By putting her voice through a kaleidoscope Antye Greie-Fuchs has made it very easy for me to like this record, but after being disappointed by her band Laub I was surprised to find that I did. This type of music is essentially all smoke and mirrors — trying to make it seem like there’s some secret world within computers or within music itself being displayed. As glitchy IDM goes, the results here are remarkably human and engaging; I’m tempted to pick on the tenuousness of the framework (AGF’s “computer” lyrics contain a lot of her just reading HTML) but that would be like questioning the physics in X-Men.

One of the things that astonishes me about Burning Man is that most of the music there is barrel-bottom trance. Finally I have an example of what it should be like; Magas are growly, single-minded, on good terms with machines, and, maybe most evocative of Burning Man, have the kind of wildly unfamiliar sonic profile (reverb, lots of highs and lows but little midrange) that you get when you’re in the desert or when Adam Lee Miller of Adult. coproduces your album. And you could dance to it if you really needed to.

I liked the album (which came out solidly on the good side of the comparison to the Notwist that I feel compelled to make with any synthy CD I buy these days) but this just has nothing special on it — a new instrumental, a piano-only version of a song from the album, and a remix. Either these prolific folks are already working night and day to produce the amount of music they do, or this stuff is relatively easy to write… wouldn’t have killed them to give this some substance.

This scotches my theory about my always liking covers of “All Tomorrow’s Parties”.

Three things about The Fall’s massive discography encourage the flowering of compilations: (1) some of it isn’t very good (2) various chunks of it are out of print at various times (3) it’s spread across several labels who don’t seem to want to share. The first and third points should by rights have scuttled this album, since the first disc summarizes one of the weakest stretches of Fall history and the second disc seeks to fill actual gaps in fans’ collections by collecting rarities and collaborations from all over the place. But Artful did a wonderful job on both counts; I assume only diehard fans like me would care, but there have been so many awful Fall compilations recently that even we would have been slow to pick this up. (I certainly was.) Always nice when someone does something right.

A whim as dopey as Madonna’s decision to ‘rap’ toward the end of “American Life” is the kind of thing that would make a running gag out of a lot of aspiring bands. Earning the benefit of the doubt (from the world at large, that is, not me — I’m just in this for Mirwais’s production) means you get a soft landing, not that you have less distance to fall.

I think some of this German laptop-pop is just boring. I mean, hear me out, I’m not saying it’s inherently boring or even that it’s somehow important that it bores me, it’s just that I got it stuck in my head at some point that it was ‘difficult’ music, and so I would be more confused than disappointed by finding a disc like this slow. Stupid expectations lead to stupid results. I liked Morganstern’s remix on the Dntel EP last year but I now I find this album cloying…

The first half of disc one dips heavily and excellently into the weird end of the “lap-pop” pool (though in one case the vocals are just someone reading a Philip Larkin poem; this crowd doesn’t totally have the “lyrics” thing down), but the other 80 minutes of music has less verve. It’s still more lively than the five discs of Clicks & Cuts I downloaded, which mostly served to confirm that I’m not crazy, Mille Plateaux records did used to all sound like someone dusting furniture in a recording studio.

I have a policy of buying everything on Saddle Creek unless I have a good reason not to. The long-term exceptions so far are Sorry About Dresden (who have never rewarded me at all for paying attention to them) and Cursive (who seemed potentially worthwhile for longer but never panned out). Yet I heard this in the store and loved the strings, nor have I regretted buying it since listening to it at home. I guess it’s a little less impressive for the fact that it basically fulfills the promise of the last few Conor Oberst albums (from Bright Eyes and Desaparecidos) rather than redeeming whatever it was I didn’t like about Cursive before, but I’m not complaining.

I very much enjoy moving it (though I admit that because it is so often out of place, sometimes the process of continually moving it becomes a chore) so I thought I was certain to enjoy this CD. And I did.