The Pale Emperor plods inoffensively from start to finish with moderate gloom and a similar level of hooks.

Belle and Sebastian's latest full-length succeeds in pointing out societal injustices with just enough sweetness to lighten the bitter frustration lurking within. And yet, at times the endless flutes, synths, and strings risk of giving the listener a cavity.

More than a decade on, this band is peeking out from behind the veil of obfuscation in an effort to stay relevant; they haven't totally abandoned the whimsy and fantasy, but they've toned it down--almost to save themselves.

The problem is that Bada$$ seems to have missed their lessons on levity. His style--often-poetic lyrics rapped in a blunted monotone over moody production--is skilled, but never very fun.

The thought and vision tucked into these constructions are inexhaustibly fun to listen to and unpack.

No Cities to Love spends much of its running time reminding us not what Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss can do but what other configurations of players can't.

If only she was as shameless lyrically as she is musically, she wouldn't be feminist (who cares) but she'd simply be worth letting in your ear.

As is, Uptown Special plays a little like a Spotify playlist on random--fun, and unexpectedly thrilling at times, but jarring and never totally satisfying.

As concept and program, Sullivan's best album to date boasts every curtain call and lighting effect designed to flatter its star.

Grim Reaper is an unedited adventure of blossoming soundscapes, vision-blurring, dissonant melodies, and cheerful robot dance numbers like "Principe Real." It hardly hits the same note twice.

Rae Sremmurd are at their best when they're doing what they want, rather than eschewing their oddities in favor of radio-friendly hooks ("Safe Sex") or buzzword phrasing.

Black Messiah has dozens of false starts, short stops, jagged breaks, and backmasked bits. Everything is a little warped. But somehow, the music never falls out of the pocket. And in that commitment to upholding the groove, we find warmth and evidence that we're still moving forward despite the assault on our senses.

Tracking and self-editing issues have always plagued her Minajesty's projects, but never more so than on this one, an album that probably would've landed with bigger fanfare had Minaj not so loudly touted it as all but an instant classic all year long.

Sucker is just an exceptionally good pop album.

It's an LP that makes virtually no sense in the Pumpkins' chronology, but is a satisfying enough half-hour of Alternative Nation-era would-be-smashes.

Cole's keen sense of injustice registers throughout 2014 Forest Hills Drive, whether slagging white artists for artistic thievery or seething over national media outlets pigeonholing black genius into sports/pop either/ors.... But the absence of "Be Free" still detracts. Unless you're the type of moviegoer who sits patiently through the end titles, feel free to duck out of "Note to Self" a bit early and head over to SoundCloud.

It's a small, controlled, uncommonly focused album, by an artist well into the kind of middle age that prizes refinement and brevity.

Something is definitely missing on A Better Tomorrow: not necessarily the cryptic slang and mythology, but that RZA and the other members haven't found something to replace what stood them apart from the crowd.

Structural issues aside, the strength of the material on The London Session is enough to place the Queen back on track to relevance, after a number of less-inspired efforts had all but sapped her career momentum.

"Sister Ray" comes across like a medley has so many shifts in speed, volume, and energy that it seems more like a medley than a concentrated take on the White Light/White Heat epic. It's the brightest gem among many in the collection, which consolidates all of the group's many faces into one cohesive opus.

Four [is] the most consisting-sounding Direction album yet.

Fans of TVOTR's early density and difficulty might get dismayed at their gradual transformation into the thinking stoner's Coldplay. But it's impossible to listen to Seeds' luxurious fuzz and think that this is a band who mean to be anything but fat and in love.

He's put together a record that's as full of unforgettably kaleidoscopic melodies as it is surreal shoutouts to Dolly Parton and Kurt Cobain--pom pom is just about as beautiful of a mess as Pink himself.

The album is another leap forward for the producer, refining his sense of songcraft and expanding his instrumental palette without sanding down his rough edges in the slightest. Faith doubles down on the industrial brutality of Problems, while also balancing that with a sense of hope and comfort rarely heard from Stott previously.

Broke With Expensive Taste is a project dripping in confidence, class, bursts of brilliance, and personality.

Even the full-length's sleepier moments offer a break from its breakneck speed and succeed in balancing out an otherwise dizzying record.

[Kiesza] serves up is one of the most elastic albums of the 1990s, both 20 years too late and also totally in time.

2's developments in subtlety and humor.

The emphasis put on the soundscapes for these songs--unprecedented for the singer/songwriter--results in her lyrics occasionally getting buried under the synth swooshes, but for the first time in a long time, the majority of Taylor's lyrics don't really demand your attention anyway.

Instead of a triumphant return to form, then, Innocence is more of a satisfying side conversation, a familiar face coming round to the back door and whiling the time away nicely till dark or dawn

Reversing their gradual progression toward gentler, grander grooves, the Pornographers' sixth album is both their liveliest since their first and their most immediate.

