Unsurprisingly, The Lost Tapes is a masterpiece in his own right, much like previous revolutionary releases Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi.

Lucifer transforms the mundane into the magnificent, slowly but surely edging out all other summer listening options.

At times the results might sound strained, but they are entirely consistent both with the principles of free jazz, from which the record emerges, and with the spirit of Don Cherry, towards which it returns.

Even with the highlights, there remains a feeling of paralysis on Synthetica that's reflected in the uneven tracklist.

Under The Pale Moon pays homage to the pasty romantics of '80s pop, the dramatic crooners of years further past, the intriguingly depraved icons of post-punk, and several others without sounding like a pastiche or a mere exercise in genre tourism.

It's a boring album, it's a depressing album, but it's also a deeply cynical album.

The Diver, in its poppiest moments or in its dingiest moments, can never quite get out of the house.

The Sister is Marissa Nadler looking down and realizing that she has recently written eight good songs.

Class Clown Spots a UFO is a fine record, but now two records into their return, it feels like this "classic" version of Guided By Voices is following too closely to a script.

More often than not it just comes off as either needlessly melodramatic or watered down to a state of vanilla

The duo has mastered the strange art of countering divides marvelously on Red Night.

With Freak Puke, they continue to embody the creatively restless heart of independent experimental rock.

There's a deep sincerity here among the saccharine, and no amount of painstakingly throwback falsetto harmonies can shroud May's songwriting from its fluttering, well-intentioned heart.

Like A$AP Mob and Odd Future before him, Purrp arrives fully formed, with his own unique, fully realized aesthetic vision.

This is stadium schlock of the highest pedigree, the kind of thing that can make you feel desperately cynical about rock music.

Upon hearing how masterfully Black Tambourine pull off these covers, it all makes sense. The sound these women helped codify with their music and their writing is inescapable today.

In Our Heads boasts at least eight festival crowd decimators, and finally strikes the right balance between Hot Chip's two sides.

Barring any idiomatic prejudices against the contemporary production techniques, there are no glaring missteps here.

There's still an eerie distortion saturating Halo's vocals, as has become her trademark. But the prominence of her singing here is almost jarring, raw, practically emotive.

Patti Smith's voice is clear and powerful, an embodiment of her singularity as a poet and musician.

The blindingly sunny Endless Flowers is an album appropriate for the beginning of the summer, all popsicles, poppy beats and poolside parties coalescing into warm nights

This is alt-country (or folk or whatever) at its finest, music that elides from well-worn and comfortable generic trope to bursts of originality, music that revels in the holy trifecta of lyricism, instrumentation and production.

Well-worn, well-defined, Heaven is the work of band with nothing left to prove.

That he was able to keep as much of himself in the transition from the underground to the mainstream is what is admirable.

It's difficult to generalize about an album like Manifest!. For every flat moment or forgettable song there soars an incredibly high peak, the kind of song you keep on repeat for a solid hour. And even this binary critical formula fails; some songs succeed and stumble at the same time.

Celebration Rock is raw frenzy, tender love, and foolish cacophony.

Generals might sound like a spoonful of sugar, but it gives you a lot of medicine to get down.

If you're over alt-rock, then Brazen Bull is going to do little to bring you around. But if you need a new guitar rock record, one that you can headbang to without irony, then the Cribs have delivered.