Just because How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars is unadorned doesn't mean it feels unfinished. By design, these songs are understated but Lindeman's voice is so strong and incredibly beautiful that what she gives you is fulsome. Paired with the album's multitudinous lyrical details, Lindeman delicately succeeds in fitting the world into her songs.

Cancer For Cure is El-P's most accessible album yet, and with the right push it could be his breakthrough release.

There are certainly lulls among the 18 tracks, moments of randomness, and even an occasional lack of direction. But if Cline is indeed trying to conjure a feeling of romance through instrumental jazz, he's done just that on this record.

Instrumentally, this record doesn't do anything revelatory that distinguishes it from their other releases. However, in maintaining their usual glitchy post-punk instrumentals with this clearer lyrical concept, the duo emphasize the emptiness of the automated economy.

New voices and ideas fading in and out like ghosts, it's an ambitious second act that meaningfully departs from the proven formula that earned the project early buzz, all to invigorating effect.

Kvelertak aren't creating any surprises on Splid, they are simply doing it better than they ever have before, showing they are greater than all the individual parts of their sound.

Mama, You Can Bet! highlights Muldrow's encyclopedic knowledge of jazz, hip-hop, funk, R&B and soul, making for a stylistically eclectic album. The 15-song sequence, however, is eminently cohesive, each track building on or seemingly responding to the previous one.

Gone are the crushing riffs and transitions, replaced with subdued progressions. It's a real blight on much of the record, unable to keep the listener enthralled or interested.

Rare, Forever feels less like an album and more like a series of single, punctuated thoughts; or one man's long meditation. It's a little jumpy, and pulses with frenetic energy. He oscillates between dancefloor bangers ("Dumbo") and languid transitions ("Allchea Vella Amor").

Snares Like a Haircut might be their most accessible and uplifting record yet; released in a time of social decay, it's a statement that rings loud and clear.

A Beach House record is best experienced like a shooting star, thrilling for its relative scarcity and singular propulsion. Once Twice Melody feels more like a sunset than a shot of light from the universe's depths — magnificent and enormous, yes, but also familiar.

NO certainly caters to longtime fans, especially ones who rather be pummeled with noise instead of pulled into new realms, which may disappoint fans of their more experimental songs. But their cacophony continues to provide comfort, especially in these strange times.

Electric Lady Sessions perhaps best functions as the defining calling card of a post-reunion LCD Soundsystem.

If BLACK METAL 2 is less Blunt-as-provocateur and more Blunt-as-storyteller, then both longtime fans and brand-new listeners owe him the opportunity to paint that morose picture in equal measure. Regardless of your familiarity with Blunt's music, you're bound to be rewarded.

The result is one of 2014's tightest releases.

Book of Ryan is a welcome origin story, an issue zero that leaves no stone unturned.

Sitting at a painfully short seven songs, the project is every bit as good as it should be; this is genuinely the reintroduction to both artists the world deserves.

Cohesive and well structured, Freddie is a clear standout for the season and quite possibly, the year. And Gibbs didn't have to rent out the Louvre to do it.

Trouble Will Find Me burns slowly, but melds together more seamlessly with each listen.

A fascinating album where creative impulses and naiveté are filtered through a strong sense of aesthetics with newfound confidence. It's the sound of a unique artist finding her footing and stepping in the zone.

Taken as a whole, this is the kind of record that will infect your life, to paraphrase "Sepsis," one of the record's standouts. I, for one, am down to let it kill me.

Wrapping The Practice of Love in avant-pop instrumentation, Hval nimbly threads complex sentiments through its prismatic shades of sound.

Warm and meditative, PHASOR’s softness is its greatest strength, extolling the virtues of patience, silence, touch and exploration. It’s a wonderfully complex album belied by its gentle minimalism.

The album is a passionately written and deeply moving meditation on loss, and Touché Amoré have never been better as a band.

Garage, house and techno are twisted into strange new forms over the 70-odd minutes that UFO holds us enthralled for.

A more challenging and elusive listen than the felted atmospherics of Chance of Rain or In Situ, this is Halo at her most artful and poetic.

A set of tapes wound with energy, suffusing the record's calculated structure with flashes of organic movement.

The Montclair, New Jersey's band's sound--off-the-cuff, loose heart-on-sleeve indie-rock cut with Americana--is the perfect vessel for that kind of premature twilight, anxiety and loss. Above all else, it feels so goddamned natural.