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.

Specifically though, Rebirth absolutely boasts some of the best tunes that Cliff's recorded since his string of successes surrounding the international releases of The Harder They Come.

Total Dust is a very nice record with a good melancholic mood.

Despite its democratic structure, Unsound suffers from a curious sequencing problem, or what we around here like to call Channel Orange-itis--but few bands of their vintage continue to write songs this prolifically or professionally.

Om certainly absorb religious images from every corner of the Old World with a certain reckless abandon, but despite a wandering path that would find most lost in appropriative disrespect, it all seems to melt effortlessly together into the band's unique tapestry of the void.

They have it in them to write great pop music or truly important experimental music, but Dirty Projectors have to decide where they want to end up before they start.

Channel Orange is going to be the standard to beat for some time. And it might very well be the best R&B album of our young decade.

Funny, relevant, incisive, compassionate, and even profound-this is the stuff a Great album [is] made of.

Coleman's exploring, surely, but he never abandons a sure-footed consistency, and the record works wonderfully as a whole.

It works, but it doesn't make sense, and can't be explained. It can only be heard.

It's not his best record by any stretch of the imagination, but it's one I'll reach for more casually and consistently than his recent stuff.

Over five years and around an international filming schedule, Riz MC has managed to use his credentials to mount a dazzling attack on what he sees going on in Farringdon Road, and has emerged with the kind of crossover masterstroke that could outshine the National Curriculum.

There's lots to love about WIXIW, but it is all so much the band's own creation that anything less than experience falls severely short of capturing it.

Taylor and Goddard's pop impulses and the dance music they've always been exploring have finally cohered, yielding a collection of songs with the potential to be as efficient on a dance floor as it is in a bedroom.

No amount of production dross can obscure the fact that Clockwork Angels still constitutes the strongest collection of Rush songs since the mid-'90s.

The result is predictably less than comfortable, though certainly not in a difficult, experimental way.

It is the best Swans live record in that it distills the essential loss of agency one is meant to endure as best as two little discs can manage.

Zimmerman's toned-down delivery and seeming refusal to belt out his lyrics, combined with the slow, slow sprawl of the tracks herein, make Dub Egg an exhausting and arid listen, even when its tracks are so individually satisfying.

Class Clown gives us what is most best and most constant about the band--their sonic restlessness, shambolic hooks, broken glory--and nothing less.

In The Idler Wheel's ten phenomenal songs, Fiona Apple seems to lay everything out on the table.

Heaven is more like a classic Sunday morning album: a modest, extremely laid back paean to the comforts of domesticity in which every song sounds like it was recorded from a rocking chair.

In the end, a few weak verses are easy to brush aside on an album this likable.

The Sister is another fine record in Nadler's growing catalogue, yet one tied more to the well-trodden tropes (lyrically, stylistically) she's built her name on than we've grown accustomed.

The Dreamer is a very traditional record, straight-up pop with a tinge of alt-country. It's easy company, a warm and thoroughly enjoyable summer listen.

AlunaGeorge can still be both pop and provocative, they just haven't hit on a reason to be so quite yet.

Banks is often all the more mesmerizing when she leaves the beef on the back-burner and takes stock of her influences.

He's pushing himself ever so slightly, and while it might not be enough to draw in the unconverted, the rest of us will want to stick around for more.

El-P's always been ahead of the curve but Cancer for Cure isn't valuable for its prescience so much as its currency of the now and the way it unites rap head nostalgia for the future beats of the past with the beats of the present.

With El-P's help, Killer Mike has produced his first unquestionably great Album.

Everything that makes Shackleton's sound a singular one is on proud display through this extensive compilation of new material.

Vocals seem to serve The Diver much better the more they're respected as atmospheric elements in addition to interesting texts, and the band make good on that necessary compromise throughout.

There is a vital something absent; reassuringly, though, the greatness that eludes awE naturalE doesn't feel like something THEESatisfaction will never "morph" into.

The style of songwriting is remarkably similar to that found on Teen Dream. Yet neither suffers much for it.

