A full three years later, Sound & Color avoids the sophomore slump by packing a sense of purpose into its 12 sleek yet gritty soul tracks.

Fun, easy listen? Not so much. But Calder's vocals are too cheerfully bright and the sounds too pleasant for things ever to become a downer.

Houndmouth resurrect a blistering, off-its-hinges breed of Americana complete with tangible wild heart and soul.

The lyrics are the album's strong suit, and for the first time ever Darnielle will be releasing them with the album, allowing for easy dissection.

Young Fathers' alarm at being boxed in has led them to make an uncompromising, and, yes, prize-worthy pop statement.

Here, he ratchets that up another notch, attacking familiar concepts (wantonly commercial rappers, his complicated relationship with his mother, the push and pull of celebrity) with seasoned vigour.

Air Conditioned Nightmare has fewer traces of the experimental Montreal loft party scene Doldrums originally emerged from, but it's not quite accessible enough for big festival stages either.

[The songs] are confessional and vulnerable, yet so strong. Of the quiet songs, only the grungy dirge slows things to a crawl.

There's no denying Bronson is a supreme talent, but Mr. Wonderful feels more like a low-stakes failed experiment than a grand proclamation.

The moody minimalism is still present, but under the rich vocal treatment the band sounds more subordinate and self-effacing, at times to a fault.

Cosmic Troubles lives up to the promise shown on Lack Of A Lake. It's mellow, super-chill dream pop.

He seems to be making an effort to be more positive, though sometimes that comes across as cumbersome or strained.

It requires some patience, but it's worth sitting through the less immediately gratifying moments for the final section's payoff.

Latham's plaintive voice sounds like it's emanating from some romantically ruinous daydream. The effect suits the mood but makes his lyrics difficult to decipher, which is frustrating given his pointed message.

It's easily his most personal work yet, and even though the story of his mother's difficult life is hardly universal, the results are deeply moving and richly evocative.

The band's maturing on Kintsugi, which, if you remember the haircut and attitude of your 16-year-old self, is always a good thing.

It's a trip, a varied one with heavy/light and ugly/beautiful balances in perfect moderation.

The results are intimate yet expansive--a pleasing balance between post-rock sonic experimentation and traditional songcraft.

The odd bit of distortion on I'm Ready and Watch Me Go disrupts the otherwise pristine party, while a heavy flirtation with piano house on Old Love/New Love returns us to life-affirming territory.

Goon is an indisputable triumph and a staggering opening statement from pop music's newest Piano Man.

Too much of the record lacks that song's percussive drive; all the pretty singing and unhurried tempos start to blend into a tepid listen, and the experimental near-spoken-word turn on Strange is just, well, strange.

A stellar, necessary batch of smart rock songs.

Lamar sounds simultaneously like a man firing on all cylinders and struggling to keep it together.

An album for piano and string quartet, this follow-up to the superb Solo Piano II is another soothing listen, and fine orchestration by Hamburg's Kaiser Quartett adds greater harmonic complexity to Gonzales's songbook.

Songs you'd expect to swell and boil over--which is what Modest Mouse are good at--often end up trudging humourlessly (Ansel, Be Brave), and things get far worse in the moments where humour is actually the goal.

An intriguing tension exists between the lo-fi production touches and pristine hi-fi sounds, and similarly between Cook's joking/not-joking attitude.

Suri's clearly committed to losing his joke rapper image, and while this attempt is not consistently successful, the high points balance out the stumbles.

The album is surprisingly full of acoustic sounds and wistful balladry reminiscent of her 90s material, but it also plugs into a load of dark, restless and weird club rhythms with help from a coterie of in-demand producers.

The grand aesthetic that makes Arcade Fire such a force is on full display. But compared to last year's plodding AF album, Reflektor, Butler gets to the point so much quicker.

Take You High, Dance With Me and Nostalgic find her ceding the floor to a few grating drops, builds and chopped-up vocal samples as well as some trendy 80s synth rhythms. Those diversions aside, this is another Kelly Clarkson album that's all about maximizing her big steamroller of a voice.

Anyone who's spent time digging through crates of dusty vinyl would be thrilled to find 12 previously unheard boogie songs that stand up this well.

