Reliably excellent but emotionally detached, the Sea and Cake's eighth album is of a piece with their first seven.

The record's nuances are divulged in layers and folds, through a latticework of instrumentation and, shockingly, some uncommonly good songwriting by band members other than Stuart Murdoch.

This record is scattered enough to alienate fans who want more consistently upbeat music. But if you’re onboard for the weirdness, the sequencing works surprisingly well.

Not the Actual Events is probably the grimiest Nine Inch Nails release since The Fragile. Rather than running the gamut between overdriven steamrolling and receding, glitchy ambience as on most of the work Reznor loosed between 1994 and 2008, the EP realizes a specific, portentous mood from several equivalent angles.

More than a decade on, this band is peeking out from behind the veil of obfuscation in an effort to stay relevant; they haven't totally abandoned the whimsy and fantasy, but they've toned it down--almost to save themselves.

It's another solid collection that echoes his day job from an artful distance.

Brings a welcome grandeur to Ward's honeyed rasp and nimble guitar picking. [Sep 2006, p.114]

The lower-key approach pays off here. [Sep 2007, p.138]

Yours Truly occasionally provides pummeling feedback rock ('It's the Weekend'), but when Lytle's lullaby vocals suggest, "You should hold my hand / While everything blows away / And we'll run to a brand-new sun," it's like Bruce Springsteen's open highway finally reached a melancholy kid from Modesto.

"I want us thinking outside the box," Shakira tells a lover on her third English-language studio disc. And musically, at least, she succeeds throughout the wildly eclectic She Wolf.

Glass Boys is easier to navigate, and doesn't engender the same awe [as "David Comes to Life"]. But its brevity allows Fucked Up to loosen a little--to indulge in sounds and tones they forwent when their albums sprawled. Less space, and more stuff: the band keeps getting denser.

But it's like the guitars have had their teeth fixed and bleached, like a extremely loud Colgate commercial.

These are the kind of go-with-the-flow countrified tunes that the Grateful Dead used to spin between epic jams, but with a more delicate acoustic touch. [Jul 2006, p.90]

The music privileges texture over catchiness. [Jun 2007, p.97]

NY's Finest has everything you'd expect from this legendary producer. [Mar 2008, p.108]

The detached aesthetic can turn anesthetic when the tunes occasionally falter or the overdubbed grooves fail to generate frisson, but the sweetly twitchy one-two punch of "Dressed in Dresden" and "Last City" brings this studiously chic debut to a sweaty climax.

Mica Levi leads her trio through this 28-minute cockeyed burst, each song a bizarre little post-punk contraption that sounds like it’s ready to fly apart and wreak havoc. Yet her debut is also insanely disorienting fun.

Whether driving a military tank through Glastonbury or recording a synth-pop tribute to playboy '80s auto mogul John Delorean, Super Furry Animals' frontman makes the gimmicky sublime.

The weird miracle is how natural singers Scott Paterson and Adele Bethel sound harmonizing (well, singing together) over subdermal synth buzz.

There’s plenty of sublime to go with the ridiculous, as well.

It's a winning rethink, salvaging the best bits of a musical style that's too easily missed. [Apr 2008, p.100]

His neoclassical melodies feel warm and full of blood, his keyboards weep where others bleep, and he puts so much skillful passion into female vocal showcasing that the tracks on his solo debut are consumed by a yearning for companionship that's only shaken momentarily.

This reunion packs no shortage of vintage wank--knotty, largely instrumental songs that surge together and drift apart with a proggy, loose-limbed precision.

Romweber is still ruler of his own bossa nova rockabilly kingdom, skipping from surf-guitar rave-ups to spacey instrumentals to sepulchral balladry, with the occasional Xavier Cugat cover tossed in.

The contrast between his interiority and the sturdiness of his compositions is striking. So, too, is the contrast between this album and Heartbreaker, his lauded solo debut. Ranking breakup records is a ghoul’s errand; suffice to say that loss was Heartbreaker’s fuel. Here, it’s turned to fumes.

With his unassuming voice--like a more agreeable Lou Reed--and spare folk-rock tunes, he's got a gift for importing cosmic subjects like mortality ('Demon Days') and transcendence ('If It Rains') into vivid everyday vignettes, minus any cheesy melodrama.

With his SAT-acing vocabulary, Bird still rocks some of the best rhymes in the game, cobbling together his own foreign language from arcane terms.