Compton is easily his most introspective album.

The album is a delightful access point to the cloudy emotional zones Bernice have always occupied, from a warm place of Snuggie-bound safety.

The production’s grittier qualities suggest heavy emotions lie beneath his sardonic facade, but the sense that Grant feels liberated in middle age is what comes across most strongly.

The sloppy rockers sound frozen in grunge time on their third release, and it works incredibly well for the dipso punks.

It's easy to get lost in the pleasant, euphoric drone, but at 47 minutes the album is more of a marathon than a sprint.

Hard-fought optimism fuels the political fury behind Savages’ buzzing aggression (timely given the momentum behind progressive political movements), but now the manifesto is delivered via more familiar, accessible sounds.

The Stage Names is much more of a balls-out rock album than most of Okkervil River's oeuvre, and also more orchestral and layered, with arrangements that include everything from non-sissy glockenspiel to metronome percussion. The complexity is the perfect counterpart to Sheff's dense writing.

On Overgrown, the chord progressions are more complex and the lyrics less abstracted, but it’s still the James Blake we love.

he band has already built a mystique with their live show (frontwoman Jehnny Beth’s penetrating glare and righteous wail transfixed a packed Horseshoe Tavern at this year’s CMW), but Silence Yourself proves they’ve got the songs to back it up.

It's not always the most comfortable thing to listen to, but like the proverbial car crash, it's hard to tear yourself away.

The gusto with which Springsteen delivers the many verses of Froggie Went A-Courtin' leaves me wondering if the millionaire everyman is simply unaware that his country is at war.

When you consider that the first song is only a minute shy of half an hour long, this collection of epic ambient disco revisionism definitely counts as a full-fledged artistic statement.

While you might be tempted to skip it, spending some time trying to absorb what he's getting at gives you a much richer context in which to appreciate his songwriting.

This career-spanning retrospective helps put Fucked Up’s unlikely critical-darling status in perspective, and serves as a handy catch-up tool for those who’ve come to the party late.

Vile’s laconic drawl and laid-back guitar heroics are so addictively blissful that eight or nine minutes don’t feel like enough.

The acoustic Clumps strips down for a particularly moving two minutes, but for the most part, Loveless commits to the stunning sonic evolution. Embrace it.

Probably his most personally revealing work yet.

With Rather Ripped they continue their slow but remarkable progression that currently finds them, for the most part, dropping old SY standbys such as long experimental noise passages in exchange for a significantly more sedated route.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs haven’t changed as much as they’d like us to believe. They still write great pop rock songs.

The result is incredibly potent and human.

If the term “ambient house” hadn’t already been taken by the Orb in the late 80s, it would be a good way to describe this; we’ll just call it really good stoner dance music instead.

The band continues to find new ways to expand within rigid, self-imposed parameters. Although the album veers away from the spaced-out psychedelia of 2007’s Attack & Release, it retains much of that album’s slickness.

Post-Nothing is their eight-song debut, and it goes by in a flash of infectious, sweaty anthem jams about angsty youth problems.

Many great pop artists build imaginary worlds with sets, costumes, music videos and artwork, but Gwenno achieves something similar using a richly detailed soundscapes that gradually draw you in deeper.

In terms of brightness and accessibility, the album feels like an extension of their breakout record, 2008's Microcastle. Yet it's clear the band has matured in the intervening years--and they're better for it.

With its haunting risks that resonate, Love Remains is a perfect fall record.

Pop music is never a purely cerebral exercise, and despite its intriguing concept, The Next Day is woefully short on anything to sing along to.

There's not much on proto-punk legend Patti Smith's 11th album, Banga, that would have sounded out of place back when she first started blowing minds in the 1970s.