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.

The Numero Group unearths a lost soundtrack recorded in 1974 by an obscure Chicago band for a Blaxploitation film that was never made.

The Portland band's third LP, full of sugary girl-group harmonies layered over fuzzy punk basslines and lo-fi guitar riffs, recalls a time (the 1990s) when female rockers banded together to prove that shrieking and shredding wasn't just the provenance of those with a Y chromosome.

A long-shelved Jim O'Rourke remix/re-edit of Red Krayola's 1999 album Fingerpainting finally sees the light of day.