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.