The result is a whirlwind of a record, tight but decidedly fleshed-out, doting on death but still affirming life, and definitive proof that Widowspeak looks and sounds best in rapturous tones of earth.

[A] lovable shamble of a rock record.

Fade is approaching a late career masterwork, their strongest top to bottom effort since their mid-'90s peak.

Fall Be Kind doesn’t exactly break past the barriers set by this year’s "Merriweather Post Pavilion," but it is an excellent extension of the ethos captured by that particular record.

It is a more mature record.

Together these four pieces create a single, near-breathless listening experience, robust enough to envelop but varied enough to leave you both craving and curious for more.

Let’s Stay Friends is the most ambitious abuse of genre the band’s yet laid, like somehow when the indie revolution got gerrymandered Les Savy Fav came out on top.

Even though it’s as proficient as the Dodos have always been, albeit in subtler ways, there’s nothing about this record that feels arbitrary. It’s an album that feels like honesty, or at least a very well done facsimile of it.

Who knows if Josephine will ultimately have the staying power of Molina’s very best work, but he and his band are back doing what they do best--and, for all the talk of ramblers heading for the horizon, they finally sound at home.

This is a record filled with breezy jazz tunes ripe for a dance hall. It’s also music that will give you a headache from thinking, if you take the time to truly appreciate the multi-faceted work of art that it is.

Throughout, as ever, it’s Stewart’s voice that grounds the music in something recognizably human, his inexhaustibly elastic voice capable of so much but never able to be anything less than beautiful.

Here, as on their last effort, probably the most well fitted referent is Andrew Bird, but Forest flattens the jubilant hop of Pale Young Gentlemen into a cluster of songs much darker and more expansive.

It’s the Casiotone defence mechanism: take your innermost awkward lumps and bathe them in rose-tinted easy listening. Ashworth successfully translate this to his new instruments no fewer than nine or ten times on this eleven track set.

It is an expertly crafted and detailed work which accomplishes total immersion in the listener. [Review of UK release]

While originality may not be high up on Blank Realm’s list of virtues, there’s something engaging about a record this wonderfully crafted and this genuine in its own personal zeitgeist.

The tone is set: They Want My Soul gives pleasures immediate and unlocked, a freshly bitten peach dribbling sweet nectar down your chin.

Beyond simply being a fantastic musician, he’s a master of imaginative storytelling, and manages to perfectly capture the feeling of such a cruel yet contemplative season.

This record speaks into the empty vastness of our endless music consumerism, and all it says is "me too."

There's no doubt that Nothing Fits is a high-pressure, unflagging, and energetic piece of work. But it's also fun, frequently lowbrow, and--to the heathenish--a bit backward.

The album’s arrangements are as thematically monotone as the raw lyrics, building rock beds for Elvrum’s unpredictable, but dangerously uniform, vocal melodies.

Real Estate is a remarkable debut, and I really look forward to more from this band in the future, please, which will undoubtedly be soon in some form or another.

There's nothing but clouds on Occasion for Song, but rather than uninviting it's eminently listenable; an unflinching, graceful, truthful exploration of how to go on living when you've lost a friend, of how to recognize a world that suddenly seems that much darker and less hopeful.

Dear Mark J. Mulcahy, I Love You is a triumphantly together record, focused and witty and emotional and present in the way that only someone rediscovering his life’s work can be.

The record is no departure, but when the form is this strong one isn’t needed.

The music Real Estate make is so melodic and plentiful that it could capture any feeling it wanted to--Atlas just transposes their sound into the evening.

While No Wow certainly has its missteps, they largely come as a result of the band’s most basic concept: simplicity and repetition.

A simple record to listen to under the sun that has a couple of knowing winks about going steady and treating your pals right, but nothing you need worry about.

The end result is a sound that feels both modern and ancient: the glorious sequence of arpeggios that rounds out "Return to the Violence of the Ocean Floor," for example, owes as much to Baroque counterpoint as to progressive rock or synth-pop. And yet, throughout the course of the album, these influences are melded seamlessly into a sound that is unmistakably Krug's own: dour, wistful, and tragic.