As ever with free-improv records, the level of control is remarkable.

Drunk’s a chill listen, but it’s also a restless one.

This disconnect between Dirty Projectors’s pop tendencies with its “art” signaling is what ultimately stains the album with such a deep sense of confusion, making it difficult to parse who exactly this music is written for, if not people who are already fans of Dirty Projectors.

Without an adequate treatment or storyboard, [I Decided] feels listless and wanting immediate predicate. It lacks a ready place on the shelf.

The energy imparted simply can’t overcome a drowning of influences, or rather, the kinetic is overcome by the potential.

Eno’s continuation of his flag-bearing series is about as ignorable as it has always been with waning levels on the side of interest.

Ultimately, though, it becomes hard to identify individual tracks without keeping a close eye on the tracklisting as you go.

It’s as wicked as Twins at a fraction of the cost, as weird as Melted but twice as pretty, oozing acerbic coffee, acid mud, and gasoline.

In some ways, it is as an exercise in stripping away everything that makes The Flaming Lips such a truly special group, leaving only that which serves as decorative tinsel to their music, hanging limp and lifelessly in the air.

On A Shadow In Time, Basinski tries not merely to locate Bowie’s ghost in the machine, but to find its cross-dressing, orange-haired, anisocoric-eyed soul locked somewhere inside the hard electronic casing of the world.

The LP straps us into its cramped, jilted rhythms and harsh materiality, keeping us in its grips. And it’s successful in keeping us there precisely because we enjoy its confinement, we enjoy its power over us, and we enjoy the illusion that we aren’t confined and powerless. That’s ultimately what makes it a wonderland.

There is a creeping charm to tracks that seem initially off.

Nine Suns, One Morning is unpredictable without being arbitrary.

Despite its sub-30 minute run-time, Remain Calm packs a punch.

It’s a diverse group and they’re doing some excellent work. Really great stuff.

Many of these songs begin promisingly before losing momentum and settling into turgid grooves. Rather than serving as a platform for D∆WN and Machinedrum to hybridize and expand the pop form, Redemption offers ornate, glittering garments, which constrict as they envelop.

For all of its harshness and grit, Daniel Bachman is an elegant, personal work, a letter written cozily from the hearth of modern country music, its ink smudges and scrawl an affectionate indicator of the hands that wrought them.

Jessica Rabbit does not feel challenging, nor does it feel inviting. The adolescent only hopes to participate.

Lambchop’s albums often come off as minor masterpieces--not quietly stunning but aesthetically proclamatory, carrying material enough for a listener to stay with and dwell on. FLOTUS is no exception.

American Band won’t transform our American landscape; good country music can’t heal a national soul. But an art of humanity and a faith in being better to each other can help redefine America.

Beyond the Fleeting Gales is a genuine and unpretentious promise from Crying that they are here, and so are we, and together we can save the world, even if it’s just for a moment.

Exercising a more polished sound than heard on their debut Intro Bonito, which felt somewhat dinky by design--it was often centered around decisively hollow chiptune-inspired arrangements--Bonito Generation is its own self-reflective hit parade carrying with it five pre-album singles and the potential for at least a few more.

Ultimately, 13 is a lens buffer for viewing Supersilent’s previous interrogations of how conditioned humans process sound and space, yet it needn’t in itself be a normative work.

Musically, there are too many things going on and too few things going on. Every track sounds more or less the same, and every track sounds like a poor heyday tribute.

Building a Beginning takes to heart every criticism of his 2013 release, inverting it into something that, though restrained and even surprisingly heartfelt at times, does very little to save itself from being forgotten.

The borrowing of in-house trap elements is neither crass nor exploitative: it is rather a seeming extension of the communicative nature of patten’s project.

Color is, first, a thing of intrigue and frenzy, as deserving of your undivided attention as it is confounding mixed with almost any other sense perception; second, it’s an exercise with a few robust rewards.

COW makes no claims to reinvent the wheel. Yet its heightened attention to detail marks a new focus for the duo, who, with less tools than ever before, manage to find a sound that’s wistful, wide-eyed, and surprisingly full of sounds new to the act, if still par for the course within the wider realm of contemporary composition.