The performances are competent, but the songs, themselves, lack compositional ingenuity.

While MU.ZZ.LE isn't thrilling, in the suspense film sense, it manages to strike a rewarding middle ground between comfort and pain, simplicity and difficulty.

As an unsettling exercise in pop terrorism, The Horror is a rare treat.

Here, Cloud Nothings move past the slacker touches that marked their first releases, their gestures getting bigger and broader as they make attempts at emotional universality.

If only conviction had been more successfully transposed onto their music, the band could have produced a follow-up that would not have had to contend with standing in its predecessor's large, looming shadow.

The music in this album slowly shapes the surrounding substance of the listening space, building a reticulated, synth-orchestrated architecture with countless perspectives.

As a palate-cleanser for those of us jaded on the overplay of St. Vincent or even the theatrico-folk-foray of Arcade Fire-esque energies, The Golden Record is sufficient and at its best sublime. At its worst, though, it's drifty, gossamer, and chilly.

An album that, despite its hallucinogenic tendencies, is painfully boring.

Let's Go Eat the Factory works as an offering to those obsessive enough to be satisfied just to see Sprout and Pollard up on the same stage and little else.

The listener need be an equally astute one.

Nothing can be a comfortable resting point, not only for Zomby, but also, symbolically, for the whole dubstep scene, a brief and peaceful pit stop for mental refueling and contemplation of the followed path in the vertiginous, intricate, never-ending electronic music circuit.

Where it is intellectually interesting, it may not be aurally satisfying.

In Stetson's hands, the sax is no longer an expressive medium or even a madman's toy, but an artisanal tool, a machinic assemblage, designed for catching and releasing cosmic powers.

The Boris of New Album never hesitate and seldom falter, realizing the potential they've left untapped for years.

On most of Keep Your Dreams, Canyons are trying too hard to be everything all the time. It's obvious they have all the tools they'll need, but it'll be a little longer before they build something really worthwhile.

The dichotomy between the agonies of face-melting and beatific singing has long been a Pterodactyl motif, but this time the guitar wizardry takes a nonetheless threatening backseat to the structure of the songs.

The sounds sometimes crash and collide rather than meld together, whereas elsewhere, paradoxically, they slide off the ear, a little over-anonymous yet falling short of the unique grey palette of an act like Japan.

Although the album's been released in the United States a year after it was in their native Australia, the songs have held up quite nicely, memorable and unique as they are.

This is complex, life-affirming music that's both serious and playful, steeped in tradition yet as highly original and forward-thinking as anything you're likely to hear this year.

Contains a set of willingly - and often tedious - half-finished songs, forming a clumsy collage (cover art reference) that is actually more coherent and better enjoyed when contextualized within the band's 34-year trajectory.

That Ward succeeds so well in capturing something akin to escapism while keeping things engaging enough to bypass passivity is perhaps the album's greatest strength.

It is music with palpable warmth, not nearly as cold as your average techno track.

It's good. Very good.

Pan Am Stories is an early masterpiece for Knight, an ambitious photographic travelogue constructed out of the raw materials of bedroom psych-pop.

On 200 Years, Ben and Elisa play their mortality out, unnerved and reassuring, wisely, beautifully.

Besides adhering to his familiar sonic longings and rather than dampening the message, Far Side Virtual succeeds in exciting the collective memory of that generation now so conjoined to its technological appendages.

All told, Western Teleport is an absolute victory lap for the punchiest axis of his 2005 sound

Mike Patton's The Solitude of Prime Numbers stands for the most part as a collection of missed opportunities, which ironically is its triumph.