At a distance, the album can feel like an ambient mood piece with some pretty moments rising from the mist. Listen closely, however, and something changes. The album becomes a meditation on pain and wonder, an apparent duality that Cave’s narrator turns into an acceptance of what it means to live.

[Siamese Dream has] more focused, sturdily constructed songs and even more fastidious production [than Gish].

The word "cinematic" gets thrown around a lot in describing densely orchestrated music these days, but "Smile" was among the first albums to achieve that distinction in the rock era, conjuring movie-like images in the listener's mind with its vivid blend of instruments and sound effects (the crunch of vegetables, the tapping of nails, the riotous conversation of barnyard animals).

Damn. strips down the rhythms to their essence, flavored with the occasional cameo (notably Rihanna and U2). Lamar’s voice does most of the heavy lifting, playing multiple roles and characters. His supple singing complements a variety of rap tones and textures.

Black Messiah miraculously doesn't sound overcooked. It's as if D'Angelo spent all that time building tracks up and then editing them down to their raw, spontaneous-sounding essence.

The album peaks in its second half, with a series of songs in which Cave doesn't just again walk the narrow line between love and death, but ponders whether "nothing really matters anymore."

Much of the album has that feel, a collision of grandeur and emptiness, a meditation on the disconnect between the artist's intent and the public's perception.

As self-effacing and understated as Noname can appear, the weight of her songs and words eventually can’t be denied.

It’ll take a while to absorb everything that Beyonce has poured into her sixth studio album--a dozen songs plus a 60-minute movie that is more than just a mere advertisement for the music, but an essential companion that provides context and deepens understanding. But it’s apparent already that Lemonade is the artist’s most accomplished and cohesive work yet.

This is not one of those waiting-at-death's-door late-career farewells that have become a cottage industry since Johnny Cash closed his career with a series of acoustic albums recorded by producer Rick Rubin. It instead presents an artist still near the height of his considerable powers

Channel Orange creates a state of mind with words and sound.

This is a personal singer-songwriter album outfitted in pop colors. Strings swoop, backing vocals become percussion beds, keyboards are smudged and distorted with dance club grime, beats ascend and then dissolve.

["Compton" has] one of the few predictable moments on an album that otherwise brims with comedy, complexity and the many voices in Kendrick Lamar's head.

Its sweep across genres and eras is exactly the point. The time-traveling heroine of "The ArchAndroid" aims to uncover previously hidden points of harmony amid chaos. In this case, it's a big risk that brings big reward.

It's an iconic if flawed album. But the overflow of songs presented on The Ties That Bind makes for a great argument-starter. Did Springsteen assemble the best version of The River? This boxed set provides evidence for piecing together an even better one.

His subject matter is explicit and personal, the album a song cycle brimming with ghosts – four siblings who died tragically young. ... He narrators in these songs are more like a collection of lost voices, including that of Saadiq himself.

No Cities to Love& is not a complete triumph, the totally devastating statement of revived purpose that they might have intended, but it's not for lack of trying.

Hunt's refusal to be pigeonholed killed his major-label career, but without bean-counters looking over his shoulder, he sounds frisky and playful.

It's full of surface charm, the type of music that is designed to sound big in a club, the soundtrack for a night of excess. But there's very little conventional about these beats and the way Big Boi nimbly spreads his living-large imagery over them.

Savage Young Du contains nothing less than the foundation of that towering legacy.

If anything, the songs are more dramatic than ever, making greater use of near-silence and dynamics to underline hooks and refrains.

Though the album is less immediate than “Body Talk,” the choruses not as insistent, it exudes a hypnotic pull nonetheless: this is a gentler brand of body music about absence and need.

Songs melt into one another without losing their identities. Kiwanuka’s narrators drift through a world torn by violence and racism and find purpose. His voice remains plaintive, understated, deeply textured, but there’s a resolve that wasn’t as evident on his earlier work.

