Days of the Bagnold Summer plays like a b-sides compilation with a few cuts worth revisiting. Like the Storytelling OST, this one’s strictly for the heads.

Equivalents is similar to a lot of the post-Coast/Range/Arc material, but decidedly reduced. The faint stuttering high organ sounds that pepper the opener feel curiously threadbare, with none of that contented percussive effervescence swimming up to give it any harmonic sweep.

Cantu-Ledesma’s ensemble (that’s 11 in total, including greats like Mary Lattimore, JAB, and Roger Tellier Craig) achieve an elegant cascade here that’s more stoicism than stupor and more calm than stagnancy.

Here Comes the Cowboy sounds awfully similar to 1973’s Hosono House. But there’s a lack. Maybe it’s the dynamism displayed on Hosono’s debut that makes it so intrinsically enthralling, but on Here Comes the Cowboy, the whole thing feels more like American gaijin vs. Japanese cowboy copypasta.

This is digital automation entering the flow of the socio-linguistic, or stark outlooks amidst techno-financial mind-control. This is the sound of a colorless decline.

Despite its prickly sonics and inaccessible veneer, Isa takes recourse to a privilege of gratuitous futurity, a privilege its cold sheen blinds itself from registering.

The melodies don’t propel; they put buffers and stopgaps between other moments of intense sound design. Like a luxury car at a car show, they exude and ooze sleekness and velocity. But hidden within that is a terror: the terror of being surveilled, minute by minute, devoid of ontological access to the eternal or the metaphysical.

Like ghosts that don’t know they’re dead, the songs on Deerhunter’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? wander about in a well-produced limbo almost in mourning for the death they can’t die. But they don’t know it, so--and this is the saddest part about it--they become what they deplore, all loss glossed over.

Maybe Warzone is better understood as a deep-cut career retrospective than a singular album. Despite its stylistic consistency, the record is uneven and only its closing track, a reworking of “Imagine,” will ring any bells to those casually familiar with Ono’s work.

It is an album of specks dancing in the dust in an amorphous bubble of babble and bawling thoughts, yearning to be unthought.

They’ve left the cutting edge musically, which can have valuable results, but here it feels ambivalent and a little tidy.

With Moon 2, Ava Luna modestly succeed along the same rubric that we apply when we listen to Steely Dan or Daft Punk: the result is impressive, pleasant, and inventive, but ultimately feels too insubstantial for us to garner much from it.

Perhaps Negro Swan is merely a step along the way, as Blood Orange continues to contend with monolithic, difficult ideas, but for now, this patchwork of sweltering grooves, amicable conversations, and urban ambience remains limited in its vision.

However, palpable in the sound of hej! is the plastic production that in most PC Music releases obscures what severs real from virtual, superficial from sincere, instead exposing that the uncanny excess of the latter grounds the former’s dominion in our minds.

On the whole, Imitation is self-consciously danceable and overconfidently messy. It’s restless music for restless people, and while it entertains plenty for stretches, it doesn’t quite hold the focus that a 40-minute collection of songs demands.

A Broke Moon Rises isn’t pastoral like Bon Iver, and it doesn’t trade in the woe, guts, and glory of an Explosions in the Sky. It’s folk rock as an aging human in all its requisite fallibility and disgrace, pushing through torrents of doubt and disillusionment to a place where their essential spirit can take wing.

This is the sound of a thin stench of burning bone coming from a kebab shop’s dumpster.

Love is Dead is formally earnest and it succumbs as a product of its (unearnest) production, an art of sincerity lost underneath. Love is Dead, damnably, is sincerity in place of irony, which is to say sincerity outside irony. It has no world to tease of tense.

A bit more laidback than its predecessors and encapsulated by exotic shades, Across the Meridian sits somewhere between Les Baxter’s lovable cheese, the playful ingenuity of Pierre Bastien, and the more twisted corners of a 1970s European TV station library music.

