–Sean Fennessey. On Vespertine, heaven is lust. Because this duo’s pounding, relentless repetition turns superfluity and excess into glorious virtues. And despite the bullshit whispery Neptunes tracks and a tiny bit of filler, the end result is nearly as viscerally satisfying. Defenders of the album format in an mp3 age often point to the medium’s capacity to take listeners on a journey; on Cryptograms, the journey is the band’s own. Stagnation! Before Soulwax’s DJ alter egos, “eclectic” still tended to go hand in hand with “tasteful”—classic mixes like Coldcut’s 1995. ranged across a breakbeat genrescape but never lost a sense of discernment. But first, Night Falls Over Kortedala. Blending exquisite ballast, searching psychonautica, greasy glam, thought-eradicating pummelprog, and bleary spindlerock, Source Tags & Codes operates on a grand scale. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast. Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo in their prime had that effect. The more colorful moments of the Who or the Kinks don’t exactly fit into the punk-filtered narrative of rock history, so they’re often written off as weird artsy indulgences. Look at what follows it, and the backhanded buzzword for naysayers and disgruntled fans is “professional.” You Are Free is, to this point in her career, the last time that Chan Marshall has sounded like the Cat Power most admire—the doe-eyed waif gifted with an awkward poetic grace and burdened with world-weary wisdom. The Welsh pop futurists’ 2001 opus Rings Around the World touches upon all the Big Issues of our time—military aggression, evangelicalism run amok, environmental disaster—but presents them as the backdrop to some bizarro video-game version of the world: To wit, the war-pig sadists targeted in the psych-folk centerpiece “No Sympathy” quite literally get blasted away by an invading army of happy-hardcore techno beats in its final two minutes. And it’s pretty amazing that his grand pop coronation didn’t come at the expense of his antisocial snarl or the bluesy heaviness of his beats. Dreams about death! The irony is that returning to it, what strikes you is how shrewd their song choices were—licensing-forced covers aside everything here, mashed or unmashed, displays impeccable taste in pop. It’s hard rock in the form of a bear hug rather than a fist to the face or a grind of the hips. Change does emo a few better by eschewing melodrama (well, mostly) for the real heartbreak of heartbreak: how very mundane it gets, feeling like shit about somebody. OK, he did that, too. But on the back of 11 well-crafted, brutally executed scorched-earth lighter-raisers, it succeeds. , what else did a free-associating New Orleans rap star have left to try? On several tracks, Björk’s breaths—some quick uptakes, some smoked sighs—are left intact, providing corporeal commentary to the surrounding hush. Fairy tale parables of animal liberation and lessons learned through sadness and family illustrate, in the end, the urge only to beat boundaries. That classic-rock archetype still holds a lot of weight and if you don’t believe me, well, Kings of Leon had a top 10 single this year. At some point the grandiosity should turn to bloat right? But the flood of internet mashups were unimpeachable evidence that no, not everyone can do this, and along came biomedical engineer Gregg Gillis, the Michael Phelps of cutting-and-pasting, to be our beat-matching hero. In place of those virtues it offers a series of riotous peaks (Dolly! Pitchfork's Top 200 Albums of the 2000s. And they don’t leave, either, so you feed every detail through your memory machine until all they ever seem to say is goodbye, and they’re gone. Even as “Homage” melts your face or “Baudelaire” boogies its way into your brain, you half-expect whatever’s next to fail. There weren’t many portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-fuck-up albums this decade that brimmed with as much wit, regret, and wry honesty. –Marc Hogan, Listen: Jens Lekman: “The Opposite of Hallelujah”, Before Vordul and Vast Aire broke through, underground hip-hop maintained a line between scientific abstract battlers and real-talk street-rap practitioners—it was a fine one, but few outside Shaolin made a habit of crossing it. But King works best on slow-ride bangers like “Top Back” and “Bankhead” and the almighty “What You Know,” wheelhouse trunk-rattlers from one of the greatest ever to do them. Listening to Mary Lattimore’s Silver Ladders feels like blinking awake on New Year’s Day: There’s some melancholy over ... Yaeji: What We Drew. 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