Even though A Constant Sea is arguably somewhat conservative in its regurgitation of established tropes and forms, the execution of its inherited framework predominantly unfurls with confidence and clout.

With his inoffensive voice and inoffensive beats (surprisingly so, considering their producers), Bodan does, if only for a brief time, achieve something exciting and intimat

This 18-track monster drives home one point more than any other: Ryan Adams needs a fucking editor.

Despite its prickly sonics and inaccessible veneer, Isa takes recourse to a privilege of gratuitous futurity, a privilege its cold sheen blinds itself from registering.

There are sounds, but are they melodies? Yes and no. We hear these sounds and get awed by how Lord Raja manages to suspend the belief that they, the sounds, are somehow working to form a whole. Snares and pads and synths. The same formula, a slightly different approach.

Ultimately, Inherit is neither a great nor terrible album. Although it certainly sounds like it was a hell of a lotta fun to record, I don’t think even die-hard fans will get overly excited about it.

Bonfires is certainly a step up on its efficient, bloodless predecessor "God Save The Clientele" and stands up no matter what’s next for the band.

If Watersports paced itself, if it weren’t afraid to be shorter, if it understood the power of precision, it could have been more awe-inspiring.

It sounds dismissive to say that Farm is, undeniably, nothing more than another Dinosaur Jr. record. Yet it is, and if that assertion carries with any ideas of complacency or stock “rock action,” it should also denote the superb craftsmenship inherent in Mascis, Barlow, and Murph’s work.

Whether or not one enjoys Presidence depends largely on whether this practice resonates; and resonance is a highly contingent, subjective process. However, if you do manage to hum along at their frequency and wavelength, you are in for one of the longest, strangest, most well-documented trips in the contemporary indie scene.

There's a ton of great music on this release, but Kinsella ultimately ruins the focus.

While some of the tracks on the album may get bogged down in their own slumped posture, tracks like "The Extremists," "A Go-See," and "Soft Light" are instantly palatable and give a take on the '80s which says, blame the decade, not the music.

His ambition’s got the better of him this time, though: it’s tough to care about the overarching (and admittedly interesting) theme when the component songs aren’t satisfying themselves.

Wonderland isn’t a very good album, but it more than succeeds at being a mess. Is this meant to be a Marxist critique of capitalism, or is it a maximalist celebration of the same? I’d argue that it’s both, but much like Berglund, I have too strong a sense of the fact that I do not understand what it all means.

The straightforward manner in which Disappears present themselves makes it easy to take the album at face value and enjoy its vibe and vigor without worrying about its place in the broader canon.

His legacy is confirmed and almost nothing he does could harm that, but it also seems as though the young bucks of the music world are progressing the framework more so than he.

These songs are alive, but there are too many cooks, and they clutter things with all their different ideas and approaches. Madlib's instrumental interludes are weird and compelling, which is no surprise, but because of the multitude of voices, his influence is more subdued than usual.

If Dani appeared on a few less tracks here, Scale may have been one of the year's finest.

While this doesn’t exactly add up to any profound reinvention of genre, Before a Million Universes thrives best without thinking.

The stronger songs to these brittle ears are the ones that feel like experiments within an album.

While the album can aptly be termed “good,” it isn’t the epic that many might expect, especially to those whose interests have long since shifted away from GN’R’s aesthetic and the younger generation unable to emotionally connect with the sounds.

With so much music released by White Hills, a lot of the tracks end up being mood-lighting (“InWords,” “OutWords,” “The Internal Monologue,” “Circulating”), but the album’s back-half, kicked off by “Forever in Space (Enlightened),” is what keeps me spinning.

As a whole, On Your Own Love Again is a somewhat murkier affair.

Its problems arise not out of any dearth of talent or skill, but out of its unfiltered sincerity and relentless positivity--qualities that are hardly problematic in themselves.

It’s as if the music has already presented itself. But it hasn’t. Titles can’t describe timbres or structures: they can only point to them.

Port Entropy is Tokumaru's fourth widely-available full-length and sees him taking his songs to greater aspirational heights than much of his previous work, which has been characterized more by restraint than indulgence.

Cotonou Club backs up the feeling I got when I saw the group on their recent UK tour, namely that, while they're still very funky, they aren't currently laying the voodoo down like they did on those magic 70s discs.

Taken as a whole, Embrace is an enjoyable album. It’s predictable in places, at times even a little cliché, but it’s executed competently enough that these qualities are forgivable.