It's so soft-focus as to rarely assert itself or command attention, but fuzz-pop Free The Skull brings to mind Pink Mountaintops, boogie rocker Slow Down Low has a blissful pulse, and Thieves gets terrific mileage out of a hypnotically repetitive riff.

Too bad clunky lyrics hold things back at times.

Three years later, Purity Ring's sophomore effort lives up to the anticipation.

It has a range of emotions, all showcasing Smith as one of the most unheralded songwriters out there today.

The band's straightforward punk leanings give way to more angular, spacious, softer songwriting--and some welcome metal nods in the title track--partway through the 10-track album, but Paternoster's vocals never back off. That's where the power, hooks and originality come from, but they're a little relentless.

While it doesn't mine new territory, Restarter is the sound of Torche getting comfortable and digging in their heels.

Chasing Yesterday breaks no new ground but does show more range than we normally expect from Noel Gallagher, possibly a result of his taking on production duties this time.

At times, these preoccupations feel clumsy in their topicality, and it's hard to tell whether GOF's unthinkably long history as a Band That Has Things To Say makes this more or less forgivable.

Sometimes his experimental tendencies and pop impulses mesh perfectly, but the sudden shifts between abrasive noise and New Age mood music are heavy-handed and clunky.

Sometimes the best music happens when experimentalists indulge their inner pop music fan.

Energy flows smoothly from frantic sugar-rush highs to subtly beautiful, ambient polyrhythm experiments, and this gradual winding down effectively showcases the full spectrum of his vision. It shouldn't work, but it does.

Only brief, melancholy melodies give relief from the oppressive darkness.

The concept's fine, but the results are more self-indulgent and boring than challenging. For Sonic Youth obsessives only.

When Chenaux alights on something more typically songlike, he sparks both anticipation and memory: an interesting marriage of nostalgia and novelty.

Drake is increasingly astute at reframing hip-hop braggadocio about wealth and competition as a kind of existential crisis through telling--but now familiar--details about his life (“I got two mortgages $30 million in total”) and subtle uses of melody and atmosphere.

With everybody involved sharp and on point, Sour Soul is a contemporary classic.

While acoustically generated and devoid of any heavy electronic processing, the results are much darker and stranger than anything on Syro, with ominous detuned metallic percussion and mangled piano noises taking the place of bright, bubbling, acid synth lines.

There is an unexciting emphasis on precision and minimalism that saps the emotional heat from an otherwise interesting fusion of styles and sounds.

With Retox they deliver an intensity and focus few bands could maintain for a 12-song album, let alone a three-album career.

[The] fourth LP is lazy through and through despite throwing up waves of explosive sex-and-death rock and roll.

Terraplane's saving grace is that it's fun to listen to and full of swagger.

Blackheart is refreshingly unbeholden to the convention that requires R&B singers to balladeer non-stop at top volume.

Many moments are reminiscent of big-room progressive tunes of the early 00s, which sound dated at times. Nevertheless, there are also plenty of undeniably pretty melodies, thick tones and pleasingly warm textures, not to mention impressive flashes of innovation and creativity.

The lyrics are brilliant and subtle.

Whether you take to Pratt's reedy, quavering vocals (think Vashti Bunyan or Joanna Newsom) is purely subjective, but the way she changes up her register to suit a song's vibe helps bring colour to a fairly flat palette (which only includes the odd dab of organ and clavinet).

The music means the world to him, and it's wonderful.

Sometimes the vocals are uncomfortable (that goes away after a couple of listens), and sometimes, like on Caribou or Rabbit, they're crystal clear and beautiful. The instrumentation is just as amorphous.

Unlike Manson's previous records, there's no real guiding concept here, which is probably for the best.

Some trendy lite disco and uplifting, singalong hooks give her voice more to compete with and play up the universality of experience, but Sullivan sounds better the more specific she gets.

These nine ballads are stripped to essentials--beats, strings, stirring vocals --full of beautiful and eerie contrasts that highlight Björk's loneliness, anger and fleeting moments of optimism.

Occasionally their influences come through too heavily, and the album would've benefited from one or two fewer songs. Still, a hugely pleasant listen.

The slower, sentimental ballads can veer into maudlin territory, and the spoken-word Reprise seems utterly unnecessary, but such minor missteps are easily overlooked when the rest is such a satisfying listen.

All of the more modern accents are refreshingly unobtrusive. The minimalist arrangements give each instrument room to breath so the richness of the tones and the relaxed confidence of the playing stand out in sharp relief.

