Helena Costas and Danger Mouse combine the former’s folk pop proclivities with the latter’s penchant for hip-hop and psychedelia, and the results are mostly awkward and cumbersome.

I find myself disappointed with Plague Park despite its elusive initial luster. The good news is it’s an easy fix: Hire a band.

Life is Sweet! depicts a gifted artist taking a very solid step on the road to self-discovery. He's just wrestling with the palpable anxiety of influence at the moment.

Despite To Rococo Rot's placid rejection of any exceptionally radical artistic statement, there is a grace and deft care taken on the record not to buoy the stately jams with textural shifts, but to interlock the two in an elegant way that's impressive to the discerning listener. Nevertheless, this is a somewhat uninspiring recording.

Possibly the most confident and successful of this third phase of Black Dice, the pieces here make no claims to exist as anything but the welcoming and obtuse freaks of rhythms gone awry.

Barter 6 is an obvious, tight application of Thug’s lawless style brought into the space of a linear album, letting his flow drip and collect in horizontal spaces, as opposed to being sharply crafted like in his iconic hits, “Stoner,” “Danny Glover,” and “Lifestyle.”

TRST is a f**king great dance record. While it is so much more than this as well, considering the negative connotations "dance" can have within much music discourse, it's initially, at least, the album's most notable appeal.

While Franciotti's work is far from unique in its revival both of lo-fi synth panoramas and of ambient experimentalism, the combination and alternation of the two allows Forever a certain originality beyond other musicians mining either one or the other vein.

It’s good because, beneath his relentless hedonistic pursuits and idealistic belief in the nobility of the unruly drum loops, Future preserves a romantic’s perspective on his panoply of inconsequential street life and crystalline musings from within the studio.

The guitars are jangly and questionably tuned; the drums are doused in whiskey but always manage to keep the train moving; and the vocals are passionately out-of-key but always a perfect companion to the aesthetic and historical world they float within.

While keeping the same mix of hushed beauty and spooky old-time feel, Holland seems much more direct and confident, a forwardness that risks losing some of the mystery, but instead ups the awe factor.

Slowly, quietly, with near-complete calm, Fall Forever edges the listener into that space of total fragility.

The lyrics here are sparse and, as with most of the album, indiscernible. It’s rare that a rock album could be so enjoyable without a great presence of the English language, but Person to Person certainly is.

The problem is that what’s left--the imagined everything about this record--is that it just sounds like someone lamenting a one-night stand that ended too soon, some kind of physical communication that feels like it could have gone so much deeper and become so much more emotional.

Zonoscope is far from an outright failure, just more severe of a backslide than expected.

The LP isn’t internally coherent, isn’t particularly successful on its own terms, which is probably more of a sin than any imputed association with this or that philosophy could ever be.

Gold Panda shows himself to be a more mature, more skilled architect of sound, creating vast textures that expertly render the materiality of his samples.

Their most concise yet dense and appealing album since their first non-album, Description Of The Harbor.

Ultimately, Nas’ decision to sacrifice lyrical and aesthetic sensibility for controversy, hype, and pop-appeal exposes the commodification and hollowness of his artistic voice and vision.

Listening to this album suggests a universe of unheard information beyond the reach of understanding and perception, of phenomena both too brief and too enormous for us to comprehend.

So what if Scissor Sisters aren't challenging the conventions of pop music?... [Ta-Dah is] great and will please their fans.

Skeletal Lamping is by no means a bad album; rather, after such an organic and fully realized career milestone as Hissing Fauna, the difficulty of finding a new direction is a creatively arduous one, and of Montreal’s experimentation here is notable overall.

All of the delicate, precious tom buildups that segue into invariably lofty choruses, all laced with the same pining slide guitars, overlay the record with a strummy, mid-tempo delirium that sets in once the considerable swagger of the first three tracks wears off.

Splazsh evokes mood on a larger scale than Hazyville, increasing possibilities by stepping up production technique and stylistic variety, but it continues to focus on music's effect on the mind by allowing technique to undermine and contradict itself.

What you will get with From A Compound Eye is your typical gourmet spread of Pollard delicacies from the modern eras of Bob.

These tracks are lifeless, and the multitude of sounds turns to mud, eventually eating itself.

They’ve become one of the most prolific staples of the American underground. And it’s there that Nude With Boots is a sound and welcome contribution.

Lily’s nonchalant declarations of self-esteem leave me cold. And as soon as she traded generically upbeat ska/reggae samples for a bunch of ho-hum electropop beats, she became indistinguishable from her imitators.