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

No question, This Is How You Smile is a love album, a happy album in spite of everything and anything else. It’s there in the title. Instructions for sanity and joy can be simple to follow. Roberto Carlos Lange seems to have it figured out.

This is the least fashionable album I have heard in ages, and all the better for it.

James is still at the reigns, and Syro is proof that he is still very much the king of his own tangled domain.

Transforming such intensity into a product so bewitching is an incredible effort, and the resulting works leave very little doubt that Colonial Patterns is more than some admirable interpretation--it’s a ruthless conquest.

It involves not a disconnection from, but an exploration of the material potential in his instrument(s): an excursion to the outer limits of instrumentality, a commitment to resonance as the product of granular viscera: of throats and diaphragms and guts and lungs.

Teens of Denial vaults through references to stand alone, rapturous and sincere--a fuzzy framework from the floor of all we know.

The true insight here is that Zu’s prowess is growing and can’t go unnoticed for much longer, especially with this caliber of material and their continual desire to try new things.

Even though (III) is Crystal Castles' most unified album, the text of Glass' voice is still faceless and without words--empty.

There is beauty and anguish to poring through Tyler’s songbook, a reckoning with spirits that refuse to die even as the world spins on furiously and without regard for the passages of humankind not willed or fortunate enough to keep up with the storm.

There's no such thing as universal appeal, but The Idler Wheel, despite its brittle sound and frequent fury, is galactic, at the very least.

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.

What makes Eternal Turn of the Wheel so captivating is not so much the band's furious blend of rural sampling combined with their consistent prowess as black metal musicians, but the enchanting manor in which they craft the tracks.

Although warmer, almost folk-rock, Pickpocket’s Locket is as visceral an experience as any Mercer project, albeit in a new way.

Thankfully, More Life is Drizzy’s homecoming, a vocalization of the heart in his heartless world, and a veritable return to form for it. Welcome back to the Firm.

The faithful will be rewarded with this immaculately recorded set of live versions, while the release could provide a solid introduction to those who've yet to discover the virtues of having heavy, emotional music that still manages to let you fill in the blanks.

Bulldozer is essentially just an impersonation of a Snares record circa 2005, masterfully percussed but otherwise unsubstantial.

They really did a great job. I think their best song was 'Those Who Don’t Blink' but it is not a good song for a headache.

Depending on how one looks at it, The People's Key might even be understood as the culmination of a long and troublesome trajectory Bright Eyes began as a teenager's bedroom project in the mid-90s.

This is one of those genre puzzles that are rewarding to anyone with an adventurous appetite, even if your bright eyes’ve never gazed anywhere but ahead.

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

The Colour In Anything emphasizes the element of trust that collaboration implies and its role in articulating Blake’s feelings.

Overall, a handful of great songs, no clunkers, and one absolute classic is more than should be expected of any album.

This music is uncharted, revelatory, blossoming, and all the more so, because somehow it feels like it might be to Foster as well.

This album fits into the venerable history of The Ex and will make you want to dig out the old albums, too. History, as the band told us back in 1982, is what's happening now.

For the few of you who have not already been won over, I Learned The Hard Way will make you a convert. For everyone else, the album excitingly perpetuates Jones' reputation as one of soul's all-time greats.

It's the fact that the album emerges from these lacunae, between mainstream electro-pop and DIY indie, between declaration and uncertainty, between contemporary knowingness and a complete lack of irony, that imparts its own imperfect je ne sais quoi--and, paradoxically, the hooks don't hurt.

The entire first half of Eagle shows Callahan as a much more evolved and mature musician. He appears more comfortable expanding his musical space, and he exercises tasteful restraint with Beattie’s strings.

Brothers is the least stuffy record The Black Keys has put out, and it's by far their strongest.

Rather than make broad statements about the nature of modern existence, Doiron takes an authorial approach, crafting brief but potent vignettes about bikes, minivans, and lovers walking through small towns.

Under the Pale Moon carries an enormous amount of emotional and existential weight, yet it doesn't sound like the process of acting on impulses. If anything, it exhibits the fine essence of song craft, containing each song's individual mood against different echoes of similar themes in songs both before and after.

The Bones of What You Believe is one of the most unabashedly sincere works of indie pop.

