Pitchfork

TV on the Radio's follow-up to 2006's Return to Cookie Mountain-- a dense and textural album with an optimistic core-- Dear Science is catchier, but thornier. Musically, it's shit-hot but also brainy and ambivalent, and more engaging for it. TV on the Radio remain a true Event Band, and the sign o' the times they capture here isn't audacious hope, or fierce revolution: it's confusion. They're the house band for a country that has no idea what'll hit it next, and Dear Science is a jagged landscape of self-doubt, Bush-hate, and future-fear.

Sharing passing similarities with two of modern indie hip-hop's top producers, Madlib and the late J Dilla, Flying Lotus has constructed an album of static, texture, and rhythm that, at its most stirring moments, can be soothingly meditative, an accomplished blend of debris and warmth, b-boy head-nod and laptopper experimentalism. If Prefuse hadn't fallen off after One Word Extinguisher and continued to push the envelope with each record since, he might sound close to this in 2008.