Her progression in two short years, from the sonic scarcity of Tragedy to the evocative symphonic grandeur of Loud City Song, hints at a vision we are only beginning to see the full range of.

Sleeker but no less cartoony than her debut, it mixes freestyle house into her signature sound and comes off richer than anything she’s done before.

Even though it’s as proficient as the Dodos have always been, albeit in subtler ways, there’s nothing about this record that feels arbitrary. It’s an album that feels like honesty, or at least a very well done facsimile of it.

To the un-jaded, yes, boring, but to these well-worn ears, Lower Plenty drop some serious knowledge.

Dear Mark J. Mulcahy, I Love You is a triumphantly together record, focused and witty and emotional and present in the way that only someone rediscovering his life’s work can be.

Obsidian makes for a totally immersive plunge and, depending on where you are with your own head when you listen, either a welcome gulp of fresh air in recognition or a chance to hold your breath and dive deeply into life’s darker materials until you have to come back up again.

If this album works, it’s because of moments like “Landslide”: those that cut through the density of an artist in flux, one susceptible to myriad influences, managerial grumblings, and producer cues, overeager to pass off his work as undeniably unique.

As a record standing almost entirely on nostalgia, sure, it gives schmaltzy ’70s dance music a fine, not-sacrilegious update and sets it to a pleasant neon glow, but it’s a trip through history that’s almost more educational than immersive.

The record attempts to fuse dance music and complexity, but doesn’t quite reconcile the two; instead, its mindless thrills butt up against impenetrable baths of sound.

Soft Will is the perfect summer record, hazy and ill-defined and hard to remember but oh-so-euphoric.

While originality may not be high up on Blank Realm’s list of virtues, there’s something engaging about a record this wonderfully crafted and this genuine in its own personal zeitgeist.

There’s a central and important paradox at work here, something that elevates the record above what might otherwise be emo-aspirations of gushy earnestness. Singer Devon Welsh makes himself the first target of an incisive analysis.

Personal Record doesn’t always have the focus and sense of place that made Last Summer great, but it’s pop music on a grander scale, both in sound and theme.

Yeezus is ultimately most repugnant in how it heedlessly collapses all the value dichotomies that Kanye has mined so fruitfully over the years into one bottomless cesspool of narcissism.

Together these four pieces create a single, near-breathless listening experience, robust enough to envelop but varied enough to leave you both craving and curious for more.

While the Knife seem to have outlined a much clearer vision for what they were trying to achieve, they do so, crucially, through experimentation starting outward from their own comfort zones, and with almost zero lyrical element.

She is expressing something ineffable in a way that is consumable and still interesting: the album as starting point, a work that grows with the listener--the gateway drug to thinking differently.

Modern Vampires of the City’s songs rarely feel overstuffed or overwritten, with simple kick-snare drumming, plaintive piano chords, and astoundingly well-recorded vocals at their centers.

Trouble Will Find Me is impeccably sequenced, even at thirteen songs the rare National record that doesn’t contain “the one song they should have obviously left off.”

It’s a humble record, yet one with the timeless appeal to become a classic in league with the work of Waxahathee’s influences.

Monomania is the sound of a healthy and aware group of musicians who have experimented with artifice and ultimately moved beyond it.

Phoenix has somehow managed to follow a universally acclaimed breakout record with one that not only avoids falling flat, but succeeds at creating and sustaining a subtly different atmosphere.

The Terror is an unselfish view of a world free of human manipulation, and as such is a staggering listen to fans accustomed to the Lips’ sheeny pop orchestra and, before that, their lo-fi quirk.

The result would be encyclopedia-thumbing pastiche if it weren’t all so carefully curated, and if the production wasn’t so intricately, lavishly produced that as each track stretches into the fifth or sixth or eighth minute it was not still revealing permutations, secrets, strange little surprises.

RKives as a whole, hopeful and appreciative above all else, a way for the band and the fans to celebrate what they had one last time before returning to the present, to careers already well into the next phase.

Not so much a change of pace as a consolidation and careful re-allotment of her powers.

The result is a collection of great, hard-driving tracks that feel poppier than any of the long-winding snores on that new Justin Timberlake album.

You can’t really blame Bowie for conforming to 21st-century quality control when it comes to the sound and scope of this record, but it’s not exactly something to be celebrated either. What deserves celebration, or at least indulgence, are the glimpses of sublime execution on The Next Day, as well as Bowie’s skill in maintaining his mystique after all this time.