It's the sound of a DJ just getting started after everyone's gone home.

Under Construction, uninhibited and unpredictable, is her best yet.

Young Enough is poppier than its predecessor but not always as immediately catchy. Sometimes that feels intentional and it can often be a good thing, often slowing down the band’s torpedo tunefulness to negotiate trauma in real time. It’s the mark of a band deepening the feelings of real personal struggle beneath the churning guitars and sheer melodies.

They’re back with the fantastic new Memory, unafraid to show their scars as they find new ways to nuance a sound that beautifully takes Eighties and Nineties indie noise back to Sixties girl groups, surf-rock and California pop.

Aimlessness can be a rite of passage for twentysomethings, and Crutchfield shines brightest when she transforms that fear into frenetic pop joy.

She delves into her emotions and wears them on her jersey, and though at times this vulnerability and malaise feels tiresome, it’s her self-exploration that makes it worthwhile.

Radically openhearted and stunning new album. The album feels like a series of warm embraces: of Andrews’ past musical selves, of her past mistakes and misfortunes, and of her bright, beautifully uncertain present and future.

The supporting cast replicates the vintage stylings a touch too meticulously, and Green's singing lacks the turbulence that animated his old masterpieces. But it's hard to find fault with songs like the electrifying title track.

She waits till the last line to reveal the common thread: "There's a sweetness in us that lives long past the dust on our eyes once our eyes finally close."

Their second album is a multi-faceted R&B treat, full of glistening vocal chemistry, sharp writing, and a self-determination you want to get up and cheer for.

Their fifth LP is this quintessentially English retro-rock band's most American-sounding record, especially rhythmically.

If Vampire Weekend was Rushmore, Contra is their Royal Tenenbaums: brainy, confident and generally awesome.

If you happen to be a rock band, and you don't happen to be either of the White Stripes, it so sucks to be you right now.

A sweeter, more confident effort. [8-22 Jul 2004, p.124]

Chock-full of well-textured pop reveries. [16 Sep 2004, p.80]

It's a fun ride. [6 Oct 2005, p.154]

With loads of melodrama and not a moment of subtlety, Justice define the new-jacques swing.

The pair's debut is a modest masterpiece of production finesse, rooted in house but borrowing from hip-hop, dubstep and other club mutations.

This is music that merges raw physical pleasure and dreamscape explorations. The stakes are high, and the payoffs are real.

Across the 10-track LP, the folk-tinged singer belts with gusto. ... The album's strongest moments, however, are Carlile's riskier departures towards the LP's end.

Full of delicate folk mopers, lighthearted country romps, and genuinely sweet love songs, as well as his best guitar playing in years. [Dec 2020, p.70]

The result is a set that feels like an instant folk-rock classic.

Funny, propulsive, queer, dissonant, and utterly intoxicating, it gilds a record to put on next time some stooge tells you indie rock is dead.

A New Orleans-based, Jack White-endorsed 25-yearold with an open sore of a voice and a love of distorted boogie-blues shredding, Booker is grafting new shoots into roots music.

[Nas] shreds any doubts about his MC prowess.

Picaresque is a triumph of theatrical imagination: the culmination of the Decemberists' steady march to greatness in four years of enriched storytelling and folk-rock invention.

From A Room is strikingly focused, sonically and thematically. Its characters are flawed; there's much bad behavior, with heartbreak to pay.

Spoon's eighth album is an immediate grabber on par with the group's best work to date.

The greatest adventure on Eye on the Bat is Palehound’s musical evolution: they’re sharper, punkier, and more fearless — roaring in the face of change.

White's definition of acoustic includes pedal steel and pretty much everything except punk guitar. You may miss the electric buzz blowing the melancholy away, but this foot stomping music does the job.

Bringing a new sonic palette into his discipline of manipulated notes and overwhelming whoosh, Hecker gushes, drones and distends in ways that are both new and familiar.

At its heart, Down in the Weeds is a wounded, hopeful take on the Los Angeles midlife-crisis record (he moved there a few years ago). It’s a topic well-suited for Oberst’s abstract cynicism, as he tackles crumbling SoCal interstates, Malibu beach disasters, and, of course, yoga.

Sumac’s collaboration with Japanese avant-garde icon Keiji Haino is maybe 2018’s best rock record. Its 66-minute run time is a mix of fragility and chaos, a delivery system for raw, visceral shocks of aggression.

