The music on their third album, Mind Control, shows a broader vocabulary of anachronism.

Early exploits including a ridiculous rhyme about T-Rex amorousness ("Dinosaur Sex"), jabs at vapid art-school scenesters ("Art Bitch" and "!Franchesckaar!"), and some indecipherable indie-dance vocoding ("I Wanna Be Darth Vader"). True Romance is a strident departure from those frivolities so far as solid, true-to-aim songwriting is concerned, but the divergence and a touch of the silliness remains.

Recorded at Jamaica's Tuff Gong studios, the record's strongest asset is making things that shouldn't work together sound natural.

[It's] mostly a very good album, but the concept betrays the end listening experience, leaving the unshakable feeling that it could've been a six-track EP, not an over-padded full album.

Ultimately, what makes Excavation such an awesome and absorbing listen is precisely its indifference to the listener.

They've stepped up their ballad game, and the grooves, smartly percussive and Kanye-slick, are deeper than ever.

Despite all this defiantly cosmopolitan music, Wheelhouse finds Paisley in bittersweet reverie.

By facing down the exhausting nature of depression and loneliness (seriously, Coyne sounds so depleted that he can barely muster the dejection to sing, and yes, that's a compliment), the Lips have retroactively strengthened their entire artistic credo.

Hotel California is inexcusable. It may be the least creative major-label rap album in recent memory.

Revealing more to outsiders than, say, that entire Nirvana box set, it revels in the seemingly defunct L.A. pop greats' status as old-school virtuosos who turned the new school on.

This is their longest album and has the highest stakes, and succeeds.

Overgrown's biggest fault is lack of quality control; it's an uneven listen, with peaks like "Retrograde" segueing into the quotidian piano recital of "DLM," with an undistinguished back half that doesn't linger in the mind afterward.

What aren't here are coherently shaped songs, or hooks, or riffs, or melodies that stick.

They've never sounded more in tune with the materiality of sound or the sonorousness of the physical world.

The living, breathing aspect of Arnalds' music is more evident here than on his previous six years’ worth of albums and EPs, which makes Winter easily his most straightforwardly accessible and mainstream-leaning effort to date.

So much of Wolf is about distancing Tyler from the listener, whereas the vulnerability and melodic mirroring of "Answer," awash in sad organ glissando and two decades of unmet emotional need, is the album's truly shocking moment, in large part because it's so much better than everything else. From there it's another eight problematic songs until a pulse returns during Earl Sweatshirt's guest verse on "Rusty."

They're still wildly unpredictable--and still committed to not singing in English--but the dichotomy between the adrenaline rushes and chill-out moments seems a bit more purposeful.

The real act of provocation here comes in the streamlining of what had been cacophonous material into a solid bag of actual tunes.

A cleverly plotted head trip disguised as a ramshackle mess, the debut full-length from this psychedelic Oakland quartet turns brain-scrambling confusion into a fine art.

Amygdala is the most fearless and most accomplished thing he's ever made: a smorgasbord of sonic possibility, a new idea around every corner, each vibrantly alive in a wide sound field.

Rather than give us a full album of "The Strokes Misremember the '80s," the band falls back repeatedly on self-imitation.

You're better off soaking in the good choices here and resigning yourself to enduring the bad ones.

Her voice and her lyrics are just a part of what makes Sleeper such a gripping listen. The record evinces a rumpled bohemian chic resembling a Purple Fashion editorial come to life, but behind that effortless cool is an impeccable sense of craft.

Hello, Mimi Sparhawk, who sings lead on five of these 11 songs instead of her usual one or two, and it is glorious to behold.

He seems plenty happy to hone coulda-been Nirvana licks to perfection on Afraid of Heights, which, despite being an album of all-new material, still feels like the Incesticide of his canon.

Although he's stretching traditional, time-tested folk templates culled from around the world and back again, Tyler's vision is both distinctly American and deeply modern.

Many of the tracks conclude with two- or three-minute outros, but that's where The 20/20 Experience is often at its best.

New Moon offers pleasures aplenty.

There's something exhilarating in listening to her think out loud--the sureness of her songwriting battling the part of her brain that knows the song will never be enough.

Tidy and concise, clocking in at 43 minutes, it favors the diminutive gesture to the cloying, hammy affectation that derailed so much of his prior discography.

There’s a good balance here: classicist in the Lee Ann Womack neo-countrypolitan sense, yet neither stodgy, frail, nor nostalgic, but rather as thoroughly in tune with modern millennial existence as Taylor Swift.

Real to Reel is otherwise lacking in the kind of tension that's required to produce an album that's more than the sum of its talented parts.

Regardless of the catalyst, Chelsea Light Moving is an entirely successful test of Moore’s post-breakup mettle.

