Features some of Madlib’s most difficult and most accomplished production work to date.

MoM, for their part, sound more and more comfortable with a vocalist in front of them.

The Dears are now less idiosyncratic but have successfully made the kind of straightforwardly satisfying album that you'd expect from a band on their second decade.

On many of the songs here, the accompaniment sounds like an afterthought, adding to the bedroom-recording atmosphere.

Most of it... feels as weighty and emotive as Sleater Kinney, or as seductive as Mary Timony in the mid-90s: fully-formed, feminine indie rock.

Despite Beyond’s tendency to feel like a career retrospective in spots, it contains plenty of songs that rival Mascis’s best work.

At times, as with Segundo, it’s tempting to just let Molina pull you under.

It improves on Mutations with sparkling variation and a depth of emotion Beck seldom seems to achieve.

If the arrangements were given as much attention as the astonishing, rich, in-the-same-room production: 9.1

The Grey Album isn’t much more than a well-executed novelty, nor does it illuminate some genius hidden deep within The Black Album.

If Liars have reached the post-masterpiece phase of their career where they hone their craft to a needle’s point, Liars is an absolutely brilliant jump-off.

Where Last Exit was indebted to the clubbier side of dance pop--with its tendency to wind songs around Dark’s close-clipped beats--So This Is Goodbye is a post-aught pop record first and foremost, an elegant, spacious collection of flash-frozen R&B and soft disco laments.

Murray’s Revenge feels tired, the work of a mind either distracted or unwilling to commit to any one thing.

If The Unfairground doesn’t quite qualify as a "stunning" return to form--"stunning" never really being Ayers’ stock in trade--it certainly represents the delightful and unexpected renaissance of a perennially undervalued artist, whose quiet but significant influence is long overdue for re-assessment.

Desire’s successes stem chiefly from Pharoahe’s unimpeachably brilliant rhyme skills.

Like David Bowie’s Station to Station or Peter Gabriel’s So, TV on the Radio make music that demands to be listened to actively, as for the listener to absorb the lethal amounts of heartbreak, dignity, and mystery in the human voice.

Never once during the course of the album’s ten songs, do its creators even graze the surface of mediocrity, instead settling in the sunny middle ground that Gibbard so often inhabits.

Leo proves himself emotionally enervating throughout, so it’s really a shame that Shake the Sheets isn’t half so sonically invigorating.

It isn’t the sort of artistic statement that promises to change anyone’s life, but it’s no less a great work of escapist art, the sort of essential record I’d pick for any hypothetical list of desert island necessities.

Alright Still is nothing more than pop for people who hate pop music, poptimist Quorn, phony music for people who can't let go of their inhibitions (indie-bitions?) and have to have their music classified as REAL.

It’s the collage of styles that distinguishes this album: Cuban and Indian flourishes, Eisenhower-era doo-wop, the smoky Stax groove, bucolic British trad-folk, the eccentricities of American folk, of both the Dust Bowl troubadours and the Vietnam flower-children.

Nas caps a year of NYC-based disappointments with quite possibly the most crushing one yet.

The psychedelic underpinnings of old are cleaned up a bit and the anger and bile that lay beneath the surface of the earlier material has been calmed, but there is still much to be enjoyed.

It's an album that is filled with plenty of big hooks, ample rock crunch and a loving attention to detail.

It’s not the most subtle or nuanced album, you can’t really dance to it, and it’s not particular clever. What it is: brutal, full of hooks, rock solid and fucking loud.

On The End is Near, the group seems to follow the same pattern as before, but with less than appetizing results.

The sound of the recording is clear, the audience is not annoying and Hayden’s banter in between is quite humorous and as good as the music.

This record contains some of the most astounding music that Boards Of Canada have ever composed.