The compositions here are rich, complex, and moving, and they consistently bring out the best in their (very talented) collaborators.

It doesn’t break any new ground, but it’s not a retread. It’s just good, for you and your soul.

They have taken on a wider range of styles and adapted them to their strict sound, but it still sounds like Tunng, which is never a bad thing.

The production is slick and striking, even when it fades to black (“Xanny Family”) or gets tangled up in layered hi-hats (“Program”)--these tracks sound equally as engaged and provocative as anything on last year’s masterful DS2.

Autumn, Again is a rarely dynamic dream-pop album, an ideal caffeinated companion to birch skies and stubbly faces. It is a secret pleasure like the sound of a sleeping town and the feeling of control that comes with the first morning light.

His arrangements stay wondrous as usual, carrying a gravitas that hasn’t been present in his recent creative (see: non-musical) work.

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.

Miss Machine simply crackles with stress; not stress over homework or girlfriends, but the kind of stress a bunch of semis put on a bridge.

These are talented writers/performers at the absolute top of their game. Just as relevant now as they ever were.

Elf Power have discarded many of the classic song styles that make their debut so strong, allowing a love of arena/anthem rock to mutate into a lolling interest in marches on later albums, kind of a return to old-world aesthetics that blends a potentially solid band into the grey tapestry of indie rock like so much frizzing wool.

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.

Evans has created a beguiling work born of an intensely solitary process, inviting sympathetic listeners to resonate with her private mystical revelations.

For new listeners, this is the most accessible Sand album to date, but for veteran Sand nuts, this may be... well, just different.

If $ucessor is the finality of the final, then Tahoe is the beginning that begins. Tahoe is a voice that emerges after the rupture, the voice that creates itself anew, settling into itself as into a home.

An über-catchy collection of short, diverse songs laden with a playfully channeled anger and wit that are hard to forget.

It's a stand-up, spaced-out entry in the already formidable footwork scene.

Each song has a distinctive quality that stands on its own. However, when you back away from the album as a whole, you begin to see that all these individual elements unify to make a greater holistic product.

Earth's greatest strength is also its structural weakness; to continually enact the tremulousness of all origins is to refuse to get going, to depart

Eden’s greatest asset is cupcakKe’s domineering voice; she wields hooks that effectively complement her verses and maintains a flow that not only justifies but also elevates her puerile sense of humor.

Amidst the palpitated urgings of bass and the rapid skimmings of guitar, Fox’s drumkit emerges as the key figure here, the volatility of his technique underscoring the fact that, as soon as you efface the certainties and the contrived precision of the external world, the once incontrovertible dimensions of the self go with it.

The more populist material that makes up All the Way is stripped of any comfort such familiarity may provide by Galás’s jarring reinventions.

Orcas at first seems nondescript (and as such works well as background music, if your foreground is, let's say, a wintry gazebo), but it's an album one 'finds' after repeated close listens.

Warm Slime; it's just solid, thick as a brick.

There is nothing like Transatlaticism's "Sound of Settling" here to offset the never-ending stream of ballads and down-tempo songs.

The solution to enjoying this album, then, is to not ask it to provide heavy drama, high art, or fiery revolt – it's just pop music with a slight twist, and it's first and foremost about having a good time inhabiting glamorous guises and histrionic voices.

It’s impossible to fully return all the way home again, but You & Me is the next best thing.

Instead of picking over internal ashes, Krill rotate and swivel, holding a lighter, as if looking more closely at the moment might make action possible.

Black Mountain understand their chosen form better than any other contemporary stoner rock bands still running.

Who knows if I’ll still be listening to Holy when the leaves turn, but it’ll certainly get some heavy rotation this summer.

As an exercise in artfully executed pop maximalism, {Awayland} is unquestionably a treat.... All he needs now is something worth saying.

The Alternative To Love to be a quality rock album that covers several genres in influence and doesn't deserve to be punished for not being as good as its predecessor.

Berlinette seemed more pointed, pulled with precision and grace into the pop idiom. When you think you've got this one nailed down to a black and white electro-aesthetic, the splayed strands of its hair start pollocking acidic paint all over the place.

Nigel's production and arrangements leave very little room for the songs to breathe... However, the emphasis on Thom's lyrics illuminates The Eraser's strongest asset: its content.

There’s little sense of genre in an record-industry sense here. The pieces Moodymann mixes together, like the downtempo house of Daniel Bortz’s “Cuz You’re The One” and Swedish folksinger José González’s mournful “Remain,” shouldn’t work, but they keep the calm atmosphere going.

