Phases nevertheless reaffirms its singer’s preeminence in the current milieu of indie rock. Pulling from material as recent as January and as early as 2010, the album aggregates Olsen’s previously unreleased work into a collection that vacillates between retrospection and contemporariness.

Dance music gets one step closer to an honest depiction of euphoria; yes, yes, you’re drooling quite heavily, but at least you’re drooling through an earnest smile.

In other words, without being a mere sonic record of actual Is-ness (a field recording), A flame my love, a frequency relays an Is-ness. This is both mono no aware, the sadness of things, but also their joy, and beyond either, the experience of Being.

It’s more akin to a journal of the individual’s emotions amidst this state of the world. Constantly on the edge between sadness and rage, its disillusionment becomes anger, brought on by the feeling of helplessness in the face of global violence.

The music maintains its drive as it moves, risking the occasional drag in the more languid sections, but never succumbing to a total loss of momentum.

Each song of eight on the album develops its own world of feeling, each in a different mode and with a unique musical setting.

Mike Eagle manages to balance the sense that he is speaking for many with the certainty that no one else could do it quite the same way.

The lyrics can’t support the music, and vice-versa. That’s not to say there aren’t some great moments for people who’ve been following Bejar’s work--“Ivory Coast” and much of the second half of the record have a lot of noteworthy moments, in both their musical adventurousness and lyrical successes. But the interplay between flatness and richness that Bejar describes as integral to his lyrics--and that can be extended to its interplay with his music--isn’t here a lot of the time.

While the album isn’t exactly synergistic in its coupling of the two singers--neither Kurt nor Courtney achieve their lyrical or musical apex here--Lotta Sea Lice nevertheless intimates an unrelenting kinship between its two auteurs.

Colors dispels a greater notion of contemporary selfhood with its sheer tastelessness. It holds status as the most truly perplexing move from the artist to date. Unfortunately, the result of that move is borderline unlistenable.

Younger Now is a hookless, joyless, profitable success.

For the most part, Take Me Apart is sonically more akin to a soundtrack, one for neon-tinged late-night driving. Or for bedrooms with ceiling mirrors--those slippery reflections.

Equally informed by universal human crises as it is by contemporary imbroglios, the album aims to disorient, alienate, and dismay the listener. The band is usually able to do all three in a single song. Often in one line.

Antisocialites may not be a manifest step forward for Alvvays. Quieter than its predecessor on many of the songs, the album sacrifices immediacy for Rankin’s occasionally mawkish but otherwise astute poetics. But the tradeoff is worth it.

The shallow cynicism and apathy that animates so many of its songs are under-interrogated by its writers, instead finding form as a pessimist’s non-committal, inconclusive pouting.

On the whole, these tracks feel partially-realized, like demos that didn’t get wholly fleshed out.

Define artistic success as you will, but it’s beyond question that Mount Kimbie have here translated, and therefore transmitted, an entire state of being.

The breadth of sounds covered will scan as inconsistency to all but the most pious Uzi devotees, but it’s hard to imagine anything else serving as a more comprehensive document of rap in 2017.

There are hooks, and as usual Pink has an uncanny ability to worm his 80s-worshipping melodies and one-liners into your head whether you want them there or not, but the grand effect of Dedicated to Bobby Jameson is that of a restless mind finally beginning to slow down, settling into its patterns rather than excitedly seeking new ones, and struggling with one of the most unavoidable, stinging realities of being alive: disappointment.

It lacks an authorial voice. Since no one made this album, no vision binds it together with its identity--it doesn’t cohere.

As ever, the Brooklyn four-piece triumph when they succumb to the dreamier elements of their work, of which Expect the Best carries just enough to sustain the listener across the finish line.

Perhaps these songs take on a more chaotic, messier, and a little dirtier appearance than they might have in another possible incarnation, but they’re still clearly of the same extraction as what came before.

With nary an aural step forward from their hitherto records, Painted Ruins ends much in the same way it begins, not with a bang, but with a drone.

Every member of this band is wholly present and firing on all cylinders here.

While a few songs interject to maintain the rabid pace of earlier releases (“Because You,” “Somos Chulas (No Somos Pendejas),” “Tonta”), most come through with a mid-tempo energy that might fall flat were it not rejuvenated by dense song forms, disjointed and atonal harmony, and Ruiz’s characteristic snarl.

Its best songs are the ones that maintain the spark of originality that has always threaded through LCD Soundsystem’s work,.

Each sound swerves about unpredictably, as free-willed as particles twisting through a vast nothingness, powerful and intricate in their brutal simplicity.

This is the crux of the album’s difficulty: it feels personal and scans as though it should be, but time and time again, it leaves me not quite sure whether I know a single thing about milo, the person.