Stunningly blending American country, English folk, and Victorian pomp, the album documents a life resigned to sadness amid a world brimming with beauty both real and fake.

If it's not yet clear, Centipede does retain much of the band's earnest, knowing naiveté.

Both lyrical and hypnotic, Replica serves as a deeply romantic testament to the possibilities 
of life in the Cloud.

The follow-up (without Chao) is a more straightforward Afro-pop record, with a few exceptions.

Parquet Courts’ ridiculously good new album Wide Awake!, is a delirious ode to the power of collectivity thinly masquerading as a gameday anthem.

A return to 1994's seduction strategies: pomade-greased riffs, subdermal bass, distorto samples, and free-associative rants about how Miami is cooler than Hollywood. [July 2002, p.112]

It slips down easily, and the duo's knowledge and pedigree (their debut is out on 16-year-old rave label Ultra Records, once home to the Chemical Brothers and Tiësto) also satisfies the yen of longtime dance-music lovers who might be side-eyeing all the Johnny-Come-Latelies.

File it [“NVRLND”], and the rest of 2016 Atomized, with the band’s impressive collection of non-album treasures.

It's the sound of a man moving to his next stage, unsure how he should make his machines howl. Mournful or loud? Why not both?

For listeners coming into the album without knowledge of its overarching concept, PROTO is also full of pop-forward compositions that are striking in their own right. ... For a record about the development of machine cognition, PROTO is remarkably human at every turn.

While Mr. M consists of 11 allegedly different songs, the album has the unified feel of a single multi-movement suite.

What’s most charming about But You Caint Use My Phone is how unpretentiously Badu comports herself, ever-mindful that one of her most special qualities as a vocalist remains her ability to entwine the resilient with the goofy.

Widow City goes on for a while--maybe too long. But it's quite a trip [Oct 2007, p.106]

These adventuresome Swedes, led by instrumental virtuoso Gustav Ejstes, might be inspired by psychedelics, but they never leave anything to chemical-enhanced chance on their moody, lovely fourth album.

On his debut album, he shoots for the stratosphere and lavishly scores.

The result is the rare heady corrective that's as fun as it is thoughtful.

Sequenced like an upside-down bell curve, the band's fetching fourth album opens with the vintage hippie wisdom, musique concrète, extended space rock, and lush, jazzy Americana of "Isadora."

I See You is still distinctly and deeply an xx album, but in the gap between albums the group has found a way to move unmistakably forward while still sounding like themselves.

Packed with these canny connections between music and lyrics, Cupid highlights Hynes' tremendous recent advancement as an arranger.

When I Get Home, on the one hand, is a portrait of Solange, following the success of A Seat at the Table, leaning to the point of falling into all the most pretentious aspects of that record. On the other, When I Get Home is a complex and fascinating exercise in reconfiguring a whole history of black music for the post-modern age. ... Yes, When I Get Home is overbearing in the way it wants to announce itself as art, but the album also makes that easy to forgive.

Synths push this from kraut-psych-cruise-control curiosity to unabashed triumph.

In a narcotized haze of lounge blues, New Orleans jazz, gauzy retro soul, and understated guitar pop, he has made the most compelling record of his career.

Unlike 2007's self-indulgent The Third Hand, here he wisely picks his spots, chirping a few modest ditties. Four albums deep, he's found his comfort zone.

The jams always pull back at just the right moment, and the songs equal their folksy models. There's so much heart here that even the most exacting re-creations of bygone FM wank seem spontaneous.

They're not robots, they're "robots." They "rock" and want you to "dance." In that sense, this is absolutely in keeping with the band's legacy. It is theater: absolutely sincere and totally fake.

Banisters is far from the flashiest or most radio-friendly album Del Ray has produced, but rarely have fans gotten such crystalline, autobiographical work from the guarded star, who appeared to revel in the cool distance of her early albums. Now, she feels more present, and much closer to her music.

Vedder has never been shy about naming his influences, and here they form a buoyant cloud lifting the enterprise up among the stars.

Complicated shows a real grasp of musical history. [Jul 2007, p.99]