Isolating his experimental tendencies to specific tracks leads to some uneven pacing on the album's second half. Otherwise, Green Language fully delivers, serving as a fascinating turn for an artist who earned his reputation by essentially bashing fans into submission with bass.

Though its list of guests may suggest a hedge, Echo largely hews to the road that's less heavily trod upon.

The record is 13 tracks long, sounds nice sometimes, and features Ty$, Juicy J, Project Pat, Curren$y, Chevy Woods, and Nicki Minaj, so it doesn't overstay its welcome and has decent taste in guests.

The world that Worlds conjures is fantastical and defiantly cheery.

Her extreme choices can fall extremely flat when she tries too hard to force them to be what she wants (or, to put it in Sinead's own terms, when she winds up coming off as bossy instead of as a confident, charismatic boss). But when they pay off, it's all worth it.

In its menacing incandescence, LP1 sounds like nothing else in the world right now.

Featuring 10 tracks of gooey, dislocated goodness, its gravity-free atmospherics are just right for soundtracking summer moon treks, intergalactic windsurfing, and asteroid volleyball. Down to earth it is not: These deep but compact space jams can't get much higher.

McGee may not know where he's going on his murky head trip, but he's a compelling enough guide that you want to follow him.

Soul deftly blends caprice with the ensemble’s usual care. Anything featuring Daniel’s scrunched-up, uncommonly expressive yelp and high-strung guitar can’t help but be Spoon-y.

Like floating from level to placid level in Monument, listening to this record prompts your imagination and encourages discourse and reflection. Not the academic kind, but the kind of communal discovery people have been doing for ages.

No myths to sell, just the idea of a working rock band reclaiming what's left of a center-right boomer rock coalition. Hynoptic Eye gets my vote.

In her tuneful insistence that every unhappy couple is unhappy in its own way, Lewis remains one of our foremost chroniclers of heartache and its discontents.

After a few listens, the line becomes representative of a larger realization. In acknowledging certain personal and artistic shortcomings, Presley has uncovered a hidden well of confidence and skill that couldn't be contained in his home recordings.

He sounds comfortable with his new band, a pristinely recorded quartet that frames his lyrics with music just interesting enough to not overwhelm them.

Jackson writes open-endedly, shifting between direct experience and metaphor; mysteries left unsolved by her lyrics and persona are alternately heightened and resolved by the hurt in her voice, the assuredness of her arrangements.

No doubt this will all slay live, but there are parts on For Those Who Stay where Saulnier's obvious talents and ambitions never quite get three dimensional, though it's obviously not for a lack of effort on his behalf, as this is one band no one would ever accuse of not trying hard enough.

Although critics of Morrissey's solo career have justifiably argued that his post-Bona Drag ensembles haven't met the Smiths' lofty bar, World Peace Is None of Your Business is the first Morrissey album that's often stronger musically than it is lyrically.

What gets stultifying over the course of 38 minutes can be invigorating in small, pep-talk size bursts.

No Coast is the work of a proud scene divorcée declaring his allegiance to nothing but verse and chorus. And that's a beautiful thing that too few punks understand.

For those who can keep up, some exultant and righteous highs await.

It's an album designed for playing late at night; even peppier tracks like the popping-piston "Burn The Pages" and the jittery "Hostage" have a darkness to them. That darkness might not make Sia the world's hugest pop star, but it sure makes her one of its more compelling ones.

Apparently Citron is ready to leave the nest. When Beverly performs live she'll work with other players and Rose will be elsewhere, focusing on her solo music. That's too bad, as Careers makes a great argument for teamwork.

Unlike Someday World, the far thornier High Life doesn’t improve much with repeated plays: These are egghead jams whose esoteric textures bewitch more than their relatively static frameworks.

Trigga isn't as cohesive as 2009's Ready, but it's a sublime, soulful convergence of the sonic minimalism and oil-slicked synths of today's hip-hop and R&B, and its sound provides a charismatic contrast to its almost anhedonic pursuit of pleasure.

With likeminded ensembles like Brooklyn’s colorful psych jammers NYMPH and Switzerland’s Eastern-flavored, Voodoo-inspired collective Goat transmitting dreamscapes from the beyond while exuding familial, Zen master vibes, Yoshimi’s OOIOO has joined that spiritual fray with this Gamelan-inspired trance inducer.

As intellectual and introverted as Krell often is, he’s at his best when he and the music simply let go. What Is This Heart? delivers in the second half when nearly every song peaks with exuberant finales.

An album packed start to finish with some of Mastodon's best material to date.

Quality-wise, the second half of the album has a higher batting average.

In a career fraught with obsessions over the perfection-imperfection dichotomy, it turns out to be a blessing that she put pop and its various pressures on the backburner just to deliver some real summertime sadness.

Much of A.K.A. is still mawkish, midtempo melodrama that does too much to accentuate J. Lo's tunelessness.

The result is the rare heady corrective that's as fun as it is thoughtful.

