The majority of cuts on Goon still feel like demos: languidly spaced chords, carefully measured arpeggiation, and hardly anything so gauche as a groove. The twinkle, such as it is, comes from the vocal.

With his first album for Warp, OPN proves his mettle amid labelmates like Aphex Twin and Flying Lotus.

Even in a career filled with expansive balladry, there are moments on Push the Sky Away as lovely as anything in his repertoire, from the music-box piano chimes of "We No Who U R" to the "Dress Rehearsal Rag"-strings on "We Real Cool" and the dulcet choruses of "Finishing Jubilee Street" and "Wide Lovely Eyes."

Like floating from level to placid level in Monument, listening to this record prompts your imagination and encourages discourse and reflection. Not the academic kind, but the kind of communal discovery people have been doing for ages.

That’s the beauty of Universalists: there’s no use trying to pin it down. What’s more, doing so discredits its core thesis: music is music, plain and simple. Gat manages to capture the ecstasy of his live performance, while expanding his production and experimental practice to a global, and—dare I say—universal palette.

The LP’s sunset pastels and recurring elastic bass lines at times threaten to rob the tracks of their singularities. But 99.9% is a success because Kaytranada fosters an environment where every guest shines.

You won’t hear much new on Vertigo, but what’s there is lovingly, potently rendered.

The album has a studied looseness that's never contrived, and it shows a poise and clarity of vision which her earlier efforts barely suggested

Her stormy folk songs (which, on occasion, recall PJ Harvey's) are primal and dark, crammed with ancient mythology and portentous warnings.

Even when he's bumming, though, Walker still finds comfort in a good groove or a tart horn chart.

With a tangle of voices and viewpoints, both songs [“First Letter from St. Sean” and “A Better Sun”] write beyond Boucher’s near-exhaustive projections-of-self to see things from with a larger, more insightful point-of-view.

That sense of newfound freedom and exaltation surges through Potential, a rich matrix of the Range’s knack for digging up strangers’ stories and assimilating breakbeat, grime, U.K. garage, and late ’90s R&B.

A blatant 180 degree shift from the confines of his wretched comfort zone, Redemption is full of creative risks that pay off in spades.

The live guitars and drums--and vocals more emo than robo--give off an irresistible warmth. [Aug 2004, p.108]

This is their longest album and has the highest stakes, and succeeds.

The initial 1996 sessions emphasize the droll felicity of essential early songs 'The State I Am In' and 'The Stars of Track and Field,' tightening the comedic timing and ramping up the tension, making their adolescent trauma both funnier and scarier.

An impishly brilliant 12-song set of scruffy garage rock with moments of dreamy shimmer, Monomania leaves no confusion about what sort of band Deerhunter are: one that won't stoop to conquer.

This stream-of-consciousness head trip blends tricky, delicious melodies and slippery lyrics, yet never lapses into annoyingly smug artiness. [Mar 2007, p.88]

All 6's and 7's is an admirable attempt at balancing Tech's heavy-metal rep and hard-won maturity.

Chemtrails feels somewhat unmoored. It’s the quietest, most delicate music of Del Rey’s career so far, comprising several gorgeous arrangements, but very little of it feels particularly magnetic, especially when stacked against the rest of her songbook. The lyricism is, at moments, uninspired.

After three consistent, unique albums, the duo only flag when they abandon their sense of humor and mischief -- which is what made them so smart in the first place.

The new developments in sound and style of Marling's fifth album--and the way her leading-lady status continues to evolve--leave it as her most captivating yet. Just watch the movie and don't worry too much about the run time.

His new self-titled record slips out of the leather jacket in favor of body-oiled synth-pop that balances between swagger-happy and tooth-rottingly sweet.

“Late to the Flight” is also indicative of Marling’s range on this album: She hits contralto notes on “Shake Your Shelter” and enters soprano territory for multi-tracked harmonies on “Hand Hold Hero.” The instrumentation, almost entirely performed by Mike Lindsay, is more varied than any Marling record to date.

The added vocalists flesh out the simple bed of guitar and handclaps on the crestfallen "Mama Don't Like My Man," and play her pragmatic foils on "Money," barking, "Whatcha gonna do?" while she pleads in a Tina Turner rasp for the green stuff to stick around.

Mutant, even as it threatens to filibuster itself at over an hour long, feels like the album that Xen was meant to grow into, with every lesson that Vulnicura taught integrated at a molecular level.

Godspeed is all about wide-open spaces here. And it's easier to find transcendence in the desolation, to get hypnotized by a single note, or get lost in rearranging the four vinyl sides into your own personal manifesto.

Beaty and bouncy but less meaty, Palo Santo is for now an unsatisfying follow-up to a terrific debut.