Semblance’s rigorous and inventive improvisations attempt to bring synth music up to date, despite the unavoidable cultural allusions that threaten to render it an ironic pastiche.

Kazuashita wants what psychedelics want of human brains: transcendence. But its fleetingness masks any sort of completion. Frantic impulses come from afar, a random sphere of floating values, frames of signification.

Tracks such as The Fragile’s “Ripe (With Decay)” are these kinds of delightful journeys. “World” and “Over and Out” only display longer extensions of single ideas, which make them still a few points shy of the band’s best.

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.

Because the album can’t be one complete thing, Age Of is its own archenemy; its own princess stranded in a high castle; its own climb up the Holy Mountain. A radical incompleteness haunts it.

If Snares is complexity incarnate, Lanois is distilled modesty. These are strengths that are realized individually but create discord in tandem. Their pairing is like eating apple pie topped with cheddar cheese: some are sure to find enjoyment in the combination, but for the rest of us, these pairings are best avoided.

A Girl Cried Red replaces Nokia’s NYC authenticity for her inauthentic take on a genre that struggles to maintain itself.

Underneath Lil Xan’s disengaged delivery, TOTAL XANARCHY ends up slogging through his sketches of abandonment, addiction, and, conversely, fame and success, with total listlessness.

Dimensional People wants to be a major rap album, complete with cameos stacked way high, all epic and prodigal. But it’s just not all there.

Freedom is not a “challenging” listen, but choruses or hummable melodies are few; rather, the album progresses at a loping, steady pace, as if somehow delivered by natural rhythm.

The album’s pervasive sameness hinders sustained interest.

There’s a Riot Going On’s theory doesn’t quite match up to its execution, and its parts are greater than the whole. So, is it more beautiful, or is it more boring? The problem is that it’s often too difficult to tell the difference.

Drift is a step up from Devil’s Music (2016), which attempted to recreate Leave Home’s career-making abrasion with little of its viscerality. On the other hand, with nearly every song on the album performed in a different style, Drift lacks the cohesion of The Men’s less acclaimed albums.

Despite Shame’s lyrical foibles, they evince a prodigious adeptness for musicianship, and though Songs of Praise isn’t the most arresting debut by a garage band, there are far worse places to start.

At its worst, it wants memory over future. At its best, it wants to remember who sings next, after the shades fade.

It changes the sounds of the band from the bombastic elastic to the crouched minor. It changes the hopes of the band from boundless to restrictive. It limps, self-conscious and careful.

Culture II is very long, yes, and vulnerable to momentum-killing duds like “Beast,” but to assess the album as an irreducible work is to cling to an entirely outmoded conception of how music is consumed.

Despite its many retreads, Semicircle is still occasionally enjoyable, and that it manages to exist without a modicum of urgency or intellectual rigor is okay with me.

Two Trains could be pared down to a gorgeous EP.

The Greatest Gift may not contain all the insight and manifest artistry of one of Stevens’s studio albums, at the very least, it reasserts his perspicacious understanding of his complex emotions and propensity for self-evaluation.

Part rumination on engaging with the pop icon and part deep end even after eating the meal, Reputation keeps the ball in the air, argues for moving forward, even if it’s herky jerky.

As social commentary, it feels ineffectual and dated, its tone resembling someone’s morally mediocre guy friend who is eager to reconcile his own shortcomings by engaging a willing interlocutor. As music, though, the album glistens. Unfortunately, these two registers can’t be unwound, and so the listener is left liking the music despite, not for, its paratextual inflations.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

More or less adapting his own approach to sound with the sonic atmosphere and materials provided to him by the filmmakers, he managed to create a work that, guided by their vision, ties a satisfying knot between the two disparate ends of his catalog. Lacking the singularly textual and conceptual punch of his recent work, it’s both a practice in versatility and a sign that there’s still something of an enigma to Oneohtrix Point Never after all these years.

