He's related to John Coltrane, he's tight with Thom Yorke, so it's fitting that L.A. hip-hop surrealist Steven Ellison is a restless experimenter with an ear for forlorn beauty. The shape-shifting tracks on his third disc incorporate braying dub-step beats, nature-film-soundtrack atmospherics, fern-bar R&B and free jazz, often on top of each other. There's some info overload, but Ellison is an ace with pacing, and a distracted soulfulness guides the frantic laptop science. When Yorke emerges to moan, "I need to know you're out there," on ". . . And the World Laughs With You," he offers what might be an epigram for the album.

“Karma Chameleon”

Boy George has said this song was about standing by what you believe in. However, at the time, he was involved in a secret affair with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. "Now people can understand the songs better," he said. "They were written about my relationship with Jon, and they were also written about being a gay man in a homophobic world." The lines "If I listen to your lies, would you say/I'm a man without conviction/I'm a man who doesn't know how to sell a contradiction," described his life at the time, he said. "I was selling this big lie."