For such a musically potent album, it sometimes lacks something interesting to say.... But make no mistake; this is the most daring, catchy, and dramatic dance music you're going to hear this summer.

It's a solid enough effort to merit hope for better things in the future is pretty good for us, too.

CSS's music is almost immediately infectious and surprisingly poppy.

The Citizens have blended a poignant and fascinating, personal self-image of professional musicianship that elevates the band to unanticipated captivation.

From a group as self-satisfied as Oneida, there is a pervasive feeling that, having completed such a grand statement, they will feel consummated and move on in accordance with whatever insatiable rock 'n' roll muse they have been following all these years.

It’s at once simple, colorful, and cozy, but, if examined closely enough, can be appreciated on another level entirely--one that’s both casually sophisticated and quietly intelligent.

The laid-back feel of White Van Music ultimately hinders it from being a truly creative and distinct work.

The energy sustained here comes only from scientific curiosity at the permutations offered by a piece of hardware, and it doesn’t really connect beyond that.

You Can Have What You Want is an insular recording, but it invites us even as it turns a shoulder toward us. And that insecurity is what makes it compelling.

Orcas at first seems nondescript (and as such works well as background music, if your foreground is, let's say, a wintry gazebo), but it's an album one 'finds' after repeated close listens.

Talk Normal invoke the bare and abstract, not the fully rendered or figured, and it feels like they are making not only the kind of music we never thought we'd be missing out on, but also the kind that would be hard to live without.

An invigorating breath of fresh music.

A middle-of-the-road release that, because of the context of the band's end, is the most heartbreaking release of the year so far.

Faust continues to embrace the former and remain unperturbed by the latter, displaying the same youthful, brave spirit on C'est Com..Com..Complique 38 years after their self-titled debut.

With a sotto voce that at times leans too hard on the adenoids, Will knows better than to preen his voice for Top 40 radio. His home is with the glitch crowd. But pop star or no, Wiesenfeld, as Baths, taps into those universal feelings that makes pop music so accessible and so, well, popular.

Surrounded by Silence is at once more scatterbrained and fast moving than any other Prefuse album (even more so than the blink-and-you-miss-the-hook Extinguished), but the difference here is the cohesion of the radically different cuts.

The album is still frequently guilty of some of the shortcomings that have plagued the band since "Picaresque."

CLPPNG is an excellent, beautifully-executed record.

Who knows if I’ll still be listening to Holy when the leaves turn, but it’ll certainly get some heavy rotation this summer.

In its more spacious moments, Look A Little Closer recalls the best Talk Talk in the way that their tight grooves serve to (almost) order and contain the ambient chaos and arrhythmic percussion in the gaps.

Dancer Equired is a fine and mature next entry in the growing catalog of three of Columbus' finest.

While Nookie Wood suggests lusty concupiscence, naughtiness, and vim, these conjurations are foundered by big production and mastering straight out of 90s alt-pop radio

Atmospheric, provocative, and uplifting.

Number 1 Angel is a maybe mixtape, sorta free, but released by a voice that’s constantly solving life’s real problems with the imagined solutions of pop music.

They try their best to make a staggering number of genres their own, but ultimately prove themselves to be jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none.

There are certainly moments of well-crafted, spaced-out music, but West is not as overwhelming as it could be. And to be honest, even after several listens, all the songs in West still sound pretty much the same.

As a debut full-length, City Center shows much promise and can rightly provide the soundtrack to a strange summer.

Rather than attempting to outdo themselves, Efterklang scale back, ending sweetly, without overplaying their hand or overstaying their welcome.