Ultimately, Soft Sounds is an uneven experience, stylistically and in terms of (this listener’s) engagement. But still, in the shimmering hooky synthpop of “Machinist,” the Morrissey-esque lilt of “Boyish,” there are bright stars hanging in the firmament.

There’s an attempt here to go back to the relative atmosphere of at least Going Blank Again, but the resulting music ends up sounding like the more reverb-heavy, turn-of-the-millennium British art-rock bands.

With the bag secured, Gucci has nearly limitless options to proceed, but he’s done little to show that he’s interested in them. Droptopwop is a return to form insofar as it is the high point of his post-jail music, but a plateau is a plateau nonetheless.

As is, Teenage Emotions reads more like that freshman-year college paper you really wish you’d just deleted off your hard drive.

Despite having moments that tip it toward being his most “challenging” album lyrically (if being challenging has anything to do with being serious), This Old Dog might be his least interesting instrumentally and musically.

The pleasures that Pleasure describes are mundane to the point of tedium, trite beyond cliché. And the music itself is, despite the strength of Feist’s voice, mostly intolerable.

The bad news is that Tears isn’t as gripping as Kingdom’s earlier work (notably 2013’s Vertical XL). Tears sacrifices the ping-pong polyrhythmic beats that made his earlier material so compelling and replaces it with something simpler.

Pile are at their strongest when involved in slippages, designed moments of elasticity and indecision, effects incidental.

Kozelek spends a lot of time on Common as Light giving us his broadly “common sense” liberal pluralist live-and-let-live shtick, punctuated by grumpy bashings of “hipster” culture and its parades of regenerated tenement buildings and juice bars, music journalists, and Father John Misty, but it’s only on 10-minute opener and standout track “God Bless Ohio” that he really bares his soul.

Reassemblage already feels peculiarly familiar, but the residue it leaves behind is oddly intangible.

Drunk’s a chill listen, but it’s also a restless one.

This disconnect between Dirty Projectors’s pop tendencies with its “art” signaling is what ultimately stains the album with such a deep sense of confusion, making it difficult to parse who exactly this music is written for, if not people who are already fans of Dirty Projectors.

Without an adequate treatment or storyboard, [I Decided] feels listless and wanting immediate predicate. It lacks a ready place on the shelf.

The energy imparted simply can’t overcome a drowning of influences, or rather, the kinetic is overcome by the potential.

Eno’s continuation of his flag-bearing series is about as ignorable as it has always been with waning levels on the side of interest.

Ultimately, though, it becomes hard to identify individual tracks without keeping a close eye on the tracklisting as you go.

There is a creeping charm to tracks that seem initially off.

Many of these songs begin promisingly before losing momentum and settling into turgid grooves. Rather than serving as a platform for D∆WN and Machinedrum to hybridize and expand the pop form, Redemption offers ornate, glittering garments, which constrict as they envelop.

Jessica Rabbit does not feel challenging, nor does it feel inviting. The adolescent only hopes to participate.

Building a Beginning takes to heart every criticism of his 2013 release, inverting it into something that, though restrained and even surprisingly heartfelt at times, does very little to save itself from being forgotten.

Physicalist is indeed a luscious, bubbly record to behold; just don’t expect its preordained patterns to hold many surprises.

Not everything on Shape Shift With Me fits like “333,” which fits plenty, and hits hearts. Some of the hyper-syllabic loose-lyric delivery of “Norse Truth” drags baggy, some of the mixed political/personal imagery of “Suicide Bomber” bogs down what the song wants. Like want and love and bodies, songs won’t always feel good.

Return to Love is a sticky, sweat-drenched spiritual that commands attention with each wrenching power chord. Far from any aesthetic bait-and-switch, the album marks a slow maturation, a deep breath of chordal refinement that for once feels like an honest distillation of form.

It may be more accomplished and accessible than its forebear, yet it mostly comes across as a tad inconsequential, running through one nice song to the next without ever really being anything more than “nice.”