The aspirations here are lofty, as always, if less reflective than your average NIN lament; the songs swell, bobble, and even leak from the seams under the pressure.

Mostly, it's the wilting pedal steel, warm analog tubes, and lush heartbreak flourishes of "When I'm Gone" that distinguish Rose from the merchants of new country's jingles.

The nakedness of Crutchfield’s music is the source of both its confidence and its vulnerability.

Like Animal Collective, Youth Lagoon craft modernist pop so perfectly of its time that we're hardly aware of how much time has passed.

Mostly there are ballads--exquisitely poised, expertly arranged ones so dialed into their feminine inspirations that Milosh and Hannibal virtually merge with the objects of their affection.

The collision of rhetoric and intentions result in both colorless abstractions like piano ballad and first single "Where Are We Now," and grand melodrama like "You Feel So Lonely You Could Die."

Despite subjecting himself to psychoanalysis and attempting to purge himself of ego, Ashin has created something emphatically empathetic out of his inner turmoil. He's going through it like everyone else, but the very personal Anxiety is remarkably messy, dramatic, poignant, and at times, beautiful.

For an album whose most apparent traits are simplicity and broadness, Miracle Temple's best moments are pretty idiosyncratic.

So, no, Marr isn't exactly reinventing rock here--he already did that. The Messenger feels more like a tribute to his youth, to his home, and to all the musicians he's worked with over the past three decades.

Pleasingly, A Love Surreal eschews the idea of calling in favors, instead laying bare Bilal's own songwriting and production prowess.

There's a grandeur and purity of intent to the whole doofy concept that prove hard to resist. For Kavinsky, B-grade electronic '80s gunk is rocket fuel, and it makes Outrun soar.

There are no prominent electronics on Island Universe, but it's a relatively ambitious, often distortion-less statement that feels more spacious than the band's (former) basement-rock peers.

Miraculously, this is instead the man's best since Multiply, and his first since Jim to recreate a specific sound in his own image.

Their hooks sink deep, but you'll be more likely to hum than sing along, simply because their words so often disappear into the ether like messages traced with your fingertips on a fogged mirror.

Vexovoid is possibly the most inscrutable, evil-sounding thing to emerge from Australia since Mel Gibson.

Even in a career filled with expansive balladry, there are moments on Push the Sky Away as lovely as anything in his repertoire, from the music-box piano chimes of "We No Who U R" to the "Dress Rehearsal Rag"-strings on "We Real Cool" and the dulcet choruses of "Finishing Jubilee Street" and "Wide Lovely Eyes."

You're Nothing turns everything up--it's smarter, faster, catchier and noisier than their debut, more a Funhouse than a Rock for Light.

How I Knew Her glides by in 40 minutes without making any kind of impression at all, other than giving you a vague desire to hit up Starbucks.

the monster of folk's slow-jamming, white-suited funk would seem fresher and riskier (at least in this godless era) if Matthew E. White, another Southerner with that old-time religion/romance on his mind, hadn't carved out similar turf on last year's equally ambitious and somewhat superior Big Inner.

Take their third album, Holy Fire: It shreds.

Against all odds, this is a lyrics record, deliberate where you expect it to be insane (or inane), a smart listen in the tradition of Largely Incomprehensible Lyrics That Nonetheless Sound as If They Had Actual Time and Multiple Drafts Put Into Them.

Like The Eternal and The Seer, m b v is a late-period return of the repressed, a middle-aged freak-out tempered by hard-won mastery.

Frightened Rabbit's best material rivals brothers-in-brood the National and Arcade Fire, and even their B-level stuff is better than that of most acts working in this vein. But unlike those leading lights, these guys don't have the pop instincts to throw in the occasional punk scrappers, chamber-folk interludes, or disco rave-up to keep things from getting monotonous.

General Dome's force is relentless, but about halfway through these 12 songs, things run together, with muddy, [mid-dy] waters polluting the mix.

This ain't perfect, nor is it exactly sui generis, but it still ought to bump up their summer-festival-lineup-poster font size by a solid five points or so.

Liberated from the stylistic baggage of their previous albums, the Quins deliver something close to pure intoxicating emotion, granting themselves the freedom to go anywhere they want next time.

The self-production here is a bit murky, maybe, and the drums and vocals have seen sharper days. But these dudes still turn sharp corners.

On the surface, it's big, dumb, and fun; just beneath, there's an improbably complicated band at work, showing its hand only on repeated listens.

Racing through 11 disjointed songs in 30 minutes flat, Ra Ra Riot never give their material a chance to breathe. Instead, we're left with somewhat impressive ideas, squandered with impressive vigor.

On their 16th(!) full-length, True North, the group's highly evolved savoir-faire proves their greatest asset.

All told, it's an endearing bag of tricks.