Just like these artists [poet Nikki Giovanni, singer Eartha Kitt, blues legend Muddy Waters, funk rebel Betty Davis, jazz greats Miles Davis and Sun Ra, literary icons James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Octavia Butler, poet Sonia Sanchez, iconoclastic painter Basquiat] resisted being boxed in, so does Woods’ music. These are songs that elude genre--a blend of trip-hop, rap/spoken word, R&B, gospel.

What made "Surf" and now "Coloring Book" compelling is his ability to let his personality seep into the broad canvases on which he and his collaborators paint.

Nashville pros help with the production and songwriting, and they keep this album from becoming quite as radical a statement as it might have been. Tracks such as “Wonder Woman” and “Velvet Elvis” drag “Golden Hour” back toward assembly-line country-pop. The singer is best when she upends convention.

A Seat at the Table is in no hurry to deliver a knockout punch. Instead, its subtle grooves and delicate vocals underplay the steely resolve, the long-simmering ache in the words.

Though the songs are broken up into two- and three-minute arrangements, they seamlessly blend with the interludes to create a continuous mood piece designed to be absorbed in one 38-minute listen. In contrast to the more traditional song structures and insinuating melodies on “A Seat at the Table,” the new album lacks a signature tune. Only the reggae-flavored playfulness of “Binz” cuts through the haze on the first few listens, though shimmering moments of beauty flutter to the surface throughout.

It makes for a raw, unsettling listen, tempered by shots of dark humor.

The band's feel for melodies remains sharp, and Hood's accomplished songwriting is now matched by Cooley, which makes for one of the band's strongest front-to-back albums.

Even in this raw setting, the best of these songs transcended his Northern Minnesota upbringing and crackled with subversive wit and the acute anger of a young man not just making his way in the world, but intent on changing it.

Newsom can still be a daunting listen, and Divers requires time and attention to fully embrace. Those who do invest in it will find an artist whose highly personal art is edging toward the universal.

A casual listen or two might consign A Moon Shaped Pool to the latest in a series of Radiohead releases post-“Kid A” (2000) that are more about texture and arty experimentation than guitar rock or pop structure. But as with most Radiohead releases, there’s something more going on.

She drops some of the emotional armor on her fifth studio album, Masseducation, which comes off as not only one of her most ambitious works, but also her most transparent.

Somehow, the Australian singer-guitarist has made something fresh out of everyday vignettes performed on everyday instruments (guitar-bass-drums). She sounds like she's day-dreaming out loud instead of singing, but she's deceptively incisive as a lyricist. Her guitar-playing, while never particularly showy, can be subtle or scalding.

The tracks tumble out in short three- and four-minute bursts with barely a pause. The density of the wordplay heightens the dizzying momentum.

His most accomplished album yet.

There are a couple of less-inspired contributions, notably the glossy country-pop “You’re My Love,” which Kenny Rogers recorded in 1986. But the overriding impression is wonderment: Prince was on such a roll that he was giving away tracks that could’ve provided the backbone for at least another terrific album of his own during this era, music that ranges from the funk mischief of “Jungle Love” to the falsetto tenderness of “Baby, You’re a Trip.”

One of the year's most potent protest albums. ... The album sags midway through with a handful of lightweight love songs, but finishes with some of its most emotionally resounding tracks: the "Glory"-like plea for redemption "Rain" with Legend, the celebration of family that is "Little Chicago Boy," and the staggering "Letter to the Free."

If an album can be both chilling and beautiful at once, Undun is it.

Her solo debut, “Jaime” (ATO), breaks ground sonically and lyrically. It’s both more personal and daring, steeped in ‘60s and ‘70s soul-funk-R&B but with a rules-are-meant-to-be-broken twist.

All We Love We Leave Behind occupies the unruly intersection of metal, punk and progressive music, weeding out the weaknesses the band perceives in each genre and saving the good stuff for its rigorously constructed songs.

It’s a microcosm of Brexit England and Trump America, a distillation of pressure points that becomes audible with the ominous clickety-clacking drums and bass that usher in the staggering “Colossus.” And yet Talbot’s narrators find a way to rise above, and the songs turn strangely celebratory just when things seem to be bottoming out.

