Pitchfork

One-man noise-pop project Nathan Williams has quickly moved from homemade cassettes to online buzz, and he delivers on his first widely released LP, which recalls No Age's basement punk but feels more insular, self-contained, and unsettling.

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.