The pair’s songwriting is so inventive and electric that even the depths of the late capitalist abyss begin to offer pathways to freedom.

Where Aromanticism was intimate and sleek, græ is rangy, sprawling, a riot of moods from lustful to angry to broken-hearted. ... The most powerful moments on græ examine the distance between this wariness and the loneliness it produces.

Primal Scream have always understood the power of a groove and a lyrical grenade. Their entire career reaches a melting point on the raw, caustic Exterminator.... The album has its shortcomings. "Keep Your Faith" and "Insect Royalty" dip a bit too much into the more sentimental song-based style of the last record, Vanishing Point, and "Swastika Eyes" needs no reprise. But the fighting spirit keeps Primal Scream ahead of the pack.

P’s vast catalog could have accommodated a more balanced mix. Despite these issues, the compilation stands as a grand monument to the dancehall era and the triumphant efforts of an enterprising family to share Jamaican music with the world.

On Spaces there's a power that Frahm hasn't always been able to capture in his recorded work. But the overriding feel is one of joy at listening to a performer demonstrating the infinite elasticity of sound.

The Go-Betweens' endless enthusiasm for their own work is what propelled them out of that Brisbane bedroom in the first place, and the richness of context that this box provides makes it a deeper pleasure than its component albums are on their own.

Even in unvarnished recordings, some of the earliest tracks here--the innocent teen angst of Hart’s “Can’t See You Anymore” and “Sore Eyes,” the handclap-abetted “The Truth Hurts,” and Mould’s studio outtake “Writer’s Cramp”--show an attention to and ease with pop songcraft that later became a hallmark. ... By the time the set gets to the 1983 studio debut Everything Falls Apart, it’s a little like Dorothy stepping into Technicolor.

So Z abandons the Skynyrdisms of It Still Moves, but that album's lessons remain intact: Compared to those on previous albums, these tracks have more guitar crunch and tighter song structures.

The common thread [of the new mix] is that the guitars are cleaner, the vocals are clearer, and previously buried fills come to the surface. ... Two outtakes, both of which landed on the expanded Don’t Tell a Soul, are the best thing about the sessions by far—the countrified “Portland,” which is fantastic, and the jittery rocker “Wake Up.” ... For anyone skeptical of Don’t Tell a Soul, the most convincing argument for their vitality is the live shows from this period. ... The [live] setlist is stunning.

St. Vincent continues Clark's run as one of the past decade's most distinct and innovative guitarists, though she's never one to showboat.

As sharp, urgent, and exploratory as they’ve ever been, The Dusk in Us is quintessential Converge, given the grand new purpose of salvation.

Sounding like nothing else and answering to nobody but its creators, Run the Jewels 2 is in a class by itself.

What gives this record its internal order, and makes it stand out over previous laptop explorations of immense record collections, is the simplicity of the other genres that he dabbles and draws upon to flesh out the beat.

A decade into their career, the Notwist have created a masterpiece by pulling the same trick they pulled on Shrink: mixing things that might not seem to fit together into a beautiful, seamless whole.

The Avalanches have managed to build a totally unique context for all these sounds, while still allowing each to retain its own distinct flavor. As a result, Since I Left You sounds like nothing else.

Robyn presents them in a way that makes her resolutions feel both instinctive and deeply traveled; melodies and emotions resolve simultaneously, slowly, and imperfectly, without editorialized conclusions.

Offering no blandishments, no expressions of we’ll-get-through-this, Kiwanuka is a nerve-wracked, sustained act of whistling in the dark. Absent, though, is any hint of reveling: a tendency that often leads to soul rot.

A handy 4xCD compilation (disc four a fascinating set of outtakes and unreleased material) that captures the good Captain’s cagey albeit failed move towards mainstream rock acceptance.

The biggest disappointment here is that Modern Times is probably Dylan's least-surprising release in decades-- it's the logical continuation of its predecessor, created with the same band he's been touring with for years, fed from familiar influences, and sprinkled with all the droll, anachronistic bits now long-expected.

As she reimagines the through line of modern-day romance and heartache in jazz, Salvant is at her most versatile and expressive on Dreams and Daggers, choosing songs that wholly capture and embrace the full spectrum that is love—from the initial yearning to the relentless ache and betrayal.

If the original recordings of Tonight’s the Night are a honey and hash-soaked lamentation, Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live is a salve for such palpable tragedy in the grand tradition of a live communion.