When it's good, it doesn't get much better.

For the most part, it works.

A welcome new start for this talented band.

As far as drone or ambient records go, Black Mesa is accessible and melodious.

As is scene tradition, these three don't make it easy to find the proverbial diamonds in their artistic rough, but dispatches such as Imikuzushi make a frustrating journey seem that much more satisfying.

The first four or so tracks of Sees the Light hold their own in terms of melody and momentum....Unfortunately, Sees the Light devolves from there into full-on, committed homogeneity, songs blending into each other with little to set them apart

A textbook example of restrained, stylish writing, Here We Go Magic have found their muse: a 40-something producer from England who just knows well enough to get out of the way.

It is, itself, a joyful record, prickly and playful and sometimes downright bizarre, but never less than welcoming.

There really aren't any bad or outright boring songs here, though Castlemusic's very best moments are largely front-loaded.

It provides the kind of visceral excitement absent in so many of those other albums.

His [Kurt Ballou's] success here makes De Vermis Mysteriis the closest thing to a standout that the High on Fire catalog can claim, and the band makes good on what Ballou brings to the table.

Hair is more of a juicy stew than a straight-up throwback record.

YT // ST is a record of violence and of harmony alike, both musical and otherwise. A record that explores the shifting terrain between "A Star Over Pureland" and the scorched earth of a lightning strike. A lightning strike of a record.

It's not the sort of thing one pins their organic, folksy dreams upon, though you get the sense it was born out of that interest and perhaps lost its way over time.

Kill for Love may not be nearly as focused and razor-sharp as Night Drive, but it's twice as much fun and just as confidently personalized--just as purely Chromatics.

It's just wonderfully consistent, satisfyingly familiar.

It's easily one of the strongest efforts of 2012 thus far.

What Fortino and Harris have done here and across Foreign Body is construct a kind of suspended reality, where the consequences of day-to-day life fail to adhere to their distended sense of duration.

A relatively straightforward rock record with no shortage of epic flourishes and catchy choruses.

The music of The Iron Gates at Throop and Newport is about as universal as this stuff gets.

Clumsy it might be, familiar it might be; redundant it sure isn't quite yet.

Built as they are on rock 'n' roll clichés, these songs hold the listener at a distance. It's a bit of fun, but nothing more. Unlike their influences, something about this band doesn't really stick.

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

Habits & Contradictions is a pleasurable listen with head-scratchingly pretty samplings and lyrics more or less liberated from value care of Q's devotion to "weed and brews" and the delirious enjoyment of something so simple as saying "fuck" a lot.

Even reduced to a proper ten songs, Revolution is still a bit front-loaded, if only because the band will never be as adept at slow atmosphere as they are upbeat rock.

If dubstep is dead, then Burial is some magnificent tower of dust and light built on the remains.

With Julia Holter, with this profound and inexhaustibly gorgeous album, we can transcend our own transcendence and find the greatest bliss in the joyful renunciation of what makes us us.

The sparsity of their arrangements allows textures--the shushing of brushes on the snare, the scratch of the violin, the edge of distortion on the guitar--to shine through.

It is maybe a bit surprising that it's so damned interesting to listen to, and that, along with everything else on The Something Rain, is a powerful testament to the skill of the musicians Staples has surrounded himself with.

If this isn't the most mature mixtape K.R.I.T.'s produced yet, it may very well be his most honest, and coming from this guy, that's high praise indeed.

The best way to package this album-Flying Lotus, Madlib, and Ian Curtis in the weirdest musical threesome ever tailored for the likes of DOOM and Ghostface Killah-as the normal routes of genre identification don't quite do it here.

In a graceful return to form, Jan and Andi make it clear that they're as present as ever, ready to jump into the game like it hasn't been six years since we last met.

Arrow, the band's fourth album, doesn't differ significantly from their prior efforts, though the fiddle and pedal steel flourishes of 2009's rootsy The Mountain have been largely excised in favor of more hot shit guitar soloing care of new recruit Mark Nathan.

It is a bright and rousing thing.