At its best, Blade of Love is nicely adventurous and somewhat relentless. However, where Palace of Wind left listeners with an active role of relation and interpretation, Battle Trance comes off as a little overbearing this time around.

For now, Flood Network shows the growing pains of acclaim, responding with a thoughtful ebb, a skim across the sand before the flood.

32 Levels is a line in the sand, rather than a high watermark, for Clams Casino and the genre as a whole; a fertile growth outward, rather than a zeitgeist-recapturing album.

You could diagnose I, Gemini as a frustrating text, a scattershot indulgence that only occasionally succeeds as a collection of songs: it is.

Unfortunately, for all the polish and gut that Grammy-winning producer Vance Powell brings to help turn diarrhea to gold, the songs lack idiosyncrasy, and Diarrhea Planet’s winking anachronistic irony is lost.

Autodrama feels just several adjustments away from fullness.

Poetry aside, none of these 14 songs are highlights of any of the three artists’ vast catalogs. The stories and the production alike are pure sunshine, which often passes into the saccharine.

Co-opted as they may be, the best tracks tend to be the ones that aren’t attempting to mine old hooks for new hits.

For a record seeking personal elevation via uncontainable energy, The Glowing Man doesn’t always glow often or energetically enough to help its listeners realize that it’s trying to attain such elevation.

Wyatt processes his music through epic terms, even in its mildest moments, and if Union and Return isn’t a final destination, it is still undeniably a stepping stone, a vista for us to gaze upon with Wyatt as he campaigns on towards total, purified elevation of the mind and body.

The flesh on the 11 ghosts of Strangers is heavier than on lots of Nadler’s past work. And the sonic space mirrors the lyric meat; this is corporal, forward locomotion.

Though it shrouds itself in chaos, Bottomless Pit is ultimately Death Grips’ most straightforward, morbid, and brutal report from the deep end yet. Like watching a great beast eat itself, there is little in the way of elegance or grand design to this music, yet it remains throttling nonetheless, as relentlessly blunt as it is overwhelmingly meaningless.

Nothing have definitely learned a thing or two in between albums about using crushing dynamics to great effect. Unfortunately, there are times when the combination of a particular note and lyric rob the band of its power.

Lost Themes II isn’t the monster transfigured. It’s an echo chamber for the transforming horror to howl in.

A casual, only slightly-different-than-usual release smothered in atmosphere with one solid R&B song (that’s reportedly been kicking around in a vault for a while) left stranded in the album’s penultimate slot.

Yet if “Shattered” and follow-up “Guaranteed Struggle” are Dälek at their cacophonous and incensed best, subsequent tracks like “Masked Laughter (Nothing’s Left)” and “6dB” reveal a band cultivating a lighter, more introspective side.

The record resists you making sense of it. It hits, laughs, ends.

Silicon Tare sounds like 2010, which could be a good thing, depending on how you look at it.

He spends the whole record cooing and coaxing a series of barely-described lovers, but it’s never clear whether they’re real, imagined, or an idealized online version of the two.

Its purpose is to cement Underworld as elder statesmen of minor-arena-filling, rather than “floor-filling,” amorphously electronic music. It’s not hip, but it’s not square either.

An almost abstract series of daubs, here, there. Melodies submerged in machinery.

For every song that I replay, there’s another that I skip.

While this doesn’t exactly add up to any profound reinvention of genre, Before a Million Universes thrives best without thinking.

His subtle turns of phrase and shifts in volume manage to achieve immersive depth even when the interplay of sax, strings, electronics, and drums otherwise lacks color.

While McEntire’s aimlessness feels honest and satisfying in its questing, it also makes for an album with plenty of movement but less, perhaps, in the way of progress.

While Life of Pause appears to lack any songs with the lasting impact of tracks like “Chinatown,” “Only Heather,” “Paradise,” or even the sublimely beautiful “Golden Haze”--well-written works that exhibited a naïve clarity in purpose--it’s certainly a grower.