Pitchfork

Red Hot's latest all-star charity comp features 31 new and exclusive songs from Arcade Fire, Spoon, David Byrne, My Morning Jacket, Feist, Ben Gibbard, the Decemberists, Conor Oberst,Stuart Murdoch, Yo La Tengo, the New Pornographers, Cat Power, Antony, Bon Iver, and members of Sigur Rós, among many others. Yes, it's good.

This new Slumberland band will be bracketed with other lo-fi/noise-pop peers, but they have songs that will appeal beyond the confines of subcultures: Anyone with a weakness for trebly, melancholy pop music will find a lot to like about this record.

On The Crying Light, Antony Hegarty remains fascinated with the transitions and overlaps between birth and life, life and death, this world and the next, but he expresses them in more universal, more direct, but no less rapturous terms than he did on his New York-tinted breakthrough I Am a Bird Now.

Anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, no one looking forward to the latest Animal Collective record-- out tomorrow on vinyl and digitally, and on CD in two weeks-- will be disappointed. Everything that's defined the band to this point has here been refined and amplified into a record that captures the group's quirky and forwardly expressive style.