Deep Fantasy is exhausting, cathartic and a little scary.

Where Craft Spells' previous release felt a bit lackadaisical, the more self-aware Nausea, with its themes of growth echoed in its synth crescendos, sports ambition.

Savage Gold is of course far more than the sum of its parts, but those parts--Killing Joke, Deathspell Omega, later Death--make for an excellent starting point for the band's considerable combined talents to spring from.

Ultimately, it's their sisterly harmonies--not their lyrical content--that provide the salve of this First Aid Kit.

Lazaretto's experimentation sounds ambivalent, its songs fractured and distracted.

He's trying to remind you that he's still tough, though these lines mostly just conjure images of Travis Bickle in the mirror: a guy alone and clueless, snarling at imagined enemies that can't talk back.

Glass Boys is easier to navigate, and doesn't engender the same awe [as "David Comes to Life"]. But its brevity allows Fucked Up to loosen a little--to indulge in sounds and tones they forwent when their albums sprawled. Less space, and more stuff: the band keeps getting denser.

Their most eccentric, diverse sounding record to date.

These performances never surrender to the anxiety of influence: All those comparisons are mere reference points for a loose aesthetic that values sustained chordal vamps above all else.

Both "Smokin' and Drinkin'," featuring Little Big Town, and the rowdy "Somethin' Bad," her and Carrie Underwood's retort to bro-country, feel forced. These are small missteps on an otherwise solid outing.

Joyously addictive mutual self-destruction is what Do It Again is all about.

An album so urgent and pressing that it often foregoes language for feeling, explanations for executions.

Although Feast comes packed with Europeans and expats (Butler currently calls Vienna home), the rhythms strike with Yankee assertiveness, the vocals now direct yet far more diverse.

Once you've heard the undoctored edition of Bert Jansch's heartbreaking "Needle of Death," a harrowing tale of self-destruction by heroin predating Young's own "The Needle and the Damage Done," the noisier approach feels like needless gimmickry that diminishes, rather than enhances, one of his strongest sets in a long time.

In Conflict is queer outsider art at its most fraught and compelling.

Upside Down Mountain is a curious, if occasionally disturbing pleasure to listen to. Just don't expect answers when you turn it right side up.

Songs sag and soar at once.

Compared to the sleek, grandiose flash of Coldplay's last two albums—Viva La Vida and Mylo Xyloto, both underlined by help from Brian Eno--Ghost Stories feels as melancholically light and airy as Parachutes, while ironically sounding more like Eno.

Sincerely Yours, then, remains another sturdy addition to the discography of one of rap's more thrilling creatives.

In dialing down the pomp of Belong and the fuzz of their debut, the Pains discover something that transcends mere buzz: an ageless indie pop sound that could last them for years to come.

Agalloch have never sounded so rich, so full.

It's not White Blood Cells or Icky Thump, but at least they no longer sound like they're producing records in a Black Keys factory.

[An] all-consuming a ritual as rock music is capable of giving us, and also as viscerally, joyously life-affirming.

It's not that Chromeo's run out of ideas--they've been a one-idea band all along. But now they've got more of the world singing along, so their brand of fun suddenly means a little bit more.

It's immersive and transgressive, if you care about this stuff.

Her attempt at convincing us she's a loving wife and mother of two, a savvy feminist, and a satirical mastermind mostly comes off as disingenuous.

When I Never Learn aims for pop, it's the hazy Shangri-Las variety; the melodies are Li's lushest to date, but the smoke never clears around them.

She may sing about her belief in herself faltering, but her sincerity is actually stronger than ever. The victory here isn't just that Nikki Nack betters Whokill by beefing up its feral ferocity with more sophisticated chops, or that she triumphed over her detractors by proving she hadn't already peaked. Garbus found power in a hopeless place.

Whether or not you've made your peace with the datedness of Indie Cindy, as well as the sheer pile of things you did not want to see the band do, are you going to put it on repeat? More than you think, but less than they hope.

This is serious music. Albarn has stated that this is his most personal record and he ain't kidding.

Throughout the album, she shifts from restrained cool to soaring sentimentalism in mere seconds; this dynamic is something that Civilian possessed, but Shriek masters.

Sometimes the album sounds backward when it isn't. Rarely does it sound like one person squeaking out notes in succession--more like a bunch of dudes filling a tape with improvisations, rewinding to the cool parts and haranguing some hapless studio engineer to razorblade it all together.

The Way and Color is a gem in its own devastating way, but don't be surprised if TEEN occupy a completely different space next time.

SZA isn't lost when sharing a song with big names, but she doesn't seem interested in pulling them entirely into her own world either.

Breezy in its boldness (12 tracks, under 50 minutes), this is a heavily considered album from the only reasonable rap star around.

Food is indeed "the real thing," a satisfying album grounded by familiar funk, rooted in classic soul sounds and focused on the everyday rituals of life: eating.