The "neon" in the name is both a hint and a misnomer: This Austin, Texas duo's debut emanates bright colors even while the glow is muted by lo-fi haze.

For those who can keep up, some exultant and righteous highs await.

The male-dominated world of dubstep may dismiss all this as too lightweight and precious, but Katy B may transform into the queen of this boys club yet.

Guest producers give Frank its greatest highlights. ... Though much of the album is well within Anakin’s comfort zone, it also sees him trying more melodic approaches.

Consistent with his acclaimed “New History Warfare” series, it captures a human arpeggiator reconstituting post-minimalism, jazz, and metal in growling, moaning pieces with far more syncopated parts--percussion, bass, melody, harmony--than one guy recording without overdubs should rightfully account for.

Even at roughly the same length as past Waxhatchee albums, Storm feels more compact. The second half sags briefly between the undifferentiated buzz of “Hear You” and delicate breathiness of “A Little More,” but in the final stretch, the band pulls through.

Though made by only two people, Civilian never feels less than fully realized.

They offer a survey of rock’s history, but their take is revisionist.

The entire point of Melody’s Echo Chamber is for listeners to find their bliss while Prochet quests for hers. While Emotional Eternal sustains this winsome, pastel streak, it’s mellower, more assured, more grounded, far less a product of happy studio accidents than what came before.

Dear All Tomorrow's Parties: Book this band immediately and meet your future.

District Line is essentially the same furiously melodic pop Mould played way back when. [Feb 2008, p.98]

The hooks are hidden in dense atmospherics, but after a few late-night sessions, these grand, moody songs will reveal secrets worth waiting up for. [Oct 2008, p.122]

They're career musicians active since the '90s, but here, they actually sound excited again.

No matter how enthusiastically some claim Beck as a zeitgeist-embracing pop chameleon of the Jean-Luc Godard variety, he's far more a craftsman of the Louis Malle school: sophisticated, assured, self-aware, and incessantly torn between competing genres.

Broke With Expensive Taste is a project dripping in confidence, class, bursts of brilliance, and personality.

Buraka assemble Jamaican dancehall, Brazilian favela beats, South African ghetto-tech, and video-game ear candy like colorful Lego blocks on an earthy yet impeccably crafted working-class fiesta for dance-floor zombies and vampires of all nations.

An eclectic vanguard sound. [Jul 2006, p.88]

It moves according to the oblique logic of the subconscious, entering your mind through the back door. A newfound attention to space has allowed Big Thief to expand their palette even as they’ve brought the volume down.

Heartbreaking Bravery is both entryway and endpoint, a listening experience that's harrowing and gripping and, no matter how you come at it, moving. In other words, it remains true to its title.

Brilliantly unhinged rock spiked with R&B and power pop. [Jun 2006, p.80]

He's put together a record that's as full of unforgettably kaleidoscopic melodies as it is surreal shoutouts to Dolly Parton and Kurt Cobain--pom pom is just about as beautiful of a mess as Pink himself.

It's a major work, one that confirms that she's only marginal in the sense that she's vibrating on her own wavelength, way out at the edge of the spectrum.

Wilco (the album), the band's seventh studio effort, treats verse-chorus-verse basics like holy truths. The result is the rare rock album about acceptance. And it's fantastic.

Revealing more to outsiders than, say, that entire Nirvana box set, it revels in the seemingly defunct L.A. pop greats' status as old-school virtuosos who turned the new school on.

Forward, it’s enticing--but in reverse, it’s sublime.

Like most free jazz, it's music of the moment, a work of granular epiphanies that accrete, finally, into a magnificent whole.

Her voice is a bear hug in the literal sense; succumbing to it is like being carjacked by Patsy Cline.

Delivered in a frail squawk recalling Seattle singer-songwriter Perfume Genius, his coming-of-age songs carve intuitive, 
idiosyncratic paths (spidery guitar, buzzing electronics) to mountaintop indie-rock catharsis.