Purple Mountains was produced and accompanied by Jarvis Taveniere and Jeremy Earle of Woods, with eight other musicians filling the gaps. The arrangements, some of the most gracious Berman’s ever had, hum and glow with foggy organs and soft golden horns. Their serenity is at odds with his desperation: This is a portrait of a shattered man.

Assembled as carefully as he once cut up a cappellas, it's a dance-music textbook.

It’s not easy to homogenize the opposing forces at play, but everything here feels like a genuine rumble through a mind scarred and inebriated by the reality of gang life and chasing the American dream while the room spins.

Here, on record, buttressed by her own diaphanous back-up vocals, she's fading deliciously into the background even as she's finally stepping into the spotlight.

As important as the production is, though, it’s still the songwriting that makes Pawn Shop stand out.

With five songs clocking in at more than seven minutes, often thanks to detours down E Street, it's a big-idea album that feels small and personable, even as it's kicking you in the shin.

They maintain a slow, directionless drift that weights their third record with the dread of what’s beyond the sky.

The dreamy project leaves the snide social critiques and radicalisms to the wayside for 36 minutes that feel of its own realm, where the dichotomies and bodily desire feel self-contained. The intimacy is never lost within the set’s high concept: For an album centered on lonesomeness, Aromanticism feels warm.

Thanks to its polyrhythms and rich instrumental textures, The Animal Spirits is as likely to appeal to fans of experimental rock music (especially electro-tribal searchers like Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance, Fuck Buttons, or Dan Deacon) as it is to those who regularly spend evenings at the club.

In her willingness to tread the line between the crushing flood of data and irrepressible pop hooks has created a record so undeniably of its time and place (that is, cyberspace) that it can’t be easily ignored.

Where Turn Into’s multilayered arrangements sometimes felt scrunched, Everybody Works blossoms.

Lovingly fastidious and packed with special effects.

“Outer Acid” remains uncanny in its mix of blissful keys and menacing acid squiggles and “Spy” diffuses some dubby harmonica into Heard’s atmospheres. “Inner Acid” returns to the squelchy acid house Heard made back in the ‘80s and the knocking beat and bells of “Nodyahed” suggest that he can still make a dancefloor quake.

Sitek's layered sonics have grown more immense... and almost none of these songs charts a predictable course. [Jun 2006, p.81]

There's still something small and handmade about the Thermals' music. [Sep 2006, p.112]

Lyrics referencing both Greek astronomy and the Old Testament, as well as guitar textures indebted more to Glenn Branca than Black Flag, reveal an art-rock ace up the band's tattered sleeve.

This latest effort shift boils down to two key foci: bolder, less guarded lyrical choices (much of the record deals with Paternoster's ongoing battle with chronic mono) and more strategic space for the frontwoman's legendary guitar solos.

Little Broken Hearts is exciting because it explores the darkest corners of betrayal, bad love, and jealousy with enough vitality to propel Jones out of the bloodless purgatory of brunch music.

Hval continues to cleverly connect, and explicitly comment on, matters of sex and politics on her third album.

The most eloquent artistic response yet to the World Trade Center tragedy. [Sep 2002, p.130]

Ween are still perved to the core.

Ironically, spitting over minimal head-knock beats from WHY? and Advance Base, Serengeti sounds reborn.

That it reads like it came from NAO’s diary points to her greatest achievement on Saturn: every song can shine as a standalone track, but they sound even better together.

Mazzy Star steadfastly stick to their dusty, psych-folk, dream-pop tableaux on Seasons of Your Day. Yet it feels nothing like a '90s hangover; in fact, the touches of organ and pedal steel that open the album hint at Beach House's hazy indie-pop.

Desire Lines sits with remarkable ease next to Camera Obscura albums released a decade ago.

[Frontman Miles] Kurosky finally has the audio toys to jazz up his Technicolor sandbox... [Oct 2001, p.134]

Like Confessions on a Dance Floor, Fundamental uses squelchy electro-disco grooves that smuggle sly pop-culture commentary. [Aug 2006, p.83]

There is almost always an underlying inorganic sound that’s either ominous, nauseous or both, and it’s the only thing that guarantees that none of the slower tracks will unknowingly be embraced in dentists’ waiting rooms next to classic soft rock. The faster songs are highly danceable, especially with these queasy keys.