What places Ropechain, Grampall’s second release for Sufjan Stevens’ Asthmatic Kitty label, above its emotionally vacant peers is a willingness to trade drugged-out euphoric rambling with tangible anxiety.

Yesterday and Today, the sophomore effort from The Field (nee Axel Willner), can be easily understood as part of the tradition of moody follow-ups a la In Utero: a pairing of a signature sound with willful experimentalism.

It remains first and foremost a very fun album.

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.

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.

Snaith covers a lot of bases on The Milk of Human Kindness and somehow it all works.

The spacious long-form approach on these eight tracks really showcase Schott’s insistent, tactile, and conversation-with-yourself lonesome performance style. It’s great loner music, for those who own this about themselves but are ever casting a tentative eye toward the throng.

McCombs is making music as if his soul depended on it. I'd listen to the sound of that struggle any day.

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.

Ciara is the singer’s most realized full-length to date and one of this year’s most thrilling pop moments.

Fall Be Kind is yet another reason why Animal Collective TOTALLY TRANSCEND any notion of hipster hype-ism, another feather in a crowded cap. God bless these guys.

The songs are lovely and placid enough to soothe the stressed and unnerved listener, but evocative enough to instill a disconcertingly curious sensation that lingers in a blissfully unfettered fashion.

There’s so much sweet in the bitter here that one might be inclined to think that this is music anyone could get into. But these are songs for Low fans.

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.

All self-examination aside, there's a lot of substance here. Vocally, he has rarely been more on point, and the instrumental ensemble is sound and uniquely Rubiesian.

At least Sleep are honest about their decision and are committed to seeing it through to its heavy, bong-rippin’ end. And by that standard, they’ve created another masterpiece.

With Sarah Davachi’s baroque venture on Pale Bloom into the sensuous folds of light blooming into light, one can hear unfolding this always light and lightness.

Sic Alps are clearly both miles ahead of and miles away from their peers. Napa Asylum only further proves this.

From the get-go, from the very first tremblings of Chris Abrahams’s piano and the hullabaloo of Tony Buck’s drums, the album engineers an atmosphere of beguiling insecurity and enigmatic possibility.

For about an hour, if you can allow Fuck Buttons to control your responses, to embrace the clusterfuck of noise and emotion, then Tarot Sport might be one of the strongest albums of this year.

Instantly enjoyable.

Tidings then, is a journey down a strip of tape from one reel to the other. Yes, it’s a little warped and damaged, but that’s what gives it its character; the insane parts make the most sense of all.

For those familiar with the music of Clogs, Lantern won't sound like much of a departure, but a definite improvement. The nuance of piano, the swelling strings that exercise restraint, the welling and wheeze of a crescendo – it all delivers.

Russell has talked about how he enjoys the constraints of old equipment and recording in humble environments, but on Armed Courage, the effect couldn’t appear further from restriction, as it forges the very motifs that set their sound free.

At points, listening to Bécs is to hear gauze become gossamer, and feel it too.

Both her songs and her subject matter hold back from shocking the listener by virtue of their content, and yet they make a startling impact--creating a headspace that leads to nowhere in the same moment that it paves the way to salvation.

This is soul music, sometimes in form, but always in content; mournful and inspirational in equal measure, Wounded Rhymes more than earns that categorization.

An amazing accomplishment and a pleasure to listen to.

It's probably best that the album we've been waiting so long to hear is as safe as Guero is. At this point we just want our Beck, and Guero is as Beck as Beck can be.

Way Out Weather is a sonically dense record--Gunn’s de facto opus by breadth and scope--but lyrically it is impersonal, preoccupied by small pleasures and moments of private reflection that, while individually beautiful and poetic, do not suggest a self-aware attempt at making a masterpiece.

That she is able to incorporate these technical talents into solid songwriting is what makes This Is It the success that it is.

These songs, nearly half a century old, are as relevant as ever. They should have never been hawked to commercial singers, but delivered as broadsides to the public or as protest music to audiences (as many of them were). Active, agitated citizens should be the recipients of these songs.

Good Bad Not Evil covers a wide range of territory, but never feels needlessly eclectic. Every stylistic experiment employed over the 35-minute runtime is a welcome departure from their signature slime rock

It’s a party album, which means it’s utopian. It’s a solo album, which means it’s rebooting. “Next Level Charli” doesn’t sound like a version we’ve never heard before; it sounds like the very same, not even accelerated but integrated, at 100% synchronization rate.