The first half of the album follows one knockout punch with another, with guitar-centric melodies underpinned by glitchy electronics that have more in common with 1980s post-punk and early industrial music than they do the pop mainstream.

It’s a rawer, less elaborate work than its predecessors, yet still hugely ambitious.

Mood frequently trumps melody, but the music is rarely flat or monochrome.

Shields and his bandmates have made a transitional album, one that nods to the band’s storied peak but winds up heading in a new direction.

lsen's songwriting has a way of undressing emotions, and she's got a voice that holds nothing back. Now she's made an album that sounds far bolder than anything she's released so far.

The entire album plays like an Ocean view, clear and uncluttered by outsized cameos.

As the songwriter and coproducer (primarily working with Venezuelan-U.K. DJ Arca, who has teamed with FKA Twigs and Kanye West), Bjork is in peak form, creating a thematic and sonically linked work that flows seamlessly from track to track.

Misty's music cushions some of his most outrageous observations in plush wordless harmonies, strings and orchestral-pop melodies, sometimes to a point where he melts into background music.

In many ways, it is the least forward-looking Daft Punk recording, but also the most ambitious--a concept album that plays like an alternative music history, with an emphasis on styles and sounds that don’t usually fit into the Baby Boomer-dictated pop/rock canon.

Things inevitably drift, but beneath the surface in the best songs there is a toughness and a newfound resilience.

Even more so than its two predecessors, The Suburbs is an Arcade Fire album designed to be heard as a whole in a specific sequence.

Gish remains among the more sensual hard-rock albums of the decade.

Bon Iver is moving on, but to where exactly? Even Justin Vernon doesn't appear to know, which may be why this transitional album sounds so muddled and the songs so elusive.

Harvey doesn't preach, she merely describes, the lilting voice and the light melodies creating a surreal backdrop for mayhem.

For all its eccentric details and occasionally fractured flow, the songs brim with ecstatic blasts of saxophone and undulating waves of rhythm that suggest Afro-pop's endless groove.

The tension between Van Etten’s melodies and Congleton’s sometimes chaotic sonic coloring makes for a bracing listen on the album’s best tracks.

In answer to the question posed by the album title, Van Etten's characters are still in transit, spinning their wheels, uncertain of their destination. No wonder their soundtrack brims with turbulence.

The sound is a good deal plusher, the arrangements thickened with pedal steel, saxophone, horns, percussion. But Vernon still sounds like he's back in that Wisconsin cabin that birthed "Emma."

The first half of the Roots' ninth studio album, How I Got Over, sounds like a hangover, a brooding meditation on a world teetering toward anarchy.

With Burton as his accomplice, the singer has learned how to juxtapose contrasting textures and emotions for maximum impact, and it makes for one of the year's most consistently engaging listens.

"Southern Rock Opera" is the kind of record most bands don't have in them.

He is subtle rather than strident, sensitive rather than demanding.

The singer with the feathery falsetto creates a fluid, dreamscape environment that floats across eras with a connoisseur's discerning feel for the telling detail.

Shires’ fifth album, is in some ways an attempt to bust down some of the cliches that inevitably attach themselves to an artist stereotyped in that way (acoustic, folk, introspective, sad). And it does the job well. Shires’ way with words is still very much intact.

The legendary pianist sounds reinvigorated on "Locked Down" (Nonesuch), in part because he's not plugging into a formula, but animating it with some feisty new sidemen.

The album gets personal, but in a more low-key way than ever before.

Whereas “10 Day” burst with callow exuberance, Acid Rap is a deeper, more emotionally complex work.

In "Turn the Season," "Ship of Fools" and "Life in Paper," the guitars suggest a torrent busting through a dam, sweeping away all in its path. It's an exhilarating, engulfing sound that might've been better served by a more concise album. But then F Up never has been much for holding itself back.

Surf integrates a mish-mash of sounds, genres and guests into a relatively coherent whole, textured and nuanced in ways that demand repeat listens.

