A finely observed, immaculately produced work, full of diversions, hooks, and charm.

Although the album bares many dark and barren moments, as well as the recycled voices of pristine, angelic choirs, few songs are ever overtly “positive” or “negative.” They probe atavistic fears, wistfully and with an endless curiosity.

Brown cathects his trauma into his songs, redirecting his pain to a productive, pedagogic end.

As a Bon Iver release, 22, A Million is the band’s most impressive record to date, surging forward with oddities that, while certainly nothing new to adventurous listeners, bridge the gap with satisfaction.

Although Banhart might not be in the business of dancing around bonfires anymore, his music still feels like gazing into one, its nocturnal reverie calmly emanating a force both naturalistic and mystical.

Physicalist is indeed a luscious, bubbly record to behold; just don’t expect its preordained patterns to hold many surprises.

Not everything on Shape Shift With Me fits like “333,” which fits plenty, and hits hearts. Some of the hyper-syllabic loose-lyric delivery of “Norse Truth” drags baggy, some of the mixed political/personal imagery of “Suicide Bomber” bogs down what the song wants. Like want and love and bodies, songs won’t always feel good.

Return to Love is a sticky, sweat-drenched spiritual that commands attention with each wrenching power chord. Far from any aesthetic bait-and-switch, the album marks a slow maturation, a deep breath of chordal refinement that for once feels like an honest distillation of form.

Tonight’s Music celebrates the space between the excessive and the unfinished, refusing us resolution, promising us a little everything.

It’s a hazy journey, encompassing loss, disconnection, and disappointment, buoyed up by hard-hitting production and Mykki’s unrelenting desire for pleasure and connection.

It may be more accomplished and accessible than its forebear, yet it mostly comes across as a tad inconsequential, running through one nice song to the next without ever really being anything more than “nice.”

If sometimes the grandeur threatens to overwhelm, the album’s subtle gradations just as often leave me struggling to explain why exactly they make me shiver, pause, cry, or, at their most elusive, disappear.

Birds’s stripped-down approach bares an utter lack of finesse behind a microphone.

At its best, Blade of Love is nicely adventurous and somewhat relentless. However, where Palace of Wind left listeners with an active role of relation and interpretation, Battle Trance comes off as a little overbearing this time around.

DJ Earl opens himself up to new approaches, creating a rich, galvanizing sound, full of rhythmic complexity, tonal variation, and melodic intrigue. It’s footwork, but not quite as you know it, a sure sign of the genre’s rude health as it moves into its next phase.

There may not be clear answers to the riddles of identity and agency posed on My Woman, but even in all of its knotty uncertainty, to be caught in Olsen’s web is such a sweet place to be.

Schmilco is missing the same spark that drove Schmilsson. Where Nilsson was relentless in pursuit of something other than settling down, Tweedy has gone the other way.

Even at its densest, Whole and Cloven, the third solo record for Bowles, sounds almost desultory, a great credit to his compositional approach.

His delivery is low, wounded, yearning; despite the rockist structures, the keyboards and drum machines rattle in a pale imitation of the grandeur he’s seeking, like the last scene of Aguirre.

The words on record are breathtaking for their deep focus, which is microscopic to the point of vaguery. Frank Ocean’s lyrics describe such specific scenes that their vocabulary is unmistakably about someone else, his own worlds within our own.

They’ve managed to wrap the menacing and the rewarding up in an air-conditioned pleasure circuit, beyond transgression and provocation

It’s a terrifying and hypnotic listen.

Bringing bouts of surf twang, no-wave tangles, and chopped-up power chords, the record blurs boundaries of genre, its eighth notes alternately swung and then made straight again. The band (Todd May, Ben Lamb, Jay Gasper, George Hondroulis, Andy Harrison) shines across the changes in support of Loveless’s powerful voice.

Cheena is phantom shamble, a reanimation of bumps that still make us shake.

It’s really the power of the synthesizer that allows his playing and compositions to breathe, to carry the music into the z axis. And while this new dimension may not present much in the way of a challenge for Frahm or for us as listeners, it’s chill indeed, and also beautiful.

For now, Flood Network shows the growing pains of acclaim, responding with a thoughtful ebb, a skim across the sand before the flood.

In 2016, “long live rock” is way too sweeping, among other things. So long live this. It’s just about right.

Interior Architecture is presented as a clear tome of mind, four slabs of endless, drifting synthesis, abstract in concept yet rich with neural networking.