Lip Lock may not be the best rap album of 2013, but it's interesting, and it's honest. After 11 years, that's a respectable way to ride out.

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.

Thanks to its introspective depth, it's equally well suited to solitary listening, the rare mix that connects dance music's public sphere--joyous, communal, kinetic, chaotic--with a more private kind of rapture.

Functioning adults that they are, Dillinger Escape Plan have realized that tightly wound precision left to its own devices is about as much fun as orgasm denial. Welcoming the pleasures of melody's slow release, they've retained their desire to rage and contort.

Like art, Vampires is dense; like pop, it seems to float in effortlessly from some place you're sure you've been, but by some trick of déjà vu eludes your conscious brain.

Over ten songs detailing a young man's despair and self-doubt, he delivers a performance that's both deeply confident and convincingly vulnerable, replete with stark, piano-based meditations and fuzz-pedal-abetted fury.

Though it's not exactly Leave Home to its predecessor's Ramones, Annie Up is still a pretty tasty serving of grits and sass.

Ready to Die is a weirdly exhilarating gem, thanks to Iggy's fiery eloquence and the Stooges' still-raw power. Apparently rock'n'roll can be an old man's game after all.

More Than Just a Dream steps backwards--where its predecessor was shockingly felt, this settles for something more distant, theatrical, grandiose.

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.

The album is stunningly crafted; their influences (Joy Division's mystic menace, Siouxsie Sioux's gothic howls) are proudly worn on blackened sleeves, but rather than dance around such matters, they dance with them.

The resulting album blurs the lines between simple and sophisticated more effectively than Phoenix ever have before.

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

Snoop's sing-song flow might seem ideal for pop-reggae, but he disappears into the background of his own album.

Cudi's unrepentant attitude is partly why Indicud sounds so engaging, at least during the album's sparkling first half. (Sadly, he doesn't have enough good songs to fill out its hour-plus, 18-track length.)

The music on their third album, Mind Control, shows a broader vocabulary of anachronism.

Early exploits including a ridiculous rhyme about T-Rex amorousness ("Dinosaur Sex"), jabs at vapid art-school scenesters ("Art Bitch" and "!Franchesckaar!"), and some indecipherable indie-dance vocoding ("I Wanna Be Darth Vader"). True Romance is a strident departure from those frivolities so far as solid, true-to-aim songwriting is concerned, but the divergence and a touch of the silliness remains.

Recorded at Jamaica's Tuff Gong studios, the record's strongest asset is making things that shouldn't work together sound natural.

[It's] mostly a very good album, but the concept betrays the end listening experience, leaving the unshakable feeling that it could've been a six-track EP, not an over-padded full album.

Ultimately, what makes Excavation such an awesome and absorbing listen is precisely its indifference to the listener.

They've stepped up their ballad game, and the grooves, smartly percussive and Kanye-slick, are deeper than ever.

Despite all this defiantly cosmopolitan music, Wheelhouse finds Paisley in bittersweet reverie.

By facing down the exhausting nature of depression and loneliness (seriously, Coyne sounds so depleted that he can barely muster the dejection to sing, and yes, that's a compliment), the Lips have retroactively strengthened their entire artistic credo.

Hotel California is inexcusable. It may be the least creative major-label rap album in recent memory.

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.

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

Overgrown's biggest fault is lack of quality control; it's an uneven listen, with peaks like "Retrograde" segueing into the quotidian piano recital of "DLM," with an undistinguished back half that doesn't linger in the mind afterward.

What aren't here are coherently shaped songs, or hooks, or riffs, or melodies that stick.