Crowded and long overdue as it is, In My Mind is a satisfying and mature showcase for one of the most skilled and creative talents in R&B.

The album constantly maintains feelings of loneliness and obsession, and serves equally as a soundtrack for fantasy exploration as well as late-night dancefloor enrapturement.

Rodriguez has been hinting at the ambition displayed on Lola for some time. What's surprising is how a record of such scope and imagination can be rendered so intimately and elegantly.

There's no pretense here: this album is pure, no-frills, feel-good fun, a start-to-finish crowd-pleaser for fans of that classic pop-punk sound.

Anyone who was into previous El Guincho albums will be satisfied by the new direction he's taken, and who knows, some R&B fans with an adventurous nature may even find his sound to be something worth checking out.

The arrangements are exquisite, the textures multivalent, and the emotional resonances cavernous, intuitive, and expressive.

Dixon judiciously edited over one-third of the tracks to facilitate flow, his craftiness most evident in the way Talc's breezy part-soft rock/part-Daft Punk hybrid melts into one of Beady Belle's graceful lounge laments. Dixon's taste dips back several decades, but he keeps it relatively contemporary all the way through.

Victorious amounts to little more than a thrown-together mess.

All the good stuff is still here, one might just have to do a little digging, hang in through a couple listens, and then the songs on Life of Pause will begin to connect with the head and the heart.

The album ends up being more sprawling than it initially seems, but no less triumphant.

Grasque proves to be the group's most elusive outing to date, favoring icy, often formless melodies that come and go as they please, and existential lyrics that periodically dissolve into ghostly, wordless repetition.

Aside from messing with his own formula, it's not necessarily the most groundbreaking or well-written LP Sartain has made and, taken as a whole, it feels more like an experiment than a major step forward.

Compared to You Are Not Alone and One True Vine, the quality of the material is more variable.

By the time the meditative, strings-driven "Zone Null" brings Void Beats/Invocation Trex to a close, it feels like the end of a journey that reveals Cavern of Anti-Matter as a playful yet profound group capable of touching on the cosmic as well as kosmiche.

Ultimately, Need Your Light is an ambitious, thrilling album, full of songs that aim to grab your heart as well as your ears.

Phase is an exciting debut from a talented artist, a case where the hype is duly warranted.

At its best, Neo transcends redundancy with raw power, but it remains to be seen whether or not the band can find their own voice amid the maelstrom.

Undeniably great sounding, the record puts Animal Collective's brightest colors forward and, if history is any indication, is no predictor whatsoever of what they may do next.

Banshee is a smart and impressive piece of work that speaks to the mind and the soul with similar clarity.

They've honed their sound even further, zeroing in on a vintage-inspired, '60s soul aesthetic.

The other way to look at the erratic Pablo is as an "instant" LP, one that was mastered at the last minute and debuted via streaming. On that count, it's a fascinating, magazine-like experience with plenty of reasons to give it a free play, and with "Feedback" adding "name one genius that ain't crazy" to the mix, Pablo excuses itself from the usual criticisms, although it could have been tighter.

Even with the album's epic length, it never feels meandering or indulgent, as Prins Thomas remains supremely focused throughout the entire journey, finding the duality between the different types of "cosmic" music.

Daze is an astounding leap forward, harnessing an overwhelming amount of energy and transforming it into an arsenal of sonic warfare. The album also feels like it's the beginning of what could become a lengthy saga, with many additional battles to come.

Arts & Leisure is so easygoing that it's easy to underestimate, but it reveals Martin as a first-rate storyteller who captures the joys of new sights and new ways of thinking in songs full of life and humor.

It might have been interesting to boil the track list down a bit, then spend a disc catching up on the post-1995 bands that have kept the sound alive. That being said, the story they do tell on Still in a Dream is a fascinating one, full of guitar-mangling bliss and soaring melodic grandeur suitable for a fuzzy trip down memory lane or a deep dive of discovery for the novice gazer.

Hidden City would have made a great EP, but falls far short of the mark as an album. It closes this arbitrary trilogy on a strange and unsatisfying note.

The music fits the moods perfectly and the low-key sound makes the songs even stronger. In that regard, it might be the best match of Astor's career. Even if it's not, it still makes for a pretty great album, one of his strongest and one of the strongest singer/songwriter albums one is likely to hear in 2016.

Just as you think the trio are going to lock up legs and topple over, they fall into a gorgeous minor-key stride and dissipate into a sweepingly ominous mid-song bass solo. Ultimately, it's these moments of dazzling group dynamics that help make Man Made Object a jazz-infused work of art on GoGo Penguin's own terms.