Grizzly Bear are an Animal Collective that decided to go more intelligible and accessible instead of running naked through the woods on five hits of sunshine acid while screaming in tongues.

His choruses are instantly memorable and his word-soup lyricism easily places him in the upper echelon of intelligent emcees, somewhere between MF Doom and Dose One.

The finished product is brilliantly, beautifully schizophrenic.

If Tempest was hellfire apocalypse romance, prophesied steampunk armageddon, then Shadows in The Night is the revelation of the true nature of the American songbook.

Beyond nodding more explicitly to the sounds of the early 70s than Ghost’s or Batoh’s work usually did, the real difference--the thing that marks The Silence out from these earlier projects--is a kind of poise and effortlessness, which is drawn out by the richness and immediacy of the production.

This album is a consistent, expansive collection of modestly experimental pop songs (covering familiar aesthetic territory, and exploring broad and intertwining personal/familial, political, theological, and philosophical themes), and well worth repeated listens and eventual internalization.

There are solid structures to these pieces, the result of audio engineers who know how to combine materials. But there’s an elegance, too, in the manner in which lines pick up from each other, rhythms are doubled or halved, textures complement each other.

How to Dress Well has most often been described as a distorted take on R&B, and I suppose that's most accurate, too. Love Remains substantiates the hearsay with slow, soulful requiems that begin to feel like lovingly sculpted effigies of some of the genre's more immortal catalysts.

Were brevity the chiefmost virtue of popular music, "Baby Birch" would be a turgid waste of time, rather than the deft and skillful creature it is. The same sentiment goes for the rest of the album; there is a depth to the material here that rewards--nay, demands--repeated scrutiny.

Those who like Mercury Rev like them a lot; so while The Secret Migration doesn't happen to migrate into new territory, they are the type of band that could go on making the same album forever and we wouldn't care.

Pressed together, it becomes apparent how pleasurably the band’s entire discography has crystallized. Capturing the quicksilver violence of youth may be beyond us now, as it is for Wild Beasts, but we still make time to celebrate the night’s dark chemistry.

As evidenced by their name, The Body is seeking something more basic, using techniques that link us on a primal level to that most universal of human certainties: death itself. Together, they give us both the forest and the harpies, the tortured and the torturer.

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 invites its listeners into that silent continuum that makes music whole.

While it may not carry the same intrigue of a college student self-recording a lo-fi opus between classes, this new Twin Fantasy elucidates the masterfulness of an incisive indie savant whose creative reach had, until recently, exceeded his grasp.

Apocalypse is keenly observed, distinctly humane, and predictably idiosyncratic; it is yet another minor triumph from an artist who, despite his constant self-deprecation, seems incapable of offering up less than his best.

Megafaun, with reverence to everything and without reference to anyone, are quickly carving their own path both through and away from their musical roots.

Although Watching Dead Empires In Decay lacks content other than song titles, it evokes spaces that need no explanation.

Wide Awake! is the album in which America’s most consistent punk band once again distill their myriad influences, this time with a whole new list of reasons why their minds never push the brakes.

The style hasn't changed, the lyrics haven't suffered, and the charm and charisma is still clearly evident.

Alpinisms is an undoubtedly singular album, setting the bar quite high for this burgeoning trio.

Freetown Sound is a clapback, a healing song, a historical re-embodiment of the (infinite number of) (also) black experience(s) contained within the vantage of a single individual.

An invigorating breath of fresh music.

[A] wondrous debut record.

Bozulich has amassed a band and baptized it with the name of her last record, and together they careen through a broken itinerary of radiant darkness.

Eclipse is not a record for everyone, and Twin Shadow’s older fans probably are justified in their dismissals. But in terms of emotional texture, Eclipse represents a return to form.

It is a strange softness that contains all in a luminescence that exceeds it.

Nine Suns, One Morning is unpredictable without being arbitrary.

Stay Positive offers up plenty of reasons to let go and believe.

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

Ultimately, Bon Iver, Bon Iver is the sound of growth, of growing pains, and the sound of grounding, of tearing new ground. If it aches, it aches like any natural growth, with beauty and wonder.

Lucifer - Latin for "morning light" or "light-bearer" - is an unabashedly blissed-out affair, composed of expansive dub grooves and enough good vibes to fill an entire summer.