Thorpe and co. can still sound as if they play against rather than off one another. But Two Dancers, a huge improvement that comes only one year after their debut, is certainly the sounds of Wild Beasts becoming a band to keep tabs on.

A well-crafted doorway into Thee Oh Sees' lovely DIY funhouse, and leave your rock 'n' roll expectations at the giant lips-shaped entrance.

A gorgeous little nightmare.

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.

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

New Amerykah, Part Two: Return of the Ankh is a record full of smooth, creative, grooving (but not too grooving) songs that are exceptionally well conceived, penned, and executed.

Introspection of this kind can be a difficult thing to pull off convincingly, but Nostalgia never veers too far into sentimentality to let its edges be sanded down.

This is a break-up album, a cohesive work embodying a singular mood, and Nadler, like any great artist, sets the scene with such careful, immersive depth that it can be difficult to the seams in her work until you explore every inch.

Swans always understood better than most post-punk bands that the crushing, wall-of-sound repetition pioneered by Glenn Branca could be taken to its logical, nihilistic extreme in rock-n-roll.

Looping State of Mind both conquers and surpasses the only-so-many-pieces-in-the-box standards of most traditional dance forms by appeasing those crescendo/break/denouement expectations in name only.

At this point MacKaye and Farina are splitting vocal duties fairly, um, evenly, and the contrast between his weathered bark and her more soulful emoting creates a dynamic equally as fascinating as their instrumental dexterity.

For the most part, it works.

There is not a bad verse on it.

As a rap record, it excels.

As a breakup narrative, it’s successful. As pop music, it’s either too insular or simply unable to turn Silberman’s own experience into something one would desire to revisit.

Game Theory’s highs never quite reach those of Do You Want More?!!!??! or Illadeph Halflife (1996), and those albums, even with those highs, are still inconsistent affairs. Which means that the Roots are back on track, but the track itself was never something we praised wholeheartedly in the first place.

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.

Each song is either a seismic death rattle or aftershock.

It is a bright and rousing thing.

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.

Skying does for early '80s psychedelic Brit-rock what Primary Colours did for post-punk, and both are as satisfying with such goals as one can imagine. Can their '90s Seattle grunge tribute be far behind?

It's true the band has made a radical decision to turn down the volume on the wall of sound they've been building up since their debut, but in doing so they've turned up something else they've been fond of for so long: measured nuance.

More critically, though, is that Eye Contact works very well as a stamp on this band's original turn with Saint Dymphna: now that we know that a lot of their contemporaries were also going to turn in this direction, it's nice to see a band that was once ahead of the curve still working so hard to keep their sound this fascinating.

Sift through Are the Dark Horse and the sounds of the Beach Boys or Orbison can certainly be found, but the band has yet to learn the clean, economical songwriting of their influences.

These songs are enjoyable and beautiful and pure hip-hop --- glittering, hard diamonds that hopefully won’t get buried in the underground scene’s mounds of coal.

Nearly 1700 words and I still feel like this record's left me speechless. That's an epiphany to cherish.

Wounded Rhymes' moments of true daring are few, but it's the first indication that Li's turning a critical eye on her own style-and that she's got a knack for reinvention.

Tryptych is something of a good trade convention, showcasing just how Demdike's samples become reborn with a strong modern edge. You feel like you're privy to seeing something here that's all set to sweep across the market.