She is singular in her ability to be among the most stylistically diverse contemporary artists of our time, without being flashy about it.

On Public Warning, Lady Sovereign explores the natural edges of her characteristic sound and emerges a more fully-realised artist.

Arguably the best Rosie Thomas record so far.

Despite a minor quality slip two-thirds in, many will find solace in its sadness. It's a requiem for lost dreams, a 'melancholy dolly', but, crucially, Ruppert packs a killer knack for melody, too.

The overall vibe of the album is much richer, sonically. Honky-tonk pianos, lively Hammond organ, tambourines hitting all the right beats: Funk draws out the right sound for these songs and Craft sings his heart out on every track.

In the long run, a few duds in 90 minutes of material doesn't seem too high a sin, especially considering the same concession could easily be made for a release like the Beatles' White Album. Thus, with Scorpion, Drake makes a cohesive argument for broadening our attention spans and enjoying life's music, regardless of runtime.

It is indeed an unrushed, introspective piece of work--not music for a bright sunny Sunday, but perfect for a Sunday during a meditation retreat in a haunted monastery.

A lush, hazy cloud of 12-string acoustic guitars, banjos, violins, and cellos raining down Rieger’s refreshing melodies, marred only by a bit of uncomfortable familiarity at times.

The 1975 is far from a perfect album. But in many ways, its flaws are part of its charm.

Sometimes dance pop with this much gloss and unabashed glee is relegated to the realms of guilty pleasure, but Aphrodite is that rare representation of perfect production that is just pleasure, pure and simple.

Satisfyingly, Into the Wild is filled with the hallmarks of such solo detours: sparse, moody crooning, more rising and falling than he allows in Pearl Jam and a surprising amount of ukulele.

The album is a difficult listen because it is immeasurably honest, because it exposes a group who, after 13 releases in almost 20 years, sounds less seasoned than flat-out exhausted.

In spite of the lack of original material, Scratch My Back is as rewarding an experience as a brand-new studio album could be, as it stands as a potent display of Gabriel’s power as a performer.

Darwin Deez bobs along nicely and, although it's not an album to get particularly excited about, it's hard not to like it.

Continues in the GusGus tradition of decent, thinking-man's dance music.

Hypnotic Nights is a raucous, enjoyable fare of summertime fluff.

Under the Covers may not deliver any jarring surprises, but it’s a loving tribute to 15 unimpeachable songs, narrated by two skilled and knowledgeable tour guides.

The harmonies are more sophisticated, the sounds more complex, the music more fully realized.

For the complete listening experience, I will return to this record more often than his last two full-lengths, but I think he still has some room to grow and avenues to explore.

It’s well worth the journey.

It’s a perfectly enjoyable record, but it doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

Getting lost in the measured melancholy of Hard Believer doesn’t take much effort at all. And that’s the point--a point made repeatedly throughout the set. Just lie back and let Fink do all the work here.

Four albums later, Fischerspooner have proven they are anything but a one-hit wonder. Only time will tell if those few dazzling tracks on Sir are an isolated accident or a foretaste of greater things to come.

Through the duration of the record, the producer presents a surreal cinematic vision fueled by his experimental ethos and influenced by diverse influences.

It's hard not to acknowledge that Share the Joy is Vivian Girls' best crafted, most cohesive effort yet.

Exempting a little predictability and some late-in-the-game tapering off, Mass Gothic is a stunning and invigorating record.

Diamond Hoo Ha is a city record through and through: fuzzy and raucous, lit up with neon guitars and drums as crowded as a main urban artery, seedy in thrill and immaculately clean in design.

At its best, this proves a smart move, and elsewhere, it just shows that albums need only be as long as they can remain interesting.

Cheap Trick certainly aren’t innovating stylistically or challenging themselves here—they basically just stick to what works—but they still do an exceptional job delivering precisely what fans expect.

Educated Guess explores new musical territory that is challenging enough to engage even the most folk-averse listeners while it maintains a unity of tone which yields a highly listenable work.

Overall, the Fresh & Onlys have retained the standard of excellence established over the past half decade or so across a myriad releases for a number of well-regarded indie labels and crafted a solid release worthy of more in-depth consideration and late-night spins after everyone else has gone home and you’re left alone contemplating your own house of spirits.

Herren has created an album that manages to be both uniquely experimental and deeply personal, insular yet wide-open—one that derives great strength from what it doesn’t try to do.