Overall, That! Feels Good! stays focused on a mission that never feels like a chore. In its relatively brief 40-minute runtime, Ware takes her task extremely seriously, but she’s unencumbered by its immensity; actually, it seems to unleash her.

Soul’d Out is the real deal: a portrait of a pop label at its imperial peak, presenting its unmediated vision of Blackness for a rapt audience.

As Hartzman’s lyrics delve deeper into a rich, suburban mundanity, her bandmates respond with their most dramatic and explosive performances.

With LEGACY! LEGACY!, Jamila Woods positions herself to join the battle, bridging the gap, once and for all, between our unresolved past and the promise that awaits us all on the horizon.

It’s still a Napalm Death record through and through--which means shredded eardrums and tinnitus for days. After all this time, we’d expect nothing less.

Opens with a six-track attack that's rare for any genre, especially contemporary R&B.

About half of it works reasonably well, though the end result is somehow closer to Low-era Bowie or Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain than anything truly contemporary or avant-garde.

Thrills are few and far between amid this hour-long morass. Bloodmoon suffers from two problems that seem as though they should preclude one another: It is thin on fresh ideas and unexpected twists. Its hard rock-meets-hardcore permutations are familiar to anyone who has ever heard, say, Evanescence and Breaking Benjamin.

RTJ4 centers protest music less explicitly than RTJ3 did, but the moments when the album is most pronouncedly in active revolt are still when it feels most essential.

Her imagistic writing remains spare as ever, making a game of revealing concealed emotion by rendering it in multiple languages.

Despite how much better-left-forgotten material is being offered up here as essential, there's still more life in the real Nevermind than anything that's attempted to replicate its attack since.

Most of the album, though, is absolutely irony-free, and better for it.

M3LL155X (pronounced 'Melissa') builds on her previous work, exploring ideas of dominance and submission and drilling down almost completely into the self. Instead of obfuscating her soft voice with layers of effects or singing in that cartoonishly frail and breathy falsetto, twigs prowls confidently over M3LL155X.

On Jennifer B, plot twists play out like a delicious art school scandal. Just when you think these orchestra enfant terribles will stick to their notation books, Jockstrap scurry to the bridge and chuck every page into the Thames.

Black Origami is a gorgeous and overwhelming piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go.

Because the interludes outnumber the actual songs, it is difficult to call this Florist’s most accessible album, but it is certainly their most physical. ... ou get to explore each of those components: the band members convening, the songs falling into place, the woods themselves. It’s best experienced as a whole, but some tracks stand on their own.

Rather than holding up a torch, Heart Under adjusts your eyes to the pitch black.

Olsen suggests that nihilism and optimism are closer than you think, that what feels like knowing yourself is almost always revealed as delusion. On All Mirrors, she glories in that tumult, and the sparks that fly illuminate her bravura turn.

I Got Heaven moves with an intuitive grace that makes it feel stadium-sized without losing its nuance or its grounding in the scene that birthed it. It’s easy to love, and it knows it.

Building in the steps of Black women and their sonic architecture, Natural Brown Prom Queen thrives on improvisation, daring lyricism, and technical ingenuity.

You get the sense, maybe, that Tumor is carrying around other people’s secrets, and that Safe in the Hands of Love is so cavernous-sounding, in part, to accommodate them. Holding all of this together is a stew of feelings—dread, sensuousness, ecstasy, terror--that melt into a mood so pungent and pervasive that people who grew up inside all kinds of different music will be beckoned towards it. Ambient electronic, dream-pop, experimental noise, ’90s R&B, even late-’90s alt-rock--Tumor’s music is fluid and generous enough to contain it all.

The raw-material demos that close out B-Sides and Rarities count as the collection’s greatest revelations, affording a work-in-progress intimacy to the creative gestation behind songs that already feel as familiar as the back of one’s hand.

Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks gets a sparkling remaster and almost an album’s worth of okay-to-pretty-good new tracks.

This set is the document we've been missing of the onstage Family Stone of legend: the tightly knit extended family that sang and played together, the group that magically united black and white audiences. If it doesn't quite live up to their radiant reputation, it comes pretty close.

Coloring Book is one of the strongest rap albums released this year, and is destined to be on year-end lists aplenty. It's a more rewarding listen than Drake's recently released VIEWS; it's nearly as adventurous as The Life of Pablo.

