City of Refuge offers the refuge that comes with being aware of your surroundings and trying to make sense of both good and bad emotions without flinching. It is the refuge from ignorance that makes these songs timeless.

What’s funny about the album is that despite all it hard-rocking aggression, it’s a collection of mostly love songs. And it works.

Benjamin Verdoes and his bandmates have put together a debut of impressive songs that can be infectious and inviting, but also caustic and surprising.

It's a perfect chill-out record, readymade for a sunny day or starry night, and it straddles the line between evolving style and signature sound brilliantly.

The fifteen-song album may have two or three cuts too many, but the core of The Big Bang... is some pretty damn good hip-hop

That darker side of Persson gives Colonia many of its most beautiful moments and includes some of her best vocal work to date.

In Panic of Looking, he keeps speech in the realm of analog, not digital, and still makes it into music.

As a four-track EP, this would have made for an indelibly catchy collection; as an album, it plays like four lone meatballs awash in a pot of bland noodles.

But for at least 10 tracks, Gucci is able to sustain a hell of a run, forming perhaps commercial rap's best dispatch this year. There have been, and probably will be, better rap albums this year. But none will be more fun.

Given the track record Clipse have maintained through this decade with their other two albums and three mixtapes (I’m not counting the official Re-Up Gang album, and neither should you), this is a fine album, but it's still a letdown, plain and simple.

This is her best album to date.

Some of the artist's best work to date.

It's a member of a rock band that plays tightly controlled music stretching his compositional abilities to new instruments and more subtle arrangements. They're not all successes.

As a funk or electro album, As U Were is fun to listen to. A little cheesy, maybe, but it gets the proverbial party started, which is always a clear sign that something's going well. It's when Lyrics Born tries to hang on too tightly to his old roots that things start to get messy.

When the songs are spare nothing feels left out, and when they're grandiosely band-heavy not one harmony or piano fill comes off as pilled on.

Sure, it’s nowhere in the same league as the seminal CrazySexyCool and the innovative concept album FanMail, and the absence of Left Eye--apart from a touching brief posthumous appearance on “Interlude”--is still keenly felt. But there are still a handful of tracks here which can sit comfortably alongside their incredible mid-late 90s canon.

With its shameless pop-punk anthems and wonderfully irreverent lyrics, Donkey finds the members of CSS at the top of their game.

Behind all the artifice, behind the production and underwater effects, is some simple but solid songwriting. The catchy, cheerful melodies combine with the psychedelic production to create a trippy beach-music feel appropriate for their St. Petersburg roots.

It’s encouraging to hear Coldplay finally tackle something timely and weighty, even if’s taken 17 years for them to do so. Kaleidoscope’s other two offerings aren’t quite as essential, but are still worthy of taking a spot on one of the band’s seven studio efforts.

Ross is better when he's more ambitious, when he goes beyond the tired hood-rap/pop-rap divisions.

Although The Cross Of My Calling ostensibly provides an outlet for the band’s Marxist ideologies, its impeccable musicianship, arrangement and production make any political sloganeering irrelevant.

Paper Tigers proves the Caesars are capable of releasing more than one memorable track.

Time to Die by itself isn’t a bad album, necessarily, but it’s not even close to the same level as Visiter and what made Dodos different to begin with. I hope that on their fourth album, these guys return to their roots.

The Outsider shouldn't be framed as the second coming of a masterpiece but as a stepping-stone.

If they want to match the intensity of the singer's emotional performance, the band needs to loosen things up a bit.

You have to applaud these guys for jumping out on a limb with this strange trip of a record, but they probably shouldn’t take up the ‘60s-revival cause full time.

Glowing Mouth isn't the ultimate revelation it sets out to be, but Milagres put on a charming show.