It's a careful mix, edging onto cream-puff territory but never surrendering its solidity.

Even if there are more than a few moments on Drink More Water 6 that feel like obligatory retreads, there’s a lot to be said for iLoveMakonnen’s sheer charisma and for the immensely unique voice that he flaunts here more effortlessly than ever.

It’s the endearing uniqueness of this coupling that give Catfish Haven an edge over the plethora of contrived Americana wanna-bes currently littering the musical landscape.

Admittedly, no track on Taking It Easy proves as woefully intimate as the ukulele and accordion lament of Pride's "Wolves," but "The Mermaid Parade" somehow rings just as true for all its simplicity.

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

Even when the album gets really flaccid, as in the clattering breakdown of the turgid story-song 'Hopscotch Willie,' Malkmus is still annoyingly good at writing stuck-in-your-dome-piece melodies that keep you humming the tunes you don’t like just as much as the highlights

The Drop Beneath takes their sound in a direction both more eclectic and more shoegazy than 2011’s excellent Correct Behavior, even occasionally straying into jangle-Cure territory.

Times New Viking neither regress nor abandon their origins, offering instead a compromise where the harsh timbres commingle with increasingly more adept proclivities for memorable pop songs.

Many tracks sound like they're simply missing a piece.

The strongest tracks here make a case for Braxton’s compositional skills; the rest feel like recycled tales from his nights out with Stanier and Williams, an unfortunate byproduct of placing them within this context.

Ultimately, despite Gainsborough’s troubling of dance, of the physical, of expectations, the most successful (and most fascinating) tracks are those that engage with the dancefloor, or at least with rhythm, rather than do away with it completely.

If you were hoping for a predictable outing from Ben Chasny, you won't find it on The Sun Awakens.

[It] finds her in fine form.

Love Yes flings the sound skyward and waits to hear what bounces back. The pop haze of In Limbo, the bounce and blip of The Way and Color are rebroadcast as a symphony for synths and hi-hat.

An effective collaboration tempers the rougher edges around both artists and allows them to combine their own artistic strengths synthetically.

In cynical marketing terms, an 'indispensible' sticker has been slapped on this effort through these moves, so that no wallflower's music library would be complete without a shy Fading Parade.

The theatrical tricks -- and they are tricks -- are more interesting this time around. But by and large, it's more of the same.

Although there is much to like about the album, it can be difficult to differentiate one from another.

The songs are neither here nor there, which, to me, is exactly what a cover should be. That the men and woman behind Yo La Tengo have created yet another fine album after 25 years of existence and 11 full-lengths is outstanding.

Rainwater Cassette Exchange is another reason to head down to your local cassette exchange and a great nightcap to polish off one of last year’s strongest albums.

Rihanna has released a flawed album that may shrink under the weight of her biography, but it also succeeds when approached more directly, superficially.

Such is the exquisite control he holds over his music, his vision evident even in the weakest moments of Space Is Only Noise.

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.

On one level, these tracks might be compared to ambient music in its non-teleological synthesized progressions that are more concerned with exploration than attainment. But there is still an astonishing feeling of fluid movement maintained throughout, thereby avoiding stagnancy.

It's a pleasure to be embraced by a record this pretty and soulful.

It’s his intensity of focus coupled with an impressive range of motion that gives this album its real strength and maturity.

Drums Between The Bells is challenging and complex, but evocative, rewarding, and not altogether fragmentary, not even (or especially) when you bust up the long-playing order.

Even if it frontloads the strongest and newest material, Black Velvet provides a largely engaging second side. The one exception being his cover of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” originally released as a single in 2011, which feels somehow more gimmicky than the (solid, even if it highlights how cloying Cobain’s lyrics could be) Nirvana cover preceding it.

Given time, these transmissions work on a person like a vast overgrowth, subsuming one’s fastidious human preoccupations. When it hits you right, it’s like that first big beam of sunlight after weeks of cloudy sky.

Road to Rouen isn't going to blow away any fan new to Supergrass, nor is any old fan going to go ga-ga over what they're hearing, but it's good to know the band isn't sitting on their laurels fantasizing about killing their commercial appeal.

Casiokids show a subtly deep thoughtfulness coursing their thoroughly joyous songs.

A Mad & Faithful Telling, however, comes off as their most focused and researched work yet, incorporating traditional and pop culture aspects without getting cluttered or seeming like they’re trying too hard to find a niche.

