With BRMC, the curtains match the drapes in terms of words and music. [No. 150, p.51]

It includes four instrumentals that feel wide open without sacrificing the band's essential heaviness. [No. 150, p.51]

It's frustrating, because behind the superficial surfaces, these songs can thrill. [No. 150, p.52]

The band's riffs and solos topple like old growth redwoods unmoored by a mudslide, and when Haino drops his mic to join the fray on guitar and electronics, the collapse is complete. [No. 150, p.56]

Semicircle touches on elements of the socially aware and a-woke with old-fashioned message-driven songs. [No. 150, p.56]

11 somber-yet-empathetic songs on Rifles & Rosary Beads. [No. 150, p.56]

When they open up and truly let go, they achieve states of near euphoria and joyous magnificence. [No. 150, p.56]

The dominant strain is melodically powerful modern jazz where "Mvt.-1" and "Mvt.-III" are the triumphant highlights with joyous Paper Chase and Jittery Peanuts reference points. [No. 150, p.55]

It's not as fun as [1999's Play], but the broad outlines comes from a similar Play-book, with Moby talk/sung vocals amid coos and hums of female singers. ... It's an inviting album but it's bleak. [No. 150, p.56]

Freedom's Goblin has hooks and strong songwriting, and the quality is more consistent than Segall's norm. [No. 150, p.55]

Musically, it's another melodic goldmine and their most vigorous, least fussy work in ages. [No. 150, p.57]

I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life is merely very good. [No. 150, p.55]

Some new ideas are welcome more than a decade into the Jersey outfit's career, but they could've been used to more exciting ends. [No. 150, p.59]

Ewan Pearson's productions certainly bang, shimmer and simmer resplendently as called for-- but these are hardly the pro forma femmepowerment anthems it might suggest. [No. 150, p.59]

Another routinely enchanting, brilliantly exceptional, standard-issue stunner from Hoboken, N.J.'s finest. [No. 150, p.62]

Felt delivers in established structural ways while giving the songs frequent jolts to the system--either overall or in precision-chosen moments. [No. 150, p.55]

A layered-yet-vintage, warm, highly analog sound ensued. [No. 150, p.57]

Wait For Love is a beautiful consideration of what comes next. [No. 150, p.55]

Historian is another triumph. [No. 150, p.51]

One of the most powerful and overtly political albums he's ever made. [No. 150, p.55]

What is by some distance the weirdest, wildest White we've yet encountered on record. [No. 150, p.60]

Wilson is brilliant and creative yet hindered by his own expansive eclecticism and purple prose. [No. 150, p.61]

Theoretically, this shouldn't work, but it does in spades. And its constant motion is terribly addicting and moving. [No. 150, p.61]

When their voices blend, moving from two-part to three-part harmonies, the music really takes off. [No. 150, p.55]

Even second-tier tunes (by comparison)--like the silly "I Love Kangaroos"--are indelible. [No. 150, p.54]

He's most successful when stripping down his lyrical ideas and melodic underpinnings to their simplest expressions, in a live-in-the-studio trio format. [No. 150, p.55]

Mozart's Mini-Mart is full of short, witty synth-pop songs such as "When You're Depressed." Think Magnetic Fields at their most ephemeral. [No. 150, p.53]

Buffalo Tom provides a warm blanket on a cold, dark night of the soul. [No. 150, p.51]

What a glorious sound it is--the highs and lows (sonically and emotionally) are crisper and better defined. [No. 150, p.50]

What it's missing is haunting songs--calamity songs, the kind of songs that used to proliferate on Decemberists albums like soot-smudged Victorian orphans. [No. 150, p.49]

On Lost At Last, Vol. 1, he trusted in the spontaneous nature of creation, letting the songs dictate the direction the arrangements take. Eighteen players joined him in the studio, but they remain in the background, mixed down to add subtle, almost invisible nuance to these bleak songs of heartache and dejection. [No. 149, p.59]

The Moon And The Village is another subtle charmer. [No. 149, p.57]

As impressive as Savage Young Du is as a musical release--69 remastered songs over nearly three hours--it's equally impressive as a historical document. ... One of 2017's essential releases, no matter how you cut it. [No. 149, p.61]

The seventh LP by these Hot Topic/Warped tour faves sees the onetime mainstream screamo success story trying really hard to acclimate itself with whatever constitutes the present mainsteam-music climate. [No. 149, p.61]

This box set definitively captures the shaggy, psychobilly garage-stomp of U-Men during their decade-ling '80s run as the foremost representative of the Emerald City underground. [No. 149, p.61]

This double-disc retrospective includes an illustrated, 82-page hardcover book that tells her story, all six of her singles and an expanded version of her sole LP, a live album that captures her ferocious charisma and impassioned, gravelly voice on familiar R&B hits like "Money," "High Heel Sneakers" and "Shotgun." [No. 149, p.61]

