Underneath the big production, Steele writes some great melodies, and that’s the real reason that his sometimes dubious experimentations pay off.

The problem with Nightlife is that, with the exception of “Hotel Suicide,” nothing really stands out.

While their sound has become immensely creepier, it has also improbably become more beautiful.

Savane stands out both as Ali Farka Touré’s masterpiece, and as one of contemporary African music’s finest achievements to date.

Despite [some] fine moments, occasionally Van Occupanther can feel a little too slick and one-note.

Facelessly competent, they make self-important, self-consciously literate guitar rock past its sell-by date via a simple recipe: mix together some late-period Death Cab for Cutie, some OK Computer-era Radiohead, and add in a few Doves and some Decemberists.

Like everything this band's made, it's long, sloppy, and uneven, but at this point that's the idea: here are a bunch of people who kind of know each other sitting down with some guitars.

It’s hard to imagine The French Kicks making a great album, given their limited changes so far. That doesn’t change the fact that Two Thousand is a very good one.

The Looks is like the Witness Protection Program of electronic disco, where they put the folks for whom the normal anonymity of dance DJ's is simply not enough.

For the most part, songs lumber along with little forward motion.

Lots of handclaps, woo woo backing vocals, and laughs amid funny observations about contemporary urban hipster life reveal an assured and charming debut.

If Cut Chemist can recreate the effortless fusion of the album's second half, perhaps someday he can make an album worth listening to from beginning to end.

That’s not to say the album is a disappointment (it isn’t) or not great (it is, mostly), but after hitting their creative and commercial peak with Absolution and its subsequent breakthrough stateside, Black Holes and Revelations clearly reveals itself to be a transition record.

Fans of â??classicâ? psychedelic music will find few greater pleasures this year than Happy New Year.

Anyone expecting a pared down, contented Sufjan can bugger off. If anything, The Avalanche chases his caprice and whimsy further down the rabbit hole.

The Eraser is a triumph.

Tamborello’s incorporated the extended song structures of minimal into his newer constructs without the genre’s scope for subtle detailing and nuanced alteration.

Greedy Baby doesn’t make sense sans visuals, and even with them it makes… little sense.

Guillemots are constructing their own universe and inviting interested parties to join them within it. I can’t remember the last time a band did that so effectively and so invitingly.

It could be the soundtrack to death, love, pain, strength, joy, suffering, courage, despair, and faith all at the same time.

What’s most striking about the album is the realization that despite his reputation as a musical chameleon, all of Cex’s albums are pretty similar.

The overall lack of any real risk results in standard guitar anthem boilerplate.

Fundamental offers pleasure as rewarding as The Magic Mountain or Glenlivet 18--indulgences best enjoyed as you approach the half-century mark, when your imagination is keen to leisured elongations of familiar tropes or newly appreciative of exotic sumptuousness.

She’s found the perfect collaborator to match her voracious appetite for all things pop.

Keane have talked up Under the Iron Sea as being bleaker, more raw than their debut album. It is about the things they have seen over the last two years, the problems, the horrors, the sin. But Keane have not been uncovering the carcases of napalmed babies for the last two years. They’ve been playing music.

Leaving Songs sounds a lot like a Tindersticks album, one that eschews their more baroque offerings for mature balladry.

Brightblack Morning Light is an album that knows no restraint, and its palpable excess are the perfect fit for its first-light sensations.

Hope of the States haven’t completely given themselves up to mediocrity yet, but they’re well on their way.