The production is shinier, which some might hear as poppier, but the overall feel is too quirky for the mainstream--and sometimes too twee for her own good.

Although the album's frenetic energy doesn't quite match that of their breakthrough (whether they like it or not, 2008's Visiter will always be their benchmark), it's a solid new direction.

What's on the surface is arresting, but there's far more to discover deep inside.

Throwback factor aside, there is a lot of shameless fun on offer, though little imagination. But what they lack in originality they make up for in hooks and enthusiasm.

Despite the production and star power, no one element outstrips the others, except perhaps for Mystikal, who continues his reinvention as James Brown's heir apparent on the raunchy Feel Right.

Bada$$ hits a sweet spot. His production choices (and those of Statik Selektah, Kirk Knight and Freddie Joachim) are innovative and timeless.

At times his vocals sound too distant in the mix and overpowered by guitars (No Device), but singing any more forcefully would undermine the peculiar comfort that most of the record maintains.

Each song has bite, but every sound on Soul Power is kept fairly mellow.

Despite Rae Sremmurd's rep for hyped-up celebration songs, the album's best moment comes when Lee and Jimmy eschew cranking up for something closer to cutesy romance.

As Stuart Murdoch sings with literary precision about illness, isolation and striving for human connections, their digressions into club music and klezmer feel as restorative as they do celebratory.

The 10 songs are tense and commanding, loaded with nervy post-punk charge, ricocheting rhythms and electric guitars both zippy and busy and wild and bucking.

Absent Fathers doesn't offer much in the way of answers--it's more a snapshot of a process.

The songcraft is high, balancing repetitive groove with dynamic surprises. There's so much variety here, from icy Joy Divisionesque excursions (Silhouettes) to Guided by Voices-through-an-echo-chamber mood (Continental Shelf) to melodic hooks (Bunker Buster) to howling post-punk fury (Death). It lends huge excitement to the project.

Where the album falters is in his overly ambitious and affected vocals, which fall on the waifish end of 80s new wave.

Mangan's emotive voice is as assured as ever, and his socially conscious lyrics penetrate. Add in a stark, disillusioned tone and sluggish tempos and it makes for an overly serious listen.

On first listen, the album as a whole seems repetitious--there aren't any 12-minute odysseys like on breakout album Person Pitch--but its diversity reveals itself with multiple listens.

While some songs veer too far into slick pop territory, most are balanced.

This festive album of mostly original songs has something for everyone.

Consistent, yes, but not the king yet.

Had The Pinkprint included 12 songs rather than the extended version's 22, it could have been a classic.

Once again, he brilliantly distills years spent studying the arrangements and analog recording techniques of that music into a personal style that carves out its own space between rhythm and melody.

Finally, a top 40 album that attempts to capture the restless energy of recent times and spit it out in a way that doesn't just feel good, but honest, too.

They certainly keep up appearances on their 15th album, their troubles not for a second interfering with these 11 songs, the longest of which lasts three minutes and 41 seconds.

That free-form fury is a critique of the tendency to look for precise meaning in music, thereby devaluing the visceral and the emotional. But the most menacing part is the words uttered at the beginning.

It's easily one of the most beautiful, subdued folk records of the year.

It's a cool premise, but despite the ambition and guest musicians on each song, Sonic Highways sounds like every other Foo Fighters record.

When they let their experimental impulses coexist with their pop instincts, the results are strong enough to overshadow the occasional misstep.

Still their strongest effort since The W, but Wu-Tang Clan exhaust their fans' good will and nostalgia without a classic to show for it.

Even though the songs are full of warm analog synths, a strong sense of cold melancholy and anxiety permeates even the most upbeat electro-pop moments.

Each performance bursts with unadulterated emotionalism as Hegarty's voice swoops and swells around the impeccable-sounding band.

Altogether, it offers a glimpse of what Parquet Courts could turn into. The future looks promising.

The quieter moments that give his voice less to compete with are more interesting.

The deeply personal and overtly political are indivisible on Give My Love To London, an album that is harrowing in its bluntness and beautiful in its subtleties.

Building on the connections between slow hip-hop rhythms and double-time footwork beats, Archives is a further exploration of some of its predecessor’s roughly sketched-out ideas.