It would be difficult for any album to consistently live up to those peak moments, and Lost in the Dream doesn't. But Granduciel is on to something with this more band-focused release, and that new dynamic deserves an even deeper exploration next time.

Untitled, Unmastered is presented as an unfinished work, though it rarely sounds like one.

It's free of gimmicks (Hey, an R&B record without Auto-Tuned vocals!) or trendy producers (No Kanye, no Timbaland; instead, guitarist Hod David does most of the work). No wonder BLACKsummers'night walks its own confident path down the artier fringe of R&B.

The album (and the Detroit quartet's career so far) peaks near the end with two brilliant songs, in which the humanity that underpins this bleak, bracing music finally becomes undeniable.

On Stranger to Stranger (Concord), his 13th solo album, he blends the custom-made, fancifully titled cloud-chamber bowls and chromelodeons of maverick composer Harry Partch with an army of globe-spanning musicians into off-kilter pop songs.

The singer does a lot of luxuriating on her 10th album; 50 Words for Snow spreads seven songs over 65 leisurely minutes, her multi-octave voice and piano mostly at the forefront.

He approaches it with a light touch and a skip in his stride. He turns the metaphysical into a series of narratives tinged not just with poignance but humor and groove.

With each album the Detroit quartet retains its deceptively casual air while pulling triumphant moments out of the noise. It can also conjure surprising tenderness when you least expect, or turn darkly comic in one verse, and lash out in the next.

The California quintet is as comfortable submerging itself in cheesy beauty as it is in conjuring mayhem, all in service to the neo-poetic lyrics of singer George Clarke. That boundary-free approach makes the band’s fourth album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (Anti), both a divisive and energizing listen.

In striving for more self-less version of self, Pecknold and his excellent band have made an album that embraces modesty.

His first album in four years and one of the best of his storied career.

As pretty and carefully detailed as many of these tracks are, their tempos are relatively static and the arrangements tend to drift. Over three discs, the lack of variation becomes problematic.

Still feisty after all these years, his entanglements with love and aging [are]documented with wicked wit and an attitude that is anything but sentimental.

Women as underdogs, history as patriarchy, nature as kindling for civilization’s bonfire--there’s an anger percolating beneath many of these songs, yet the hard medicine goes down smoothly thanks to the ease of the arrangements.

Strange Mercy resonates as a strangely moving album about resilience. It's as messy as life often can be, ugly and beautiful all at once.

It's difficult to fault the songs or the performances, but the hand's off presentation is conservative to a fault, as if the duo were trying not to break the fine china.

High Violet sees no need to tinker with a successful formula, and because of that it's less a step forward than a refined restatement of well-known strengths.

The merger of trap beats, punk defiance and feminist theory may not be destined for the top 10, but boldness like this can’t be measured by chart positions.

With R.A.P. Music he's added a must-hear chapter to the hip-hop bible.

There’s loneliness, heartache and regret mixed with more than a pinch of decadence in these songs. The boozy, druggy indulgences match the haziness of the best songs, the self-medication of a generation of Los Angeles kids raised on broken families and bittersweet relationships.

That sense of surprise, the risk-taking of an artist daring to dig for truth, no matter how inconvenient or uncomfortable it might be, isn’t something to be taken for granted. That it informs every song suggests that “Crushing” is likely to become one of the year’s enduring albums.

Kaputt is Bejar seemingly at his mellowest, drifting through a world shrouded in synthetic keyboard fog and saxophones.

This is a solid addition to Mann's estimable discography, the kind of record that sets a mood and sustains it for 39 craftsmanlike minutes.

Its records can be exhausting listens, buried in mulch, but Fantasy Empire cleans things up a bit without reining in the intensity.

He makes the 11 songs on Warm (dBpm Records) sound effortless, sprinkled with Byrds-gone-country twang and touches of ambient dreaminess and acid-tinged atmospherics.

She conveys toughness, tenderness and humor with off-handed conviction.