Fear Inoculum is a very good Tool record.

It's a cozy-campfire roots record. [Nov 2020, p.71]

Everything about this finely wrought yet diabolically chaotic album feeds a theme: The more we try to manicure reality, in life and online, the messier it gets.

Igor is a heartfelt album that finds Tyler lowering his guard and revealing himself to be a shape-shifting artist who is still growing, and who has fully shed his skin as a vulgar internet cowboy.

His debut LP gathers 12 beautifully lean ballads sung in a vulnerable tenor, with vintage studio touches blended by sharp producers.

It's holy music, even if wholly weird.

The first Seeds LP without co-founder Mick Harvey, Sky is full of tiny sounds--plinking guitars, pulsing bass, lazy subtle drums.

The smarts on Gloryland never undercut the roots-rock rush.

His dazzling feel for 21st-century psychedelia pushes this well past nostalgia tripping--and while the verbal abstraction gets thick, there's serious pleasure in plumbing it.

“Kiss This” was the band’s first notable achievement, and their second LP advances the notion that maybe ignoring the last 30 or 40 years of pop trends isn’t the best approach.

Tenderness is a grand gesture that works. Woke looks good on Duff.

It’s the presence of Williams, who co-produced the LP with her husband Tom Overby, that ties Sunset Kids together. A master lyricist, she helps Malin refine and focus his own words.

Credit June's vinegary, slightly oddball vocals, equal parts Diana Ross and Dolly Parton, which guide each song like an old tractor retrofit with LED high beams: luminous, ancient, unstoppable.

At her best, she takes PJ Harvey and Nick Drake back to their primordial folk roots, evoking mean sex in overgrown glens and casual farmhand violence.

There are precisely zero churches or trucks on Morris’ latest. Instead, the Texas singer luxuriates in tasteful adult pop rock in the vein of Sheryl Crow and John Mayer, collaborating with producer Greg Kurstin, an A-list practitioner of the sound (Adele, James Blunt, Foo Fighters).

She recorded the set in an old children's nursery in rural England with co-producer Rob Ellis (PJ Harvey) and Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley, who help give her steely reflections a ghostly vibe.

Paramore 2.0 maintain their signature post-emo pop-metal gusto (see the blazing "Be Alone") and added a Stefani-Clarkson elasticity that at times make this feel like a solo debut.

The selection is so good, the set doubles as a best-of--it's a fine intro to the group's tuneful world of lovelorn geekdom.

There is clearly no quietude in Cox's frantic mind, but his obsession yields beauty.

Feels like a widescreen Technicolor dream.

The Private Press is a moody, murky album, by definition not as groundbreaking or epochal as Endtroducing . . . but fascinating enough in its own right.

Interpol's sleek, melancholy sound is a thing of glacial beauty.

Seemingly simple elements -- plucked violin, shuffling snare drums, chiming guitars, plinky piano, his spooky croon and magisterial whistle -- build into one heady, slippery whole.

While it may not have as many grandiose showpieces as its older sibling – no nine-minute “Venice Bitch” to be found here – Chemtrails is every bit as sharp and prescient of a cultural artifact from pop’s premier Cassandra.

It's a flash of lyrical left hooks on a set where the British singer-songwriter goes all Judas, like Dylan before her, recording with electric guitar and broadening her palette without sacrificing her subtly badass folkie persona.

An intense but often rewarding examination of sentimentality from one of youth culture’s leading miserabilists.

Across 12 tracks that all clock in under three minutes or so in length, Charlie is an expertly-crafted collection of earworms that stay in your head longer than any viral photo or TikTok clip. On his terrific, cohesive third studio album, the man with the perfect pitch proves he’s got the perfect formula for a great pop record too.

Throughout Tomorrow’s Fire, Williams sounds strategically self-effacing while also cradling a quiet, growing inner certainty. The result feels like the sound of someone coming into their own, albeit not without some rough patches; she still gets good and angry, but where rage used to feel like a deadend in her previous songs, here it drives her forward.

McCartney III isn't ambitious like Egypt Station - like his first two self-titled solo statements, it's a spontaneous palette cleanser after a labored studio project. [Nov 2020, p.69]

Sharon Jones sings with force and feeling, but there's only so much she can do to breathe life into music so in thrall to the past. Call the Dap-Kings a band if you want--they're really connoisseurs.

Godspeed's music remains as deep, angry, tender, ecstatic and uncompromising as ever.

