For the most part, it’s the moments that pivot between shadow and light that provide the most pleasure. “L’Inconnue” emerges from its chrysalis around the 1:40 mark, Legrand singing in French as a heavenly choral loop begins to surround her voice. Both musically and lyrically, the development feels closer to the sound of falling in love than anything they’ve made, an ecstatic payoff that ranks among their finest work.

Return To Cookie Mountain is one for the ages.

Anyone who can sit down in such a short period of time and write this many unique songs has to have something abnormally genius working inside.

Soil is a crucial psalm; crucial for its queerness, crucial for its catholicism, its pagan roots protruding into sidewalks, crucial for its purity of heart, crucial for how it avoids imperative, softly chiming.

Soft Money continues to blur the line between downtempo electronica and underground hip-hop in its own distinct, highly gratifying way.

I can confidently say that this is some of the most astonishingly beautiful music being made today.

It seems as though the quick release of Untrue restricted Burial from burying his emotions underneath layers of alternatively sparse and overwhelming production as he did on his debut, resulting in an album that instead wears them unabashedly on its sleeve.

Quarter Turns embodies a shadowed and daunting environment with such an abundance of beauty that it bears contrast rather than resemblance to that damning abode, for the former remains an uncontrollably agreeable environment, despite its grim and unnerving allure.

A perfect album.

One of the best albums of the year, hands down.

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

It sits in the top tier with other indie folk/rock live albums, like Bill Callahan’s Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, Ryan Adams’s Live at Carnegie Hall (the full version), the Elliott Smith bootleg Live at Studion, and, of course, Kozelek’s Live at Biko. But there’s something worthwhile about these albums that goes beyond their technical mastery and the songs they contain.

So come now fans of insidious and wily (yet cerebral) rock, Liars have delivered just what you need... even if you don't realize it yet.

It may end angrily, but when it’s all said and done, Microcastle is a blissful retreat from the known.

The Soft Bulletin provides an exquisite soundtrack to have blasting in the car at night.

RELATIONSHIP OF COMMAND IS THE GREATEST ROCK ALBUM I HAVE HEARD IN THE LAST TEN YEARS.

Perversion packed with allusions -- forgotten titles, purloined and paraphrased sources, pilfered public records and archives. This is what steeps the songs in American history instead of planting them in psycho wards, clinics, and retirement homes.

The lack of vanity, the frank way it strives for accessibility only serves to further magnify the greatness of Anxiety. It does the most ideal thing art can do: it tries to make sense of life itself, without pretense or guile.

Over and over, listen after listen and Half Free just plain sends. Mastermind Meg Remy’s first album for the vaunted 4AD label is bursting with vivid, cracked imagination and cool mastery of slippery pop allure.

Surprisingly, it’s far more tuneful than her previous release, ALL BITCHES DIE, and yet arguably even less listenable. ... Her voice is an astonishing instrument, moving from operatic fullness to hyperventilating shredded shrieks, but always foregrounding intelligibility.

It is phenomenal.

Ultimately, what makes Good News so successful is that it retains the melancholy mood of past works, while at the same time adding depth and maturity.

Destroyer's new album Kaputt may be one of the most indefensible albums of all time. But it's also a masterpiece.

This is a great record, if it is a record.

This is nothing short of a monumental piece of work.

Almost Killed Me is the most authentic, dirty, and rocking album you'll hear all summer.

Here we have an artist who's been making music for nearly 25 years and this album sounds fresh and new. This album is, by far, the best record I've heard this year.

TMLT feels like the Titus Andronicus record par excellence, it pushes and shoves at the boundaries of what such a record could or should conceivably sound like.