What we're witnessing is a woman bowing down to nothing but her own muse. [No. 149, p.61]

What Phases lacks in structural coherence it makes up for in the stirring depth of the individual performances. These are worthy outliers. [No. 149, p.61]

It's a mesmerizing and haunting labyrinth filled with morbid storytelling, hurdling tempos and rhythms that would perfectly soundtrack a meaningful coastal or cross-country road trip. [No. 149, p.61]

While the album justifies the lavish bonuses, if you get caught up in the myth, you might miss what a weird, wild work it is. Beyond all the beautiful sadness, there's joyful nonsense, a noisy screed against the GOP and the most unabashedly erotic song R.E.M. had released up to that point. [No. 149, p.60]

The results are nothing short of stunning. [No. 149, p.59]

Ultimately, neither the album's ample, artful ambience nor its pasted-on continuous sequencing can help it transcend the ho-hum resignation of its title. [No. 149, p.59]

While it's hard not to hear Soul Of A Woman and mourn Jones' death, the joyful vibrancy and old-school expertise coursing through these tracks quickly supersede any hint of sadness. [No. 149, p.58]

Among the filler that drags down the LP's second half, fulfills contractual obligations and pushes the Gwar story forward. [No. 149, p.57]

It's every bit as special as it sounds. [No. 149, p.57]

The message may project the present-day feeling of hopelessness and conspiracy, but as the medium is soulless, effortless and tinkers along with less musical substance than when a bunch of 13-year-olds get together to form their first garage band, it's the listener who'll feel mocked, cheated and wanting to escape. [No. 149, p.55]

While another updating of Bloodrock/Blue Cheer/proto-metal is exactly what the world doesn't need, it's a different story when Electric Wizard puts such source material in the crosshairs to show the saturated margins how it's done. [No. 149, p.55]

The treat here, as with all of his Bootleg releases, is the rarities. [No. 149, p.54]

Utopia is the perfect whooshing winter record, just in time for the bitter chill. [No. 149, p.53]

Even when you can't quite tell whether you want to laugh with or at Morrissey's heavy-handed proclamations, they're provocative, and that's worth a lot. [No. 149, p.51]

Tune in, turn on, and keep it fresh. [No. 149, p.53]

The Wasted Years finds Fish polishing his legacy with work resembling what Syd Barrett might've sounded like if his voice was closer to cross-tops than sugar cubes. Revisiting these years is the sound of some of our undergraduate degrees. [No. 148, p.57]

File with the rest of your King Khan records under "readily accessible." [No. 148, p.59]

The album's defiantly pop-punky first half touches on distance-challenged romance, self-care fails, siblinghood and her love/hate for the city of Perth--all with the characteristic witty, everygal charm. [No. 148, p.59]

Hitchhiker is a perfectly wonderful solo-acoustic session recorded one day in 1976. .... This is a most welcome collection. [No. 148, p.61]

[A] more muted follow-up [to 2014's The Way I'm Livin']. [No. 148, p.61]

There's no doubt who you're listening to when the calamitous chords and broken-phone vocals of "Factory" open the band's eighth full-length. [No. 148, p.61]

Anyone who appreciated that combo's [OOIOO] giddy exuberance and arcane tunefulness will find plenty to like on this record's seven intricately arranged tracks. [No. 148, p.60]

Williams is competing with listeners' ingrained memories of these songs and thta can be a challenge. But the rock songs rock harder, the swampy blues groove more deeply, and the "He Never Got Enough Love" rewrite tells a better story. [No. 148, p.60]

Her soprano voice has held up pretty well, and her love for the natural and spirit world has only grown. But the production on I'm A Harmony by Wilco's Pat Sansone and composter Julia Holter combines '70s soft rock and '80s adult contemporary into a mix so vaporous it'll evaporate if you open the window. [No. 148, p.59]

Luciferian Towers is a muddled mess of underworked ideas strung together. [No. 148, p.57]

The results are about as bold and memorable as a spent glowstick. [No. 148, p.55]

The Foo sextet has made its hardest, yet most curvaceous and warm-blooded record to date. [No. 148, p.54]

This is they type of sublime, maximalist treasure that should kick positive inspiration downstairs into the emperor-in-his-birthday-suit, for-the-sake-of-it, substance-free charlatan safe room that the experimental/abstract realm of contemporary underground music can sometime seem like. [No. 148, p.55]

Continue to blame "hipsters" for cultural ruination but can't find any to shame because they stopped wearing white belts a long time ago. [No. 148, p.53]

Save for the grooving, frizzy "Dreams," the ambient alterna-pop/R&B of Colors is sleek, clean and clear. [No. 148, p.53]