There's a maturity (and a lightness) to the music that's more sophisticated than the usual dreck that their radio competition pumps out.

For all their harmonic convolutions and tucked-away chorales, the arrangements exude modesty, without the arena-size inflation of Beatle-fan bands like Oasis...

Her addictive debut is full of such moments: catchy refrains with multiple meanings, ear-tugging melodies with hidden hooks.

In James Blake, the squish-grooved London club throb called dubstep just got its very own emotive song stylist. Blake uses neosoul keyboards, blip beats and layered snips of his heart-starved warbling to create softly roiling slow jams.

Lytle's rigorous, knotty songwriting skills check his band's yen for indie-rock messiness. And when everything coheres at the end, with the outstanding soul and reverie of "Miner at the Dial-a-View" and "So You'll Aim Toward the Sky," Grandaddy can be exhilarating.

It's amazing that music so claustrophobic can be this engrossing.

With shadowy beats from Madlib and the late J Dilla, plus dense rhymes about Darwin and a rough Brooklyn upbringing, Mos Def's fourth solo album is both mildly strange and a clear step up from his dismally undercooked 2007 record, True Magic.

The jams here rarely sound like filler: Even the Tex-Mex coda on "Mess With Time" packs more full-bodied crunch than the average Bonnaroo set.

Weller's 12th solo album is a robust binding of the experimental tangents on 2008's 22 Dreams and 2012's Sonik Kicks into taut, acid-flecked turbulence and modern-dance synthesis.

A cohesive, satisfying, fat-free full-length.

By giving themselves over even more to their concepts on Rampen — and no, everything will not be fine — they’ve created a new set of structures to explode.

Over subdued soul loops and improbably mellow piano work, The Lost Tapes displays Nas' gifts for tightly stitched narrative and stunningly precise detail.

Astormy soundtrack to one woman's inner life that swings from acoustic guitars to explosions of layered vocals, electric guitars and the occasional lonely horn or piano.

The record’s only failing is Weiner’s instinct for maximalism. Many of Private Lives’ 17 tracks are one- or two-minute segues that don’t sound so much like intervals as undercooked songs; it’s like songs that Low Cut Connie could have developed but just felt they had to release to fill two albums. But these are easily skippable, and there’s enough top-shelf Connie here that a few speed bumps don’t slow it down too much.

Devils and Dust is also as immediate and troubling as this morning's paper.

His tenor and understated acoustic-guitar work carry songs.

The best tracks fade away into gravity-defying instrumental outros that make Syd's heartache feel sublimely serene.

With Dark Matter, the band has rarely sounded more essential.

A resonant, if occasionally dour, mix of gritty, tuneful rockers and restrained, spectral balladry that evokes Leonard Cohen fronting Crazy Horse. [4 May 2006, p.56]

At times, Watson and Taylor come off like billowy-sleeved naifs who might spend Saturday afternoons riding hither and fro through the marshes, but their Saturday nights clearly involve more carnal interests.

Despite the vintage, or maybe because it's all been hidden for so long, everything here feels like new music, busy being born and put to tape with crisp impatience.

Stars sound confident enough to set anything on fire.

The Obliterati just sounds like the new Burma album.

The songs shuffle styles, but the voices transcend genre distinctions--you may not hear a more beautifully sung record this year.

It all sounds familiar but strange, and beautiful enough to suck you in. [24 Aug 2006, p.94]

The band achieves a new unity in variety here, winding from near-glam romp and fireside-folk warmth to slow-climb grandeur with an attention to the repeated payoff in a sturdy hook and hum-along chorus.

Does Segall's songwriting break new ground? Not really--but Manipulator is rarely boring even so, and always exceedingly likable.

The tunes don't always hold up. But the best ones are impossible to dislike. [22 Feb 2007, p.76]

This is dance music, handmade.

Royksopp show a debt to art rock, but they replace Pink Floyd's paranoia with a mood of late-night sorrow.

His latest shows a low-key master at work, and not in a bubble.

Their songbook bravado and grip of extreme dynamics are vividly caught in the poleaxed cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

She's always straddled musical genres, and Time*Sex*Love boasts a clear pop streak, with the influence of the Beach Boys evident on the harmonies of "Maybe World" and the string arrangements on "What Was It Like" and "King of Love."

Sing the Sorrow is not exactly a concept album, but it does have a singleness of dark purpose that builds in momentum as the disc progresses.