Big Fish Theory is a compact rap gem for dancing to or simply sitting with, an album that is as innovative as it is accessible; if not a glimpse into the future, then it’s at least an incisive look at the present.

Every moment feels lush and welcoming, designed to reach as many people as possible.

Plush's vision was obviously reaching beyond his abilities when making this album, and though that's commendable--better to try and fail than not try at all--sometimes you acheive less on the road to greatness.

Less concerned with outside forces than internal balance, Golden Hour stands as an assured, artful snapshot of a particular rush of feelings, but its wisdom speaks volumes to Musgraves’ ongoing evolution.

The resulting album is an electric blend of unforgettable imagery, emotional depth, and lurid, sizzling pop-funk.

Her mind is alive and humming, and her language leaps out at you with its hunger.

Fake Train and New Plastic Ideas hold important places in the history of 90s music, not to mention those of punk and indie as a whole. And they set the tone for unimagined Unwound greatness to come (which will be chronicled in subsequent volumes of the box-set series). But those two albums, and the tracks that accompany them on Rat Conspiracy, transcend time, place, attitude, and even the sprawling continuum of influence.

A Seat at the Table, her third full-length album, is the work of a woman who’s truly grown into herself, and discovered within a clear, exhilarating statement of self and community that’s as robust in its quieter moments as it is in its funkier ones.

Greenspan... manages to fold elements of nearly a quarter-century of forward-looking pop into a distinct sound without sounding either conceptual or trading on contradictions or the smoke-and-mirrors of attention-grabbing eclecticism.

The album rewards repetition, in listening and in execution.

For better or for worse, Kind is a Slipknot record, one that has more to offer than expected and is still sometimes frustratingly short-sighted.

"Left Alone" is nothing short of a vocal masterclass. It has the singer going from the verses' rap-like cadence to the hook's curlicue jazz stylings to the operatic long notes of the bridge-- notes that slowly curdle underneath their own exasperated weariness.

It's of the moment and feels new, but it's also striking in its immediacy and comes across as friendly and welcoming.

They returned with a successor that takes what worked on their previous album and pushes further in every direction. False Lankum sprawls, dense with ideas.

When these guys are on, it truly is the wrath of the righteous. However, Songs for the Deaf vacillates constantly between soaring heights and mind-numbing lows, making for a true hit-or-miss affair.

Even amid all these choices, Squid’s spinouts are orchestrated stunts, never heady jam-band accidents. More than a canonized style, it’s their level of control that sets them apart.

We Are Monster has the depth if you have the time. Yep, here's a fun record that's a work-for-it, in-the-details record, too.

It goes without saying that the Pixies' b-sides don't make for an average, run-of-the-mill outtakes compilation, as many of the songs are almost or equally as radiant as the more fortunate tracks that made it to the five classics between 1987 and 1991.

You get the feel of two of the world's greatest musicians in a room together, having a conversation and creating a document that will carry their legacy into the future. It is not challenging music. Anyone can approach it easily, and it is the perfect initiation to Touré's talents for listeners who haven't yet heard him.

High Land is not only his first statement of intent as a songwriter, it’s his most innovative, his most influential, and his most timelessly vivid. Peaking early can be bittersweet, but the album is all the better for it.

An album that's sonically deep, dark, and one of 2006's finest.

It's a perfect way into the world of Belle and Sebastian, even if the band spends the second half of the disc trying to redecorate that space.

Every Replacements record is extraordinary in its way, but none exemplifies their garbage-to-grandeur alchemy like Pleased To Meet Me, which rocks like early Kinks, swaggers like T. Rex, and pays tribute to their spiritual godfather Alex Chilton.

It is one of the most exciting and passionately composed albums to appear not only in the global bass tradition but in the pop and experimental spheres this year.

Musically, it feels like the first St. Vincent album since Marry Me presented without a unifying aesthetic: at various points, Clark incorporates Bond theme melodrama, Steely Dan-style prog, bouncy art pop and lechy industrial rock, making for what is arguably her loosest record, an exhale after years of fitting her songs into increasingly tight restraints. It’s a freedom that carries through to the album’s emotional content.

For all its anguish, it’s underpinned by the joyful realization that she’s finally free to record on her own terms.