The songs that collapse under their own weight find the band struggling to feel epic, but Wolf's Law still soars when the band struggles instead with epic feelings.

When consumed passively, as ambient music, his conceptual flaws recede into the fuzz of his production, a raw mush of sound that provides an appropriate and occasionally great backdrop for refreshing your Tumblr dashboard, at least until it delivers a more engaging artist to look at.

All in all, this is a well-written, smartly paced, tightly played, thematically cohesive, musically tidy piece of work. It's just that quite a lot of Camper fans probably never considered those qualities to be particularly appealing virtues.

Free Energy know that what they're emulating is about bliss not meaning, and they're savvy enough to embrace pop simplicity without condescending to it.

Return is neither a step up or down from 2010's wave-warping Causers of This or 2011's time-warping Underneath the Pine, yet it's not more of the same.

Yet even minus narrative detail or plot points, one surrenders to the logic of Richard's world, thanks to the modernist sheen holding the entire suite-like venture together, a voracious and melodic urban contemporary sound referencing 1980s pop as much as house or electro.

The musical ideas here will be readily familiar to anyone who has heard Pantha du Prince's work before.

It can feel both more possible, and yet further out of reach.

Parquet Courts' over-the-top energy, speed, and succinctness makes the combination sound fresher than anything the original elements have managed in years.

Like the film from which it borrows its title, Lady From Shanghai is an artfully awkward study in malaise.

At just under a half-hour (a runtime probably inspired by the days when vinyl records could only contain about 40 minutes of music), Lysandre is a frustrating listen.

Should these two musicians choose to continue their professional reengagement (and here's hoping they do), jettisoning the vocalists and second-rate John Cooper Clarke monologues in favor of the noisy anti-pop skank they helped invent might yet yield wondrous results. Less talk, more skronk.

Trouble Man is his first album since that second bid; it finds him finally returning to the lane that he abandoned somewhere around the time he included two Wyclef Jean songs on T.I. vs. Tip.

He's proven he can assimilate into the world of mainstream rap while still retaining his singularity.

You don't have to know Cody ChesnuTT's back story to appreciate all this--the journey is right there in the lyrics.

There's a simultaneously appealing and slightly off-putting looseness to all this, conjuring the sort of drowsiness where you'd rather sleep for a week straight than let in more heartbreak.

The music may be just as strong, tight, and impeccable--this is a band that's been going at it for more than a quarter of a century, after all--but there's a lightness missing here, a lack of passion.

This disconnect between Jesus Piece's gambit and its execution, between Game's intention and the raps served up by his guests, results in the headliner being reduced to a mere spectator on too much of his own album.

The bulk of Unorthodox Jukebox benefits from presenting Bruno Mars as he truly imagines himself: a big belter with an ear for pop hooks, sure, but one unafraid to dive into murkier waters.

Less of an anthemic, balls-to-the-wall affair than Elements of Freedom (still her strongest album overall), this one does have its own liberating, empowering charms.

Clinging to the guest stars is crucial to getting through this thing--pros like Courtney Noelle provide basic hooks where the headliner's own horrible mantras ("I got so much," "Fall asleep") fail completely.

Bish Bosch is Walker's most accessible (extremely relatively speaking) work since Climate.

The reinvigorated results feel warm-blooded, definite, vulnerable, exposed.

He's brilliant when juxtaposing rhythmic brutality against euphonious familiarity; but here, he seems exhausted by the former and ashamed of the latter.

Warrior is likable enough, but not only can't it match its predecessor, it's not nearly as exhilarating or disruptive as what fellow slizzered California trashdancer Dev or assorted K-poppers have done in the past two years with basically the same raw materials.

Kreay indulges the full breadth of her influences, turning Somethin into a series of wan genre studies.

Ultimately, Wild Water never hits as hard as its predecessor, and can't match it in terms of either focus or breadth.

The now-24-year-old's voice may be simple, but it's distinctive--and as defiant as her album titles.

Bronsonland is a place you enjoy spending time in or you don't, and that does not seem likely to change anytime soon.

Sadly, as Pit forges ahead in his campaign for world domination, his artistry is what's really being colonized.

As pure listening experience, Tourist's mazelike structure, full of echoes and switchbacks, best lends itself to listening on shuffle.

For maybe the first time, the Evens actually make you miss Fugazi a little bit less.

Judging from the spirited but wildly inconsistent material on this trilogy's first two entries, a little quality control would've helped, perhaps funneling the best of the three albums into one solid offering.

It slips down easily, and the duo's knowledge and pedigree (their debut is out on 16-year-old rave label Ultra Records, once home to the Chemical Brothers and Tiësto) also satisfies the yen of longtime dance-music lovers who might be side-eyeing all the Johnny-Come-Latelies.