, deeper seams.

The album is a ultimately a disappointment, but it has its moments nonetheless.

Bronsert and Szary rarely break the mould here but it's instead one of the most accessible and effortlessly enjoyable dance music albums of the year.

Eve sounds self-referential, dated and pretty low on ideas.

If Outrun was a fast-paced drive that made the city look like an endless stream of light-trails, Reborn is a beautiful retro pastiche that intentionally slows down to let you take in just how far you've come.

King Perry (released on Tricky's label—he also co-produces four tracks) simply falls flat, lost in technological tricks and devoid of Perry's classic, quizzical warmth.

With Steam Days, Fake returns to the fuzzy melodies and subtle, static-laced gleam that marked not only much of his best early work but also his better remixes.

Perhaps most frustratingly, Scintilli doesn't have as much of a sense of continuum as the aforementioned trilogy--which is something that any good album should have.

Asiatisch sounds better when heard as an experimental grime album and left at that. You certainly don't need to know anything about China to enjoy it.

There's something so inherently off-kilter about Scruff's kaleidoscopic production that it just doesn't jell with the sound of a human voice being all serious.

There's no denying that Iradelphic is Clark's most accessible and friendly work in ages... Unfortunately, comfort is boring.

Dream House, then, is a mixed bag. But like with everything Âme and Innervisions put their name to, from the label to the performances to the Lost In A Moment parties, the good outweighs the bad.

For all its referential qualities, this is a record that is confident in its own distinct character.

Not so serious, just damn fun. Davis is taking big swings, purposely stomping through giant puddles like a kid again, eager to see how stain patterns form. So even when he misses, he still hits.