While not on par with the best from those two bands [The Clash and Stiff Little Fingers], American Fail is still potent. [No. 148, p.53]

It's still heavy as fuck, but it's also textural, emotional, diverse and defiant as fuck, too. [No. 148, p.52]

The lyrics are often stupid as hell. ... What's novel about Pacific Daydream is that its giant, overcompressed choruses really do burrow their way into your skull. [No. 148, p.51]

There have been many very good Jon Langford albums; this outlier is one of the best. [No, 147, p.54]

The songs are tightly constructed, the recordings clean and largely devoid of production effects, allowing the melodies, all quite lovely to take center stage. [No. 147, p.61]

At the remove of three decades, this album remains as fresh and unconventional as the day the songs were first committed to tape. [No. 147, p.60]

Another fine showcase for her savvy and adventurous approach to both song selection and interpretation. [No. 147, p.59]

Fans and obsessive will love this, but it may not qualify as a return journey for the rest of us. [No. 147, p.55]

An emphasis on instrumentals is intriguing, but they're the pleasantries you'd fear. All are pretty in a disconnected, band-that-hasn't-released-new-music-in-13-years way. [No. 147, p.58]

Multi-instrumental wizards Kattner and Thorburn trade off on guitar and keyboards, with Plummer supplying the rhythmic anchor, to produce a spectral sound that complements their instrumental digressions and vocal anomalies. [No. 147, p.57]

American Dream is, in purely sonic terms, their richest, most viscerally pleasurable record yet, rife with layered, polyrhythmic percussion and an encyclopedic array of synth textures. [No. 147, p.56]

The accomplishment is immaculate, but what's harder to sort out is where the real Kelley Stoltz stands. [No. 147, p.61]

The 10 tunes evoke nothing but a good, unusually brisk-feeling and '70s-like Luna record. [No. 147, p.58]

Impossibly, Rosenberg's artistry still feels mysterious, unknowable, capable of surprise. [No. 147, p.57]

The single-minded pursuit of a sound that was fresh about the time that Melkbelly's members started kindergarten makes for an album that's competently executed but easy to forget. [No. 147, p.55]

1992-2001 functions as a perfect introduction to the band's catalog, bundling tracks from its five albums with nine unreleased songs. [No. 147, p.53]

There remain very few great "lost" albums. Make no mistake. This is one. [No. 147, p.59]

It's not an easy listen--"Greener Stretch" is one of the rare songs that has an immediate hook--but it commands, and rewards, attention. [No. 147, p.61]

The band digs deep to produce 11 sharp tracks, marked by its inventive stylistic hybrid. [No. 147, p.61]

These songs--even the quiet ones--are bold, messy, unflinching, humming with life. [No. 147, p.61]

There Is No Love In Fluorescent Light is not quite as perfect top-to-bottom as 2003's Heart, nor as high energy as 2014's No One Is Lost, but it's still very good. [No. 147, p.59]

20 Years sounds like it was a blast to make. The playful side of the band, which often gets scant notice, is on full display. [No. 147, p.55]

He [Emil Svanangen] has a high, expressive tenor that often slips into a keening falsetto that fights to be heard over the sound of the dark, frequently overwhelming synthesizer symphonies that fill the background. [No. 147, p.55]

I hear another kid in the time honored-tradition of Paul Weller between the Jam and the Style Council, eager to explore the musical universe without any adults telling him how to go about it. [No. 147, p.55]

As good as IN///PARALLEL is, Harrison leaves you curious to hear how much greater he can be when he really lets loose. [No. 147, p.55]

The trilogy's scarred, scary travelogue defines '70s Berlin as much as it does Bowie in uncompromising recovery mode. ... Brilliant. [No. 147, p.52]

Offering finds the band retooling its sound, and a few songs meander. But at its best--on the vibrant. assertive title track, on the buzzy, fizzy "Recovery," on the swaying, bittersweet "Good Religion"--it rivals Cults' revivalist previous offerings. [No. 147, p.51]

Ease My Mind has some sharper edges and fewer lush arrangements than the last Shout Out Louds album, 2013's equally excellent Optica, but the changes are slight. [No. 146, p.61]

The Gradual Progression manages to keep a curious balance between high-concept art and Fox's own fiercely independent spirit and virtuosic talent. [No. 146, p.55]

Repeated spins reveal an exotic, intoxicating soup. [No. 146, p.61]

Fear not, this is a kick-ass rock'n'roll record all the way around. [No. 146, p.61]

The band's linear approach might have you pining for an injection of dynamic flourishes, as the songwriting often consists of settling on a single tempo and rhythm and bouncing between two riffs for the duration. [No. 146, p.53]