More or less adapting his own approach to sound with the sonic atmosphere and materials provided to him by the filmmakers, he managed to create a work that, guided by their vision, ties a satisfying knot between the two disparate ends of his catalog. Lacking the singularly textual and conceptual punch of his recent work, it’s both a practice in versatility and a sign that there’s still something of an enigma to Oneohtrix Point Never after all these years.

Need to Feel Your Love is musically propulsive and provides evidence to the talk that a guitar band in 2017 can be a source of ingenuity without pulling excessive tricks and mutations upon the craft.

The only thing Arcade Fire’s Everything Now is about is Arcade Fire, which is its most pernicious and pathetic quality. Arcade Fire are no longer Orpheus and Eurydice, lovers doomed to tragedy; now they are Narcissus, the Greek hunter who lost the will to live after staring at his own reflection in a pond for too long. They ask their listeners to participate in this cynicism as they grasp so falsely at explanations for why “we” are like this.

There is something shimmering, cold, and tender in these songs. There are also moments of rock vigor that are the flip side to folk’s gentleness (never gentility).

Less of an experiment in product-curation, Quazarz scans more as an effort in process-orientation, one that, whether consciously or not, divulges some of Shabazz Palaces’s obscure mysteries.

Rafts may seem conceptually like a retrospective or statement of purpose, and it holds up nicely as a portrait, but it should also be considered a refinement, wading further away from readymade images of the tropics and into the depth of the traveler’s imagination.

With two exceptions (Desiigner and, uh, Damon Albarn), the [guest artists] completely fail to elevate the tracks in any way, an unfortunate consequence of needing to feature Charli XCX on your album because she’s good and popular as hell rather than because you and Charli XCX have made any particularly interesting music together.

As usual, it’s best listened to when you’re in your feelings, and since good news is in short supply, that might be often enough for her gauzy vision of love to feel like a balm, the more wide-eyed the songs the better.

The music enables Vega’s voice as his best accompanists have: providing the expository setting and minimalistic bedding necessary for Vega to project his scene upon and float above. His delivery will sound strange to those unfamiliar, but it will be oddly cozy to those who have known it all along.

Despite expectations, it’s an utter joy to listen to--a simple display of what 21 Savage sounds like when he’s having fun rapping.

Mellow Waves might be a strange bedfellow for the seminal albums of the year so far, but it’s a nonetheless unassumingly essential artifact.

Avey Tare’s stream of vanishing sounds, creaking floorboards, and silently intonated lullabies is romantic in its faded resemblance to our radiant, ever-growing environment; but as with Portner’s newly adopted city of Los Angeles, the supposed nature exists purely as an extension of the human desire to create and actualize what we see in our minds.

Ultimately, Soft Sounds is an uneven experience, stylistically and in terms of (this listener’s) engagement. But still, in the shimmering hooky synthpop of “Machinist,” the Morrissey-esque lilt of “Boyish,” there are bright stars hanging in the firmament.

The release’s awkward format and patronizing presentation are among the least of its poor qualities: Even for the heads, Kaleidoscope offers very little not already heard elsewhere. ... In addition to the previously mentioned Chainsmokers pair-up, there is the very ungainly Big Sean feature “Miracles (Something Special),” which, wearing more than a few embarrassing, auto-generated reverential name-drops.

Out in the Storm hones that truth; it wonders about it. “You ring me up/ I tell the truth,” goes “Fade,” and “You’ll have your truth/ I’ll have mine,” goes “Hear You.” Ten songs divulge it, which don’t have sections so much as well-portioned energies.

Bill Orcutt is a mid-career eponymous release. This is a familiar signifier of artistic reinvention.

On The Echoing Green, Cantu-Ledesma has brought a newfound clarity to his work, carving distinct shapes of mellifluous guitar lines to impose against his towering sonic architecture.

Beautiful Thugger Girls is remarkable because of its Thugger-ness--it’s a clear step forward at the very moment that Thug-derivation is a particularly viable come-up.

Melodrama overwhelms me. It reaches me at that weird and fragile center.

Are Euphoria dreams dreams that weld themselves to clusters of thought-clouds. A kind of hieroglyphic retracing, keen in this summer air, surfaces, lulled in by the world.

Dust is then a remarkable accumulation of disruptions and attachments, gaseous parts and shifting centres. Coherent in their incoherence, playful in their experimentalism, its tracks unfold smoothly, their trunks buzzing with magnetism, attracting the attention of pealing bells, skronking sax, and dub-techno beats.

There’s an attempt here to go back to the relative atmosphere of at least Going Blank Again, but the resulting music ends up sounding like the more reverb-heavy, turn-of-the-millennium British art-rock bands.

Peasant pulls every strand of Dawson’s work together to create something that might actually resemble accessible songwriting were it not so contorted by its own filthy humanity. It is utterly unique music, reminiscent perhaps of the complex, gnarled story-songs purveyed by Mayo Thompson and Joanna Newsom, but taken to much darker, more physical extremes.

With the bag secured, Gucci has nearly limitless options to proceed, but he’s done little to show that he’s interested in them. Droptopwop is a return to form insofar as it is the high point of his post-jail music, but a plateau is a plateau nonetheless.

What emerges is a baroque topography of movement and energy, culled from the explosion of an ultra-specific cultural context outwards, and then back into the dusk.

As is, Teenage Emotions reads more like that freshman-year college paper you really wish you’d just deleted off your hard drive.

For CFCF and Jean-Michel Blais, it’s essentially a self-improvement exercise, one with every reason to exist but no particular cause for release. For the listener, it’s something too rare these days: an exceedingly pleasant listen, unburdened by the weight of being anything more.

Despite having moments that tip it toward being his most “challenging” album lyrically (if being challenging has anything to do with being serious), This Old Dog might be his least interesting instrumentally and musically.