All Hail Bright Futures might be ASIWYFA’s loudest and quirkiest record, but its brain remains.

This is a whole bucket of fun, and while it may not compete with great live albums of the past, it could be the best single shot of Les Savy Fav out there.

It's doubtful that anyone will be humming the themes of The Most Incredible Thing in the future the way people can hum The Nutcracker today. But Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe sure do know their stuff.

Now three albums into their career, JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound have taken their lumps, paid their dues and emerged as a band rooted equally in the wisdom of the past and the optimism of the present.

The daring of Night Beds here is commendable, and overstuffed though it is, Ivywild is a beautiful and haunting album whose only flaw is that it offers too much of a good thing.

Future finds YACHT alive in a whole new way, with the group crafting not only some of the best pop of their careers, but of 2015 as a whole.

Doe's vocals have always been the perfect compliment to female harmonies, and for that reason, the tracks featuring female guests prove to be the record's most memorable.

Her ability to sound so eccentric yet create music so inherently comfortable is no small feat; by now, we know that wherever she goes to write her albums, and whatever bric-a-brac she ends up playing, the end result is always going to be sublime, and Blood From a Stone is no exception.

Breakthrough is a substantive piece of work, an album to be reckoned with by critics and fans alike; for it not only fulfills the promise of Mr. Killer's production work on A Sufi and a Killer, but also establishes an entirely new (and maybe impossibly high) set of expectations for a producer who appears possessed of genius.

Not his strongest album, but another relatively strong effort.

One of the finer electronic music albums of the past year.

Mentor Tormentor is lovely in that it is a balanced album in terms of style and tone, never verging too far into the sickeningly sweet.

While far from a smashing return to form on par with Everything Must Go (their career high-water mark), Lifeblood should reassure the public that the Manics are not yet artistically bankrupt.

Kiss Me Once isn’t a game-changing album, but it should churn out enough hits to secure her place on the pop culture radar until her next offering.

It may have taken five years, but Xscape is the posthumous album that does more than reminisce about Jackson’s legacy. It honors it.

This is not a band on the cusp of something new and spectacular. It's a very good repackaging of what other new, spectacular bands have used to create their identities.

Sundark and Riverlight is an enchanting and heartfelt experience from beginning to end.

Ready to Die is the reunion album (Iggy and) the Stooges deserve, washing away the bad taste of The Weirdness.

Wonder's delivery never stumbles. His earnestness carries even the least successful of his numbers (except "Raindrops" and probably "Positivity") by being so convincing.

Blitzen Trapper still have a way to travel yet, but American Goldwing is a more than a homely waypoint on the road and reason enough to wonder where the band's imagination-and yes, its influences – will take the group next.

Florence + the Machine's performance deserves its spot in the upper echelon of MTV Unplugged shows.

The beats are captivating, the choruses memorable, the skits kept to a minimum, and, most importantly, the rapping deft, inventive, and full of surprises.

This new voice from Omaha has asserted himself as sophisticated and smart.

Twista here proves that he's a big dog, worthy of major-league status, officially escaping the label of novelty act.

Like much of the Raveonettes' apparel, Raven in the Grave's dark heart is cut from '50s and '60s cloth, but this time, it's not the vintage lineage of Motown and Spector but more the cult 'death disc' craze of "Endless Sleep", "Dead Man's Curve", or "The Death of a Surfer".

The album plays like 11 different versions of “Shiny Happy People”.

Like those old Kinks’ long players, the best way to enjoy Ode to J. Smith is as individual songs based on their own merits.

In this Heartache City, where tunes have something pleasurable to them, everyone’s not scared of broken hearts--they’re scared of dying where they’ll never be found.

So despite some minor quibbles, this is a very accomplished album and one that shows Flynn well on his way to becoming the UK’s next great folk troubadour.

Skeletons must know what they’re doing after all. Most of the time. The other 30% of the time, it’s hard to shake the sense that they’re as lost as you are.

Ask the Night isn’t the Southern Gothic masterpiece it has been hyped as, but it is a nice slice of dreamy, fluid countrified folk that works well with Fink’s sensitive voice.

Doseone is, and always has been, a wild-card, and the crazy audacity he shows on G Is For Deep might just make it his wildest album yet.

The Circle in the Square builds on the Flobots' catalogue.

The Airborne Toxic Event is the sound of a band that’s not exactly sure what it wants to sound like, trying on different styles and approaches for size. It so happens that, more often that not, those approaches make for a good fit.