It’s Haim as we haven’t quite heard them before: not just eminently proficient musicians, entertainers, and “women in music,” but full of flaws and contradictions, becoming something much greater.

Amid a musical landscape now splintered into infinite subgenres, Superunknown remains the very definition of no-qualifiers-required rock--a tombstone for a once-dominant aesthetic, perhaps, but also a solid, immovable mass that endures no matter how dramatically its surroundings have changed.

Despite the omission of obvious classics like “Warm Leatherette” or Fad Gadget’s “Ricky’s Hand” (presumably because the Mute label archive was off-limits to the compiler) Close To the Noise Floor provides a fascinating overview of the formative years of British home-studio electronica: groups who were precursors in spirit, if not direct lineage, to the techno and IDM artists of the ’90s. Still, with the cult for “minimal wave” now a decade old, it almost feels like another task has become urgent: the rediscovery of the groups that did the groundwork for the outfits on Disc 3 of Noise Floor.

Each of these tracks is indeed summery in its own way, as is most of There’s a Dream. But there’s one thing that neither this collection nor Hazlewood ever forgets: The brightest sun always casts the darkest shade.

A fresh sense of discovery also suffuses I Am Not There Anymore’s more straightforward songs.

Live at the Fillmore sounds and feels vibrant and inviting, and it is curated with obvious attention and care.

The ability to live with such contradictions and give them life with his words is part of what made Scott-Heron’s work special, and McCraven’s music inhabits that complicated space and keeps its sharp edges intact.

The first disc is fine, containing most of the band's singles and a few key album tracks. The second is messier.

At its best, folklore asserts something that has been true from the start of Swift’s career: Her biggest strength is her storytelling, her well-honed songwriting craft meeting the vivid whimsy of her imagination; the music these stories are set to is subject to change, so long as it can be rooted in these traditions.

Chrome Dreams carries a dream logic that's bewitching in a way the individual moments simply aren’t, a testament to how a good album sequence can almost be a magic trick.

An expanded version of the Truckers’ The Dirty South that finally reveals the true breadth of their 2004 masterpiece.

The Drexciya reissue rightly returns the spotlight to the original electro's signature rhythms and analog palette.

Each track is fully realized, thoughtfully written, and prudently performed, rolled out with a steadiness that can become a little maddening after a handful of listens.

Not simply an excellent album, Chutes Too Narrow is also a powerful testament to pop music's capacity for depth, beauty and expressiveness.

He’s responded in the best way possible: by producing a record that, in structure and scale, is every bit The Seer’s equal, yet possessed by a peculiar energy and spirit that proves all the more alluring in its dark majesty.

Where parts of Lush revealed themselves slowly, saving their secrets for intent listening, Valentine is more immediate, grabbing your gaze and refusing to let go for 32 straight minutes.

It finds the band climbing toward some unknown peak, and while it attains great heights, there's also a now-again sound of wheels spinning, and every reason to believe LB still haven't reached their ultimate destination.

Like Ghostface's modern classic, this album defies hip-hop's current atmosphere of youthful cockiness and aging complacency: instead, it's driven by the sometimes celebratory, sometimes traumatized sense of stubborn survival and perseverance, a veteran mindset that can no longer picture success without having to defend it.

You don't get anything that great [as "1777"] on the rest of the album; that said, it's an emotional peak you only need to reach once on a collection like this, and the restraint on the following tracks helps with the overall thematic.

Song for Our Daughter brims with peaceful reflections that, even though Marling herself is just grazing her 30s, could seem like the work of an artist in their twilight years.

The thrill of Future Nostalgia—the title itself a claim to modern classic status—is in hearing her tailor the retro-funk form to suit her commanding attitude.

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.

Now she has an album that ups the stakes and nuance of her artistry. Not just in telling a story over the course of 12 songs, or by making a record that interacts with more modern musical ideas, or in how she’s using her voice with newfound multitudes, but by being bold enough to share it all so vulnerably, with the entire world listening.

Each song contains its own small epiphany, but they never quite add up to the one big sweeping epiphany that you'd hope for.

With Caligula, she has created a murderous amalgam of opera, metal, and noise that uses her classical training like a Trojan Horse, burning misogyny to ash from its Judeo-Christian roots.

An exceedingly triumphant psych-pop oddity.... I doubt 2004 will birth a more blissful sonic encounter than Ta Det Lugnt.