It's a brand of nostalgia concocted from listless energy, a wandering jumble of drums, soothing, eyes-closed croons, sighs and elastic vocals that recall different influences at every turn.

After a year-long medical hiatus, the band returns with Outside, an album that shows the group putting much more effort into melody and song construction but holding onto the same energy and dark mood as before.

The meat of Still Living isn't its quirks or vibes-it's the songwriting itself, and since the album fills two LPs and almost an hour of play-time, it has a whole lot of that.

This isn't happy-go-lucky music; these are sounds reserved for darkly tainted dance floors, where smiles aren't a part of the dress code.

For all the cutesieness that can subsume this sub-genre, it’s refreshing to see a band that can play it with a little R’n’R swagger and not just as a set-up for condescending kvetching and pink-hued album covers.

The compilation moves like a mixtape and the tracks work better together than individually.

Despite its excesses and missteps, the album gives Big Boi room to be Big Boi.

The trio proves it has a fat bag of tricks: floaty fast rhymes (Get’n Drunk), high gravity boom bap (Troublesome) and haunting alien lullabies (Nobody). But the fact that it’s Earl Sweatshirt’s heavy-lidded guest verse in Cold World that’s still stuck in my head probably means MellowHigh still has a few kinks to work out.

They leave Soft Moon's second album on a multi-faceted, adventurous note, though one that remains dark and eerie.

The issue on here is that not enough tracks combine both of these two, cool, newfound elements--Kinsella’s vocal and lyrical growth and the expert jamming that surfaces throughout.

The EP's only weakness comes in the form of "City."

All three members take to the LP's nine tracks with post-punk minimalism and as tracks draw on and the elements begin to take on a cohesive shape, it appears that by attacking with less, Little Joy inevitably comes together as more.

Having developed feelers on both ends, the partnership's combined strengths via production chops and band practice really lend to the record's debut maturity.

The synths are so smooth sounding that after a few moments they begin to lull you but not into sleep. This is way too dark of a place for sleep; it seems more like hypnosis.

It doesn’t push boundaries in the same way that Feel It Break busted up notions of genres, but its smooth production stabilizes the lyrics’ emotional bombast.

The album, titled Grace/Confusion, offers the chillwave sound that Hawk is known for but with a fuller, crisper and more melodic take.

This is part of Arcade Dynamics' charm: The release is pop-friendly with few tracks making the three-minute mark, until the fuzz of ambient outro "Porch Projector" kicks in.

Though the album overstays some of its freshness by the closing tracks, nearly everything Winston sings up to "Sister Wife" adds an inspired spin on common pop idioms.

Thematically, the album is rich and varied, but there is a slight inability to maintain a through-line musically that can prove to be jarring on occasion.

Ra Ra Riot's third LP, Beta Love, is a lot like a colorful box of candy--a bright and infectious collection of songs that hooks you on first taste.

Taken as it is, this is a great summer’s coming album, the most fresh guitar pop record of the year, though it might be a bit too bright at times.

In addition to sharpening the lyrical content, Soft Will has some of the group’s complex and multifaceted bits of rock assemblage. There’s a confidence and control to the playing on this album.

A Place To Bury Strangers succeeds in one aspect: It produces music so hammering and explosively airy that it crumbles the very walls used to create such an echoed and amplified sound. It just fails to recognize that in doing so for almost 45-minutes straight, we begin to feel like we're getting buried alive under the rubble.

Taiga marks Danilova’s own internal struggle to continue to carve out her own musical path. And so far, so good.

In an increasingly bleak post-recession climate, jagged and somber post-punk seems a rather fitting lens, and Prinzhorn Dance School has mastered its execution.

On an album so concerned with straddling the invisible borders between the material and the spiritual, Wexler's disembodied voice becomes most powerful when seeping through space like a ghost in the machine, mysterious and ubiquitous as the existential questions he sings to life.

The trio’s past experiences may explain how it manages to exercise a seasoned talent for both variety and control.... The two “Recover” remixes, by Austria’s Cid Rim and U.K.-based Curxes, are filler. They’re pleasant on their own, but neither can hold up to the original.