Craig Eley

This is music that, thanks to the global marketplace, its own ingenuity, and Youtube, moves beyond boundaries of nation and language, sound and image, rationalization and emotion.

If there is one thing that might be wrong with this album -- besides an uneventful last third -- is that the album might be too tailor-made for music critics worn out by music fatigue, hype fatigue, and irony fatigue.

It’s still style over substance in a lot of cases, but it manages to be so exciting while being so listenable that I think it demands repeated listens -- even if those are at cocktail parties.

Unfortunately, this album has too few pleasure romps and too many preludes. It’s all run-up and seriousness here, like the dinner parties of bourgeois faux-sophisticated late-20s singles, where the wine flows with hope and The Bird and The Bee album flutters around in the background.

These questions are physical as well as spiritual, and Basinki’s insistence on irregularity, chaos, and decay also ask questions of both the present and the future, where the lines between bodies and technologies, organic and artificial, creation and destruction, will continue to blur.

This is more than a diary set to music; it’s an interactive map. It is a scrapbook of love gone wrong, including ripped photos, amateur pencil sketches, tear-stained poems, and ticket stubs.

In the end, Hot Chip leave us frustrated, which makes sense since this is an album about frustration.

Gnarls Barkley understands fantasy and has created a near-perfect escape from modern life. It is often silly, occasionally ridiculous, always catchy as hell, and as loose as an album with this kind of production credit can be.