With only six tracks, Lala Belu shows that being hypnotized is what we secretly want.

Rather than slashing and burning through new territory, Chosen Lords merits attention as a charismatic history chronicling the evolution of James' musical identities.

Ultimately, that’s what it all comes down to: not necessarily violence, but feeling. That feeling when a tune hits you right in the chest, connects to you in a visceral way, spreading bubbles across your skin like spilt champagne. That feeling, so brilliantly conveyed by AJ Tracey on this album, of no longer just surviving but actually living.

While imperfect, Now You Are One Of Us is packed with poignant ideas and disturbingly beautiful moments.

Juxtaposing foley noises, drum loops, and auxiliary click-clacking against minimalist, percussive synth lines and enormous swells of energy, the album clearly has a sonic template and a cohesion easily identifiable within the first three tracks.

Contra isn't really that bad, yet it's also not nearly sturdy enough to maintain the puppy-love, Obama-esque crush many of us have had on them.

The songs on Get Behind Me Satan are sturdy.

The Mouse and the Mask's downfall, though, is its excruciatingly narrow scope.

It’s fairer to say that this album fails me because these 12 tracks are simply not interesting enough, especially for a band that was always so visceral and engaging.

The decaying aural ellipsis felt hanging in the aether marks the dusky road of the album’s fist half. This is dark stuff, darker than our main man Hart is known for.

The earth will remain unshattered by this release, but that's okay; there'll be time enough for rocking when we're old.

Those time signature-obsessed math rockers will delight in her phrasings, while those with a taste for the intimate will no doubt grimace at the hyper energy. What both of those groups are missing, however, is that one hand feeds the other. More and more, Stern seems to be getting it, too.

Exercising a more polished sound than heard on their debut Intro Bonito, which felt somewhat dinky by design--it was often centered around decisively hollow chiptune-inspired arrangements--Bonito Generation is its own self-reflective hit parade carrying with it five pre-album singles and the potential for at least a few more.

While the songs here are not memorable in the buzzer-beating manner of a title shot, no one would prefer a world where all-star matches were missing.

Mother of My Children is, generously and radically, an attempt to reconcile an identity with a universe.

This is remarkable music that proves the expansive possibilities present in one note. It feels symmetrical, but it’s not; it feels additive, but it’s not. Instead, Barbieri coaxes provocative, varied textures and melodies out of the continuous electric field generated by her synthesizer, and in doing so, she has made a drone record that feels very much alive.

So, largely unimaginative arrangements, flat delivery, a surfeit of vague ecological metaphors that wash like spray on the rocks (you can have that one for free, Mr. Hansen), and a lack of any sense of connection, of need, of reality.

Hardly a return to form, Researching The Blues (complete with the burp at the end of "One of the Good Ones") is nevertheless a document of a band having a good time doing what they love. When the hooks are this strong, it's hard not to have a good time with them.

It's hard to imagine The Decemberists topping such a fantastic and ambitious record, but as their previous albums show, I'm sure they'll have no problem one-upping themselves again.

Exciting things are still happening amidst routine and constancy, and sometimes submitting isn’t settling or getting saved; it’s letting yourself get moved against all odds. And that may be rock & roll’s only remaining saving grace, one that Spoon continues upholding and confronting with every album.

Abandon’s hammering slow pneumatic-drill beats are not so much an all-out assault as a grueling siege, in which the beleaguered inhabitants of the psyche find themselves starving, barely existing in a rising cesspool of their own shit and vomit, ridden with epidemic disease, turning to cannibalism and to frantic final Decameronesque debaucheries.

The intensity of their work comes from a great deal of poise and restraint, but as is the case with Deep Politics, this tact can also come across as strangely normative.

Public Strain feels stripped-down, simpler, and lolloping. It's not so eerie.

The result is a mix that is less concept-driven and less unified under a singular identity than previous releases.

many of these songs see Campos and Maker presenting compelling musical ideas that simply aren’t expanded upon in an equally compelling manner. Still, Mount Kimbie frequently succeed here in capturing inspired, stirring musical ideas.

This split album breaks new ground for Akron/Family while continuing to affirm Michael Gira as a reputable singer/songwriter.

Even as it limits the album's appeal as much as it does the band's chances of broader success, Wye Oak's stylistic purity is a virtue in itself.

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