Ceremonials is a sumptuously produced album of mystic pop anthems.

If Drake had it his way, one imagines he would deliver this album via fan newsletter. He made this record for them-which is why his aesthetic so thoroughly encases this record like a cocoon made of syrup-and he'd rather any stone-throwers politely evaporate.

In essence, Ferraro has crafted a noiseless noise record.

It's not perfect, but in the context of its subject matter one feels like its accidents are worth more than another album's successes.

As a whole, An Empty Bliss is a remarkably cohesive listen and one that achieves its goals, but whether or not it, in and of itself, is an entirely creative work is another question entirely.

On the surface, Replica's focus on the measured emergence of harmony seems to capture a bit of the modern struggle to find some sense amidst a constant bombardment of careless repetitions, to uncover a beautiful pattern in the digital noise of the everyday.

Perhaps the best thing about this catchy, super-short record (it'll take less than thirty minutes of your time) is the balance it strikes between tight songwriting and a loose, improvisational feeling.

Powers definitely has the compositional wherewithal to make something special--he just has to put more of himself into it.

A well-crafted doorway into Thee Oh Sees' lovely DIY funhouse, and leave your rock 'n' roll expectations at the giant lips-shaped entrance.

If McCombs' first release this year evoked a sense of baroque horror, this one does loosen up, offering at least a few degrees of clarity in a catalog more defined with each passing year by its creator's desire to subvert the tropes of his genre and refuse anything resembling an easy reading.

Anyone expecting the nocturnal looping he usually cooks up is in for a shock-Passed Me By is a jagged little tangent designed to make that warehouse seem spookier.

The record has more than its share of enjoyable moments, and more than its share of predictable "genius," but a seemingly new dread, a latent, sometimes crippling anxiety, lends the album a certain emotional edge, a hint of vulnerability, that is normally absent in the work of this Baddest of singer-songwriters.

It's a rare thing how it manages to be both accessible and inclusive without giving in to any of the current trendy concessions, all the while demonstrating the practiced purist's taste for measured, genre-specific experimentation.

With II, the Psychic Paramount have created an record both gratifying in its dense magnitude and equally rewarding in the fragility of the elements that the album is composed of.

Its overcast may be thick like a dustbowl, but well-placed rays of light make this record an especially accomplished return.

Where † crafted sly treasures out of gaudy detritus, single-minded as it may have been, Audio, Video, Disco simply settles for canonizing the forgettable.

Though it's fun, pretty, well-constructed, and hits the buttons, those very facets are in danger, in the absence of Cox's beautiful vulnerability, of becoming what this sound is all about.

XXX is something much more complex, challenging, and rewarding than a dirty joke.

It feels both classic and surprisingly new; this is Real Estate, and this is all Real Estate will ever be.

Extra Playful is fun in the worst kind of way and, at times, bad in very fun ways, but as a whole it presents rather discouragingly the attempt of an auteur marooning--perhaps on purpose, but hardly with purpose--as an amateur.

To Coldplay's credit, amidst the over-production they still manage to reach their quota of flag-waving festival rock songs, some of which could be considered career highlights.

Leslie Feist has managed to produce an even more intriguing character, one with depth and doubt and apprehension and dread and all the other things that make up the other, harder, larger half of the human experience.

It's okay to mourn Apparat's past and question his trajectory. Just don't ignore what rests at the center: a record that, if nothing more, soaks in the present moment.

The cacophony raised by this album is not so much the kind that unsettles us in important and challenging ways, but is the commercial noise of a spectacle without a center, of emotion so generic we are instantly desensitized to it.

Minor quibbles are easy to overlook on a record that is, the majority of the time, flawlessly executed.

While I wish that Only in Dreams offered more adventurous songwriting or a more varied sound, it's still an achievement in its emotional tenacity.

Folks, to my ultimate chagrin, this Divine Providence album wallows in such unencumbered, unmoving crap-it breaks my fucking heart.

On the Water is too uncompromising, too disinterested in being for anyone outside of its circle of two.