Slightly less coherent than his previous stunner, "Awfully Deep," Slime & Reason has tracks intended to fill dance floors and cuts that are more layered, their intricate beats and rhymes better suited to headphone enjoyment.

The British duo's second full-length in as many years mashes ghostly electro-pop tendencies with live instrumentation, empathetic orchestration, and tape-machine snippets, creating a world that is both compulsively listenable and eerily foreign.

For a while, it's promising: "Only If for a Night" pits Welch's soulful-and-strange vocal gymnastics against a firecracker beat and a gang of chorus chanters. But elsewhere, Ceremonials feels drained of personality.

The band's wonderfully detached mood seems born of their music's head-bouncing distractibility rather than any pretentious pondering.

Be the Void might be the band's least accessible offering yet, but it's certainly their bravest--and given some breathing room, it might just prove their most rewarding.

Woke Myself Up is smart, arresting, and nimble; at 30 minutes, the only real disappointment is that it’s over too soon.

Unless he goes all Malcolm X on us behind the walls, this solid release will be just a prelude to whatever morbid thoughts Prodigy has to share upon his release.

The release is not without brief visits to riff heaven, and it’s in the details that there are pleasures to be found....But too often you bop along to the tight drum/bass syncopations only to forget what you’re listening to--or worse, why.

Daisy may lack the immediate accessibility of Brand New's previous efforts, but once it grows on you, good luck getting it out of your head.

Of all the possible directions the band could have taken, they decided on generic coffeehouse folk pop, with predictably pleasant-yet-dull results.

It'll inevitably be pigeonholed as post-house or something equally asinine, but for now, it exists without definition, and for that we can be grateful.

It's perhaps overly long (53 minutes) and hard to penetrate, but Animal Collective's creativity glows brighter than Ric Flair's hair.

Here they make less of an effort to conceal the pop smarts percolating beneath the slop-rock surface; catchy little gems like 'Starting Over' and 'I'll Be with You' help make this the most satisfying Black Lips album yet.

Oneida have always been a thick stew of different influences, but usually with a dash of originality to bind it together; Preteen Weaponry never rises above pastiche. Nevertheless, the band’s hypnotic drone sweeps through the album like a swift current — it’s enough to generate anticipation for their future travels.

[A] terrific, visceral album.

Youth Novels, one-ups the competition by being sillier, funkier, and less comfortable--more “Konichiwa Bitches” than Keren Ann.

A little order goes a long way in making Pumps! their most accessible album to date, but what makes it their most successful album is that it still sounds like Growing.

As Bjork no doubt hoped it would, the result--long on material from that year's Volta but also featuring such oldies as 'Army of Me' and 'Pagan Poetry'--captures both energy and detail.

Most of the songs light up, shine for a while, and pull back so suddenly that you feel a little betrayed. It's a shame these dry lullabies didn't surface earlier in our dreary summer.

Everything feels dead in the desert, but Return is rife with life.

As the obviousness of Write About Love's title implies (it could have been called Play and Sing!), Belle & Sebastian are looking to get back to basics with their first album since 2005's tremendous The Life Pursuit.

The spotlight stays fixed on his darkly soothing intonations throughout, keeping the smoky, low-key aesthetic unvarying despite some stylistic and instrumental adventurousness.

Phillips captures the imagery, as well as the heart, of an era’s underground.

This could prove strenuous, but the album is more contemplative than didactic--a (k)no(w)here that’s difficult to study but easy to inhabit.

His deadpan honk of a singing voice calls to mind a less caustic Mark E. Smith, and he arranges the 12 quick songs with a gift for effective repetitive hooks and reductive structures.

Levy's unorthodox and, in some cases, homemade instruments strum and stutter with calculated abandon; her heavy British accent slumps itself across this glitchy bubblegum arcade and blunts it.

Ambition might sound like an odd thing to chide a band for, but if Wolf Parade had figured out when to push the hooks and when to pull back the excess, Expo 86 would have shone.

You’re unlikely to encounter another pioneering techno-pop act entering its third decade with style and substance largely intact.