Wilderness is one of those albums where if you like one song, you like the whole lot, and vice versa.

Put Your Back N 2 It is a deeply affecting album, but also a plainspoken one.

That flash of a golden moment in between something sparking in the air and fading quickly away is all The Clientele are living for in this batch of heart-breakingly beautiful tunes, and its what Bonfires on the Heath seems to hold in the center of its heart.

The sound is still layered and textured, and those gut-achingly gorgeous seamless harmonies between Sparhawk and wife Mimi Parker are still there.

Like every live album ever, this is pretty much for fans only. A newcomer isn't going to learn much from coming in this late, and casual observers won't find anything here they can't get on LCD Soundsystem's studio albums. But as Murphy seems content to head into retirement after this touring cycle, he's entitled to a victory or lap or two.

Hold on Now, Youngster... succeeds where the band does hold on: to genuine emotions, to vulnerability, to a cohesion that threatens to shatter under the pressure of self-deprecation and relentless skin-pounding.

It's an uneven and at times painfully intimate record, but one that confirms the talent of a songwriter obsessed with illuminating his interior truth.

Less Than Human lives up to the [DFA]’s reputation for making quality dance records, but it also explores enough outside territory so as not to feel like the next album out on the conveyor belt.

The songcraft on display here indicates that a similar crossover future is not outside the realm of possibility for these young Brits.

A certain amount of reassurance in the power of The Flaming Lips comes with each of the band's album releases, and this one is no different.

This is another hyper-energized, beautifully crafted album by the Mountain Goats.

Continuing the convention-defying structure that Deerhunter pioneered with "Cryptograms," Microcastle starts slow and spirals into something much larger.

It is a record that tries to rise above the expectations created by the band’s past success. In doing so, it loses sight of where their past success came from.

A Deeper Understanding is an epic, panoramic record, but its effect is an intimate, personal one. The way these song stretch out make them grand, but they still leave space for you, the listener.

Rainbow is simply the record she needed to make. And at a time where most pop music is either designed by committee or drowning in beigeness, it’s also the kind of individual and achingly honest record we needed to hear.

Past albums might have romanticized drugs and booze as the way out, but here it's music, and the album feels more healing as a result, even if its ode to the sweet sounds that came before it presents its own complications and delusions.

A lack of self-editing is the only real flaw on an album which proves that two decades into their career QOTSA are sounding fresher than ever.

Barnes's most personal and emotional album to date.

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

Each pass cements that Stevens has done the impossible yet again: He's released another album that's both genre-defining and genre-defying.

While there may not be a ton of surprises from his solo work at this point, this is still an awfully strong set from a guy who's pretty tough to beat when he's on his game.

Break it Yourself dodges the feedback of erring too closely to its own sources--but not all of it soars.

It does two things that disparate types of electronic music do, and manages to bridge the gap between ambience and glitch so seemlessly they feel much closer than you might have first thought.

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.

Offend Maggie’s mellowness is not a lessening of Deerhoof’s strangeness. In fact, the emotional intensity of these songs may be even more pronounced than in songs from the past.

If Donuts was Jay Dee's swan song, The Shining is a glimpse of what his work may have sounded like in the future.

Like the White Album, Exile on Mainstreet, or Wowee Zowee, this album's risky lack of sonic cohesion becomes the very through line that binds the work as a whole. Unlike those albums, however, not all of the experiments here are uniformly excellent or thrilling, nor do they all live up to the promise of the wonderful, muted Satan.

The Crying Light is not exactly light and happy stuff, but for Antony, it’s a giant step forward down the path toward personal and artistic happiness.