It may not come across as immediately ambitious as her previous work, but there are no tricks or gimmicks that create this intimacy; it’s just clever production and writing that never outstays its welcome.

With The Boxer, The National has not only crafted a contender for Album of the Year.

What resulted is ultimately an album of destructive beauty. Elegance married with sonic destruction!

American Dream does offer a lot from a songwriting standpoint, and why wouldn’t it? Murphy is a skilled producer with a deft ear for melody. But he’s somehow disrupted that valuable balance of humor and thoughtfulness found in LCD Soundsystem’s past with a more sedate offering that is riddled with mixed messages.

We Will Always Love You is an impressive mediation on everything that matters, and of letting go of what doesn’t.

Granduciel apparently spent hours going over and over tracks as they were developed from their demo stage into full blown band pieces, occasionally completely abandoning latter versions to return to the demos, and that was the case with album standout track An Ocean In Between The Waves-it looks like an inspired decision.

It’s not simply an incremental improvement. It’s a quantum leap. As far as third albums go, it’s their Forever Changes, Summerteeth, and The Meadowlands rolled into one. It really is monumental. ... It truly is one for the ages.

Dry Cleaning have far more talent than they do irreverence. How satisfying, then, that where Miller was one and done, they’ve only just gotten started.

There’s a confrontational energy to The Underside of Power that encourages conversation, and not just rapturous abandon. It’s an unorthodox approach that immediately distinguishes them.

A muted and detailed project that doesn’t feel like a grand statement or treatise—just a collection of lovely little songs.

The intensity of the music and interplay between the trio remains firmly intact and stronger than ever.

Kendrick Lamar’s talent is superficial in the extreme, plumbing his own creative depths with an unerring attention to detail. With untitled unmastered., he has found another way to sheathe people in his compelling vision.

It’s a surprise to see him employ such an economy of language, but Bejar can still command your attention with his sharp, romantic one-liners. He’s setting the scene by making a visceral impression with characters that feel alive, engulfed in their indecisiveness, driven with a theatrical imagination that’s as restless as it’s ever been.

This is the most esoteric, thinking-person’s cloud rap album I’ve heard since Shabazz Palaces’ Black Up, and I mean that in the most endearing, complimentary way possible.

Despite clear flaws though, enthusiastically raving about the album, even when taking into account that a third of it (including those aforementioned ten minutes of Fracking… ) is borderline irritating, feels entirely justified, rather than an exercise in willful perversion, thanks to the quality of everything else on offer.

It's in Spoon's ability to remain so forthright while keeping their intentions a little bit hazy where their songwriting presents itself in the best light. We've never asked them to spell it out for us, especially when they're at their most direct, and that's why they continue to keep us guessing after all these years.

One could say that her impeccable use of space is what reveals a special intensity to her work, a musical style artists don't often explore as they near the end of their third decade release music. Orton hinted at it through all this time, even if you weren't paying close attention.

It's the work of a mature and serious artist, who has made a unique and lasting contribution to pop, and this album will continue her reputation.

This is the best album of the year so far.

This ambiguity is precisely what makes New Brigade so exciting--there's no dogged political agenda, nor a desire to sound wiser than their 17 to 19-age range. And even if it sounds like a slush of trebly clatter, Iceage manage to pack a wallop of melodic transitions in each measure.

By the end of closer Thirsty Tulips, it should be no wonder that Mattimore is signed to Ghostly International, a traditionally electronic music label. She makes ambient music better than the music that most ambient musicians are putting out these days.

As it is, we have a definite return to consistency, if not form, and a Paul Simon as simultaneously hermetic and engaged as only he can be.

With a steadfast attention to his orchestration, it helps to illuminate his musical exploration of the West.

With a sound that maintains relevancy in the modern age as the band keeps true to a form that’s existed thirty-plus years, Protomartyr’s Detroit Rock interpretation of post-punk seems to gain something with every album they produce, a sensibility that’s somehow detectible but difficult to define or pinpoint.

This is the band’s most mature and consistent record yet.

There's something hypnotic about The Stars that Leave the Stage, one of the most inscrutable and forward-thinking cuts here, on which he establishes a calamitous tension over a spooky piano motif reminiscent of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' From Her to Eternity. The band sounds largely more muscular and self-assured, with a terrific rhythm section to boot.

Even if the songwriting didn’t completely explore the full scope of Cobain’s capabilities, Bleach also represents that point in time when money was an object and the music was all that mattered, a precursor to a cultural shift that made Sub Pop a national brand.

They sound as involved as they’ve ever been, the fruits of considering a more improvisational and segmented approach to writing music.