For all its supposed politeness, this is distinct, sharp music.

Blues Funeral generally succeeds because Lanegan knows exactly what his audience wants and is willing to play to his strengths.

As one may ascertain, the world of the Caretaker is a potential rabbit hole of nostalgia, anxiety, and all manner of undisclosed obsessions, but a distinct sense of calm washes over the best of this material.

For all its seriousness, it's the absence of big moments and Hadreas' refusal to give in to easy outs that make what he does so compelling.

Frankie's doesn't bear the weight of an obviously solo effort and at once succeeds in creating music that rivals any full-band effort from any of her peers.

The band manages throughout Onwards to the Wall to keep things just about as industrial as they can get. And without abandoning pop for metal by always maintaining a strict allegiance to simplicity.

This album creates that space, where both that source of fear and joy are simultaneous, inevitable, and sublime.

Mr. M is something to behold in its details: the kind of record that seems to open up gradually over time, graceful and pretty sure but brimming subcutaneously with many yet-undiscovered pleasures.

This attention to economy marks these records [I Don't Rock At All and Man With Potential] as two of Swanson's most digestible and re-playable releases to date.

From the ground up, Plumb is through and through the work of a band that has absolutely mastered its craft.

The Russian Wilds is a demonstrative bid for being taken seriously, and these guys simply exhibit too much enthusiasm to be relegated to mere also-rans in the long shadow of Miller's previous band.

Pretty but not boring, eclectic but not overindulgent, Cyrk is the work of an artist still messing with all the possibilities in front of her.

Wong is at the apex of his songwriting. This is not to be missed.

It's hungry, vicious synergy that the Detroit duo's got going here and one can only hope that it's something they can eventually translate into something longer than an EP, or at least something with more depth.

There is always a feeling of constructive clarification at the heart of Clay Class, and that reappraisal of the traditional sense of progress is something that is cemented by the ideology shining through the holes that Prinzhorn Dance School so artfully poke through the fourth wall.

The Horror is one of the label's most tenacious offerings yet.

It simply, like her two (arguably better) albums before them, hurts too good to be ignored.

With Clear Heart Full Eyes he's established himself, tentatively, as a man apart from his band.

While sonically it's different from anything else on Rich Forever, it's a product of the same insecurity machine that produces the rest of the tape's insistent cajoling.

Visions is exactly what it sounds like: it's an aesthetic and conceptual vision, one utterly unique to Boucher, and it's both strange and satisfying.

The record's understandable missteps are minor in comparison to its joyful evocations, and though Lindstrøm seems to be attempting to approach new territory, he does it in considerate measures and comes away with something that still makes perfect sense.

What could come off as a gimmick, however, instead plays like a focused foray into day-glo disco.

Though its pleasures may not be quite as direct as his work with Crayon Fields, and its tempos remain thoroughly slow, it remains a standout among a rapidly-increasing number of hardware and software-driven thrillseekers, more than ample evidence that O'Connor's work is worth taking notice of.

Baldi manages to find a comfortable place in between the all-potential pleasure-all-the-time approach of his first two records and the potential for all-out sad dude sonic violence, delivering a criticism of and break-up message to computer music by jettisoning every aspect of his work that could possibly be labeled as such.

Better to think of this one as a purposefully delineated double A-side.

Nada Surf have not reached outside their comfort zone with The Stars are Indifferent to Astronomy.

The ubiquity of the Weeknd has saturated their latest mixtape, and ultimately Echoes of Silence struggles under that ubiquity.

Too bad, then, that I Love You is underdeveloped.

Chairlift are perfectly capable of producing a really good album; Something just isn't it.

It's not so much disorienting as it is illuminating to revisit ØØ Void, Sunn O)))'s second release from 2000, recently reissued by Southern Lord. After all, it sounds exactly as you remember-or exactly as you'd imagine-which is to say: glacial-slow riffs, suffocating drones, mind-numbing minimalism.

Though at times deeply affecting, Voyageur is not the great statement of a record one might hope for after a four-year absence.