The songwriting is at times patchy....But the noise of Le Noise sets it above Young's last few albums. [Nov 2010, p.62]

Infinite Love itself feels like the sonic equivalent of the iTunes Visualizer: pulsing forms, growing in complexity, before turning in on themselves and shooting off in another direction. [Nov 2010, p.62]

Down there, his most accessible work outside the confines of Animal Collective, revels in that upside-down gravity. [Nov 2010, p.61]

The polished arrangements, alien harmonies and attention to detail that have characterised Stereolab output over the years are all present and to the usual high standard. [Nov 2010, p.60]

Fans are unlikely to be disappointed, but if you're expecting a new direction, look somewhere else. [Nov 2010, p.52]

Their debut album King Night defies genre tagging and, for once, lives up to the drooling media accolades already smeared on it. [Dec 2010, p.54]

The sound is persistently visceral even as the succession of surfaces and interventions belies a planned set of juxtapositions. [Dec 2010, p.52]

As a prank or a statement, Expekoration is a particularly lazy one. [Dec 2010, p.50]

Lil B's slower, more ruminative delivery here feels far braver for being more exposed and vulnerable. [Dec 2010, p.50]

These are worn vintage sounds, but the songs here lack the choruses and hooks to invest them with fresh life, and Buttery's voice is forgettable. [Dec 2010, p.46]

The duo fashion a collection of bright funny and often extremely beautiful songs that bristle with invention. [Aug 2010, p.58]

'Corporate Cannibal' is the exception, and Jones, a miracle of nature at Meltdown, proves more fallible on Hurricane. [Nov 2008, p.64]

Her voice remains a beguiling instrument, but there's a sense that the attempt to ditch the kitsch and connect more directly is compromising the originality of her vision. [Oct 2010, p.60]

This EP chases Cosmogramma into the same territory, but seems to favor consistent, looping palettes and original electronics over the latter's ad hoc sampling. [Oct 2010, p.66]

Swans are alive, utterly. A terrible beauty is reborn. [Sep 2010, p.51]

One of his purely enjoyable recordings. [Sep 2010, p.68]

The music veers between between a kind of funk slop with trippy organ squelches and good ol' fashioned rawk with biblical overtones, It feels a little like drowning in a bath of Jack Daniels, but not in a good way. [Sep 2010, p.53]

There's nothing on their fourth album that couldn't have been recorded in the early to mid-1980s. [Sep 2010, p.50]

Together, these two collections add up to a desolate statement that is naked enough to make listening feel like a act of voyeurism. [Sep 2010, p.62]

Ultimately, though, one crucial element is missing: El-P's voice. His desperate, throbbing-forehead-vein rapping is as vital as his sound as the synths or the beats, and this disc would have been vastly improved by even one bilious verse. [Aug 2010, p.61]

He telegraphs all too simplistic rhymes schemes and rarely offers subject matter beyond deeply cliched braggadocio. He's rapping like he doesn't want to be there. [Oct 2010, p.67]

There is aimlessness on occasion--the mainly instrumental "OVNI" frankly just sounds like messing around--but for the most part the sense of glee in vigorous sound making for cranky and rebellious ends is infectious. [Aug 2010, p.86]

If Richter was attempting to instill some of the haunted bleakness of Winterreise into his own music, he has certainly succeeded. [Jul 2010, p.60]

It all slides down very easily--but there's isn't much of an aftertaste. [Aug 2010, p.66]

He frequently seems bored with his own raps, rarely breaking his monotone and indifferently fluctuating between bragging about the quality of his weed and bragging about nothing. The record's saving grace comes with reemergence of producer Ski Beatz. [Sep 2010, p.68]

The feeling of opiated depressive inertia that weighs it down is compounded by the sugary viscosity of Danger Mouse;s production. Yet it's these slower songs, shaped by Linkous's Country-inflected enervation and Danger Mouse's attention to sonic detail, that work best, while the more up tempo, rockier tracks come off as perfunctory. [Jul 2010, p.53]

The album is the product of a consistent vision, synthesizing hip-hop's beat architecture and sound manipulation with bespoke funk playing. [Sep 2010, p.50]

The results are mixed. The album never fully escapes the feeling of rootless hipster genre-rifling. But the skill of Mast and Stroud at engineering riffs cannot be denied. [Jul 2010, p.60]