Per Second is the perfect combination of mainstream and alternative in one handy package.

As a soundtrack, End of the Day will ultimately be a minor work in Barnett’s catalog. However, it does illuminate her capacity to lower the volume and explore a different register of ambient frequencies in her ongoing sound. This LP is fascinating for its introspective character, even if the key elements that have defined Barnett’s popular appeal are missing.

This is an incredibly strong start for Erika Spring, and it'll be fascinating to see if she can sustain this level of excellence over a full-length.

Everywhere at Once is an improvement over his debut from start to finish.

For every track that mines neurotic hetero-masculinity for laughs, however, another is more charitable, which is to say more sentimental. This isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker.

While the Bravery are certainly not in league with the Strokes, Interpol, or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, this record is a strong one with some unexpected surprises.

PiL still has power. If John Lydon and his current crew of misfits continue to stay the course, we are going to see some classic works that'll stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the band's commercial and artistic heyday. You could already make that case for This is PiL.

The important fact is, Come of Age leaves you intrigued by that prospect while keeping you satisfied in the moment.

As Year in the Kingdom moves along, beautifully and without a misstep, you can imagine that crowded reunion downstairs from Tillman.

Even more encouraging is that, vocally, Reg at last sounds up to the challenge of the musical variety displayed on this album.

The compositions on this LP are governed by order, but they, crucially, possess innate groove and the good sense to make things entertaining rather than merely clever.

These tracks are still filled with weird sounds, it's just not the same sounds you might be expecting.

The Cover Up is musically more ambitious than the band's previous efforts.

Rather than strive for the idiocy of Pussy Galore, the grunt of Royal Trux or the swagger of Weird War, Hagerty is now content to occupy an entirely different ground. This alone ought to be enough to pique interest from followers of Hagerty’s career but despite, or perhaps because of, this there’s little on Earth Junk that will draw interest from new fans.

All in all, The Naked Truth is a great musical and lyrical effort, as well as a timely response to the media and the peanut gallery.

Crayons is a healthy antidote to an industry that loves to package and box artists.

Beautiful things come out of this unlikely pairing, and it just goes to show that good stuff can come out of what is considered to be a box office turkey.

Icky Blossoms may not be the first to champion this brand of art house experimentalism, but they do it with such aplomb that you wish they were.

Some bands deliver a masterpiece straight out of the gate. Not Born Ruffians. But with Say It, they’re getting warmer.

It’s also something worth hearing for lapsed fans who haven’t been keeping up with TMBG in recent years or for anyone who loves well-written power-pop with a side of nerdiness.

What they’ve offered up is something that sounds like the Brit-jangle of the Stone Roses but less optimistic, a bit ballsier, and ultimately not as compelling.

With only the confidence that kind of young, pure, unambiguous love can provide, he felt comfortable enough to produce one of his most honest, unabashed, unpretentious, and downright joyful records.

The foibles in surface-level character development thankfully get overshadowed for much of the album with the undeniable charm of the orchestral pop sound.

The great success of The Blackbird Diaries is that it serves as yet another reinforcement of Stewart being one of the most necessary-and perhaps overlooked-songwriters and performers to emerge in the last 30 years.

The choice to even out the songs throughout Fleetwood Mac's existence is a good move, one that will surely inspire fans of the group's many different to get ahold of the collection of songs included on Just Tell Me That You Want Me.

This is actually a fun little record.

The pop isn't perfect--it's jagged, thin, even occasionally grating--but Modern Skirts wouldn't have it any other way. A hometown isn't an automatic seal of quality, but don't try to expect anything less from Gramahawk either.

It's no real surprise that teaming one of today's great rockers with one of the great rockers of all time would yield such great results, but the surprise here is in how natural they sound together.

A fantastic record that edits down everything they've done to its essence without dilution.

When the band boil their sound to its core, base elements, the results are explosive. While there are enough reference points and touchstones on No Tourists to stir memories of the band's entire career, there are incendiary moments that hit similar heights. By now, the band know what they do well and ably show that they still have plenty of petrol left in the can to throw on the fire.

So even though it all adds up to Jenkinson’s most human album in years, its most heartening aspect is that it’s still launched from his usual paradigm.

If the album weren't free it would definitely be worth paying for the aforementioned highlights alone, with none of the filler seeming disappointing so much as more of the same.