Chance is no longer quite coming from that place of adolescence that was essential to 10 Day and Acid Rap, but on Coloring Book, he doesn’t yet sound comfortably settled into whatever it is that’s supposed to come next.

Duality pervades Gumption. City and country. Natural, machine. Personal, abstract. Song. Noise.

If we pretend that on some level this album doesn’t contain the cringe-worthy hetero-male angst of early-2000s rock, we’d be lying to ourselves, but the technical quality of the work renders it engrossing nonetheless, especially taken alongside its odd tenderness, its prescient cultural relevance, and its culmination of the fluidity of gendered tropes that ran throughout their career, where the concept of aggression becomes as much a floating signifier among a sea of textural dynamics as a reification of rage.

So what if Scissor Sisters aren't challenging the conventions of pop music?... [Ta-Dah is] great and will please their fans.

The music tries to express what words can't, which makes this Animal Collective’s most combustive, "live" record yet.

The songwriting is capable, it’s just somewhat predictable, and the lyrics are cheeky.

Shall Noise Upon succeeds in fits and spurts, but as a whole, it lacks the continuity that is an essential ingredient for a career-defining record.

The result is a cache of songs that are somewhat transposable with one another, but they’re undeniably well-crafted pieces of music, let alone psych-pop.

Even if it is a bit less adventurous, many of the tunes are right up there with anything the band has done.

In the final analysis, of Montreal represents a rare and comprehensive attainment of vitality in modern music.

Anderson’s guitar-for-the-sake-of-guitar approach eludes grandeur and self-proclamation.

[Bring Me The Head...] is the perfect accomplice to the contorted bliss of a seductive daydream.

With more focus on the adventurous composition and skilled playing of Coomes and Weiss, it would be hard for anyone, including myself, to dismiss this as anything other than impressive. Now, if they just hire a new lyricist for their next one.

Whether Kimya is trying to find the light side of death or losing faith in her heroes of past, she comes off rather upfront, upbeat, and positive.

P.O.S. is good. Real good.

While there is an abundance of elements that are “of the norm,” a joyous and haphazard mashing of non-standard pop ingredients drives home the album’s directive: a deranged, wonderful projection of polypop-delirium.

While Pfeffer’s lyrics are engaging, they’re sometimes inaccessible in delivery. Despite this, So Embarrassing is an interesting personal take on prog rock’s roots, and therefore quite a step in the right direction.

It’s precisely because of the transience and mutability of Open as a whole that its fleeting moments of splendor prove all the more affecting and beautiful, despite the possible contention that--because of the often contradictory accompaniment--these might not be moments of splendor at all.

The fact of the matter is, despite lesser numbers, they have demonstrated progression as artists.

Although they have a ways to go before establishing their own musical identity, The Uglysuit have more than enough talent to make it plausible that they’ll get there someday.

As gorgeous and misstep-free as it is, the soundtrack risks a bit of that souvenir, collector’s item feel native to score-based soundtracks. That being said, it’s nowhere near as padded-out as those typically are. While melodies and tones recur, track to track, it plays out with an ear toward immersion.

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

It has to be said that A U R O R A easily justifies its existence, and that even if its quasi-independent emotional domain won’t empower us to do away with the niggardly concrete bases of its emergence, it will at least beautify them for 40 minutes.

While James is here less austere than on Cheetah EP and less eccentric than on landmark release Richard D. James Album, Collapse nevertheless proves to be a serviceable Aphex Twin release at this point in his career. His knack for finding interesting textures and layers hasn’t been compromised nor has his willingness to build off of previous styles in his oeuvre.

The only complaint about Knoxville is its length, although it's not so much a complaint as it is a curiosity about whether there is more of this live performance out there somewhere that didn't make the final edit. As with almost all Fennesz projects and releases, the listener is left wanting more.

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.

There is a generative sense of the perpetual "to be continued" and "to be announced" in both the projects of Benjamin and Torontonian songwriter Sandro Perri.

The Future Will Come blooms incrementally, driven from the ground by the grittiest keyboard performance heard on a dance album in some time.

Although not perfect (and perhaps transitional), Time to Go Home is a defining moment not only for Chastity Belt, but also for a style currently seeing a serious revival.

One can’t declare Autumn of the Seraphs, Pinback’s fourth full-length, any better than their first, second, or third album.

If one didn't care for White Hills before, this won't change a mind. Of their recorded material, however, White Hills' latest is perhaps their best; short of an in-person experience of the band's eardrum-shattering performances

The only thing keeping The Death Set from being remarkably original is the repetition of Siera’s beloved drum machine.