McCombs is making music as if his soul depended on it. I'd listen to the sound of that struggle any day.

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

Cotonou Club backs up the feeling I got when I saw the group on their recent UK tour, namely that, while they're still very funky, they aren't currently laying the voodoo down like they did on those magic 70s discs.

Terra clearly isn't meant for a sun-soaked day at the beach. It's meant for quiet evenings at home, for slow living, for monotonous days of insularity, idealized but never unrealistic.

On Talahomi Way, the Llamas are in fine, optimistic form, taking a holiday outside of time, to a place where Brian Wilson converses with Shuggie Otis over mai tais, major seventh chords are once again heard in pop songwriting, and distortion is something that happens in a funhouse mirror.

Black Sun is spotty and rusted, and it is likely that it will be interesting to most for this or that track - a grimy slayer, a leftfield floorfiller - or for the fact that it has a fantastic musique concrète apocalyptic vignette featuring Flying Lotus for a coda.

To be a little more complimentary, Bespoke sounds like darkly magnolia-lined city streets, like late afternoon, like crisp hotel beds. Darlington may have tailored the album from existing sonic cloth, but at least this time the seams are a little more skillfully sewn.

Explosions In The Sky continue to tap into this special vector of imagination, emotion, and possibility, making everything that much more vivid.

There's a great, brisk evening stroll quality here, drifting imperceptibly between wistful and paranoid.

Dee's lyrics consistently reveal a formidable intelligence and a deep and deeply-felt cultural repertoire.

Although as a dub obsessive it saddens me to say it (indeed, it saddens me to say anything critical of anyone as seminal, interesting, and all-round sympathetic as Styrene), it's mostly the reggae tracks and uninspiring deejay cameos that let the album down.

II is gonna get you. It's gonna fold you up, flatten you in its steel press, and make a revolting panini outta ya. Then it's chow time. So long, sucker.

They've got all the right footnotes and they know their way around a hook, but A Thousand Heys doesn't carve out a distinctive enough place for itself amid this year's crop of guitar-wielding miscreants.

Do Whatever You Want All The Time is tepid and uneventful, and proof that the band's previous work didn't succeed solely on its raucousness.

It's an enjoyable record (if somewhat slight, for a full-length), but its best moments are a lot like those faded mom-and-dad photos Huntai likes to use: iconic, intriguing, but not quite his own.

In Love With Oblivion is generic in the best sense of the term, a record that blasts a bright light through its otherwise dead sources.

The intensity of their work comes from a great deal of poise and restraint, but as is the case with Deep Politics, this tact can also come across as strangely normative.

Nine Types of Light has the same basic sonic patina, but TV on the Radio still have cards left to play.

His flow never deviates from that of Doggystyle, but the production on his hits demonstrates an effort to evolve with the times.

Canary is less unified, but there are great songs here.

Harbors feels mannered, genteel even; the aesthetic is humanness within mechanical complexity, as the jet wings, lungs, and eye on the album art suggest.

Certainly, Tomboy, recorded in a dark basement in sun-soaked Lisbon, delivers its fair share of primal pleasures and sacred ecstasies.

Share The Joy sees our own Vivians enter into a similar contretemps: locking horns with death and with demons (literally, on "Trying To Pretend"), they achieve a narrative victory that nonetheless remains, for the auditor, a work in progress.

Apocalypse is keenly observed, distinctly humane, and predictably idiosyncratic; it is yet another minor triumph from an artist who, despite his constant self-deprecation, seems incapable of offering up less than his best.

Cherish the Light Years is a breathless, versatile record from front to back, always oscillating between extreme shades of dark and light.

In cynical marketing terms, an 'indispensible' sticker has been slapped on this effort through these moves, so that no wallflower's music library would be complete without a shy Fading Parade.

While 936's perpetual schizophrenia is noteworthy, it's Peaking Lights' songwriting that elevates 936.

While the overall record is much more song-centered and even features honest-to-goodness vocals on many of the tracks, he's still basically stockpiling scraps from his childhood.