It’s hard to imagine a more vocally versatile pair than Lal and Mike, whose interplay adds depth to all of these moods.

Oh Me Oh My manages to be Holley’s most approachable and most ambitious album all at once.

As catchy and well-crafted as these songs are, they never feel restricted or overly polished. Each track is given room to grow, stretching into extended intros, impulsive solos, and oft-repeated verses.

With that in mind, the album is perfectly titled, as Actor proves St. Vincent as an artist capable of crafting believable, complicated characters with compassion, insight, and exacting skill.

Past Life Martyred Saints is a fiercely individual record, made by a musician with a fearless and courageous approach to her art. Crucially, the desire to let such raw emotion out in song never feels forced.

You sense feelings of longing and unease all over Nepenthe, which makes it a less blissful place to spend time than her previous album. But that also makes it a much more cathartic listen, and perhaps a more rewarding one.

The consistency of Wilderness' eleven songs is almost overwhelming.

Parklive showcases Blur in top form, but live albums are about a little more than a band; they document a moment too.

One of this year's most remarkable "punk" albums.

Before the Dawn demystifies what we’ve fetishized in her absence. Without draining her magic, it lets Bush exist back down on Earth.

Present within these songs are grace and generosity--two words I could not imagine summoning to describe Father John Misty’s music a year ago.

They're pleasure-pushers, filling tunes with riffs, phrases, and beats a five-year-old could love. But, on Wolfgang, those same songs are unfulfilled--and this band wouldn't have it any other way. There's beauty in a sunset. Phoenix are wringing it out.

But while Random Spirit Lover is dense and thorny-- even opaque, at times--it's never haphazard.

The new-stuff disc offers few hints as to where the label is headed next, which is unsurprising, but the variety on display is only matched by the quality of the tunes themselves.

Her best music, this album included, has the effect of putting one in the kind of treasured, child-like space--not so much innocent as open to imagination--that never gets old.

What it is is the announcement of a stunning and unexpected late-career renaissance; Prodigy is tapping back into the fearsome frustration that once drove him.

On Islah, his hook-writing is sterling.

The album deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk, using found sound and his own sonorous, humming voice to tease out the complicated harmony of love and power at the heart of Kincaid’s short story.

Each disc stands on its own as a powerful document; together, they genuinely earn the word "epic.

Even at its darkest, though, softscars is a blast, its turbo-charged riffs and sticky melodies all but begging you to crank the volume up to levels that will require future ENT visits. And there are plenty of purely fun moments here too.

Yet another leap forward for a band that has constantly pushed itself in new directions.

Friend and Foe follows through on the potential of their unique sound, proving their wildly great debut was no fluke.

Blitzen Trapper are no longer talented jacks-of-all-trades, but a master of one, and Furr is proof that this already-great band gets even better as they define themselves more specifically.

Divers is not a puzzle to crack, but a dialog that generously articulates the intimate chasm of loss, the way it's both irrational and very real.

Like The Clash before them, The Libertines draw primarily from decades of rock tradition-- blues, dub, a healthy whiff of the English countryside, and a few gorgeous rock riffs straight from the brainstem of Chuck Berry-- and fuse them into an unruly and triumphant monster of an album.

It is a joy to hear, and a reminder that the struggle for a better world is a beautiful and worthwhile endeavor, despite the many powerful voices that work daily to convince us otherwise. branch fought the good fight until the very end.

By stepping out of focus and receding into his assembled ranks, Hecker has found a renewed compositional approach. And on the most fascinating album of his career, he has, at last, expressed an idea he has pursued for a decade.

Much of More Blood, More Tracks elicits an eerie feeling, a dramatic feedback loop of Dylan’s shifting self-image. It’s not uncommon for the Bootleg Series to leave breadcrumb trails for fans, yet hearing Dylan obsess over these songs about obsession creates an uncanny Synecdoche, New York effect.