Your willingness to stick with McPhun from here on out depends entirely how much you enjoy listening to music that sounds like a meticulous recreation of 80s dance pop.

Keep things simple, reminded by older folks of a time when it was totally acceptable to admit being part of the KISS Army.

On 20/20, the Timberlake/Timbaland team seems content to set up a basic (and more often than not, bland) hook, repeat it ad infinitum, and tack on some superfluous bits until the desired, bloated end product comes into being.

It’s not so easily classifiable as “country,” but easily classifiable as really great pop music.

Taken as a piece, Somewhere Else can’t live up to those giddy heights, but its sweetness is still to be savored.

While Moore’s aesthetic interests are rangy and Chelsea Light Moving most certainly exist to make them a compelling reality, the disc’s final act seems to be the most keyed-in to his recognizably arty, bookish-punk iconoclasm.

Perhaps what is most obvious is that Untogether may have benefited from Blue Hawaii turning it up just a notch or two.

The Men have simply absorbed another musical language and are trying to speak through it and the other languages they’ve spoken through on previous albums, trading Spacemen 3 or The Buzzcocks for Dusty Springfield (“Freaky”). Some don’t work (“Saw Her Face,” parts of “Half Angel Half Light”), some do really well (“The Brass,” “Electric”).

What falls from the mouth is indeed valuable, in the case of Fear of Men.

For Pickering, electronic music is as powerful as any supernatural promise, and on House of Woo, he demonstrates his dedication to the beat with a most persuasive degree of conviction.

It’s an accomplished one, and Fernow sometimes impressively commands the stylistic cues of the electronic musics he’s discovering. But the cold, calculating position of producer feels alien to Prurient as a project, where once Fernow torched his soul.

Total Folklore is a captivating release of memorable, “hummable” tunes dressed in the trappings of noise and “difficult listening.”

The lack of vanity, the frank way it strives for accessibility only serves to further magnify the greatness of Anxiety. It does the most ideal thing art can do: it tries to make sense of life itself, without pretense or guile.

AMOK might be a weaker, meeker product than the output of Radiohead, but its compact nature, its genre codes, and its context are what’s important here. AMOK sums up Thom Yorke as he stands to today.

James seems to be in a good place, and thankfully for us, he’s managed to capture and translate it quite well into his music.

While it still has a few standout moments that grab the listener and spark a mood, it’s only occasionally eventful and, ultimately, doesn’t reach the heights of its predecessor.

Filching from the foundations of dub music to create a stridulous yet wholesome panache is something Vladislav Delay has been doing for many years, and despite purveying a rather ambivalent shrug with regards to its inception, he has fashioned on Kuopio an album that stands equally as tall as its predecessors.

True Minds continues a proud tradition of celebrating dead ends and lost causes.

A well-done lo-fi pop album lost of the things we’re used to: contexts and whatnot that make both us and the analytical process feel much easier, helping us pretend that we really know what’s going on and how to get behind the ideas.

The non-stop purging of masculinist bile can be exhausting, but that can and should be considered a measure of success, a sign that, despite whatever growth has been exhibited, success hasn’t changed Pissed Jeans.

The stronger songs to these brittle ears are the ones that feel like experiments within an album.

Even with all of this depth, Push The Sky Away finds Cave doing more with less lyrically.

There are solid structures to these pieces, the result of audio engineers who know how to combine materials. But there’s an elegance, too, in the manner in which lines pick up from each other, rhythms are doubled or halved, textures complement each other.

What we have on The Jazz Age is music that’s haunting itself.

As an exercise in artfully executed pop maximalism, {Awayland} is unquestionably a treat.... All he needs now is something worth saying.

It’s obviously well-crafted and well-executed.

There are gestures in her music that are so touching, or so beautiful, they leave me dumbstruck.

The album’s strongest cuts reveal an undeniable energy and excitement on the behalf of its creators, but those moments are much too sparse to draw in many from outside of Putnam’s cult of true believers.