Cohen's voice maintains the album's consistently floaty quality through these sparser tracks, making for a relentlessly dreamy set that's lost in thought and desire.

Small Mercies may not be quite as immediate as The Age of Anxiety, but it's fizzing with energy and ideas that prove that Pixx the right person to sing about what's wrong with the world.

It's a roller coaster of conflicting moods and feelings.

More dense, driven, and complexly rendered than anything else in the band's catalog, Spectre expands on the strongest moments of Lightning Dust's ever-shifting muse. The production, songwriting, and performances all reach new levels of curiosity and unpredictable moves, making it some of the band's most captivating work.

The precision may mean 50 Year Trip: Live at Red Rocks lacks spontaneity, but the album does showcase Fogerty at the height of his showmanship. He performed at Red Rocks to entertain the crowd by playing the hits, and what worked in concert works on record, too.

After several records of heady composition and high-concept music, Be Up a Hello is refreshingly direct. Without simply revisiting a bygone golden era, Jenkinson reconsiders some of his old ways, taking some of his more familiar ideas to new, strange places. As always.

Just as vibrant and full of wonder as Popp, Scis is another imaginative, unpredictable world of sound.

"In Your Eyes" isn't quite tonally of piece with the rest of Rated PG but as it's one of Gabriel's most famous songs, it belongs here and helps put into perspective how so much of Gabriel's film work leans toward the artier side of the spectrum.

The easy melodies and subtle singing of the title track is something new and very welcome; much of the rest of the album hits this same note of familiarity and growth, and it makes for a very satisfying listen. If Berry continues to progress and impress at this level, he might soon be known as a musician who does some acting instead of the other way around.

Poised somewhere between elegance and ferocity, All Bets Are Off is an exciting debut from an artist who thrives on the unexpected.

Refuge sounds composed, thoughtful, and intimate, with reflections on pain, grief, acceptance, and relief coming through in the character of the album's varied atmospheres.

It's handsomely crafted classic rock played with flair, wit, and precision, elements that make familiar tropes seem fresh.

Phillips' commentary on the state of the world is quite artful, but a look at the lyrics and a careful listen to the vocals allows the activist side of the songs to step forward, and when they take shape it's effective in the way it whispers rather than shouts in our ear.

As a whole, Heavy Rocks [2022] is demanding, wild, and raw, yet needs to be heard in a single listening session. After three decades together, Boris continue to willfully and eagerly engage a tense musical restlessness that keeps them sounding unsettled, ambitious, often feral, and in a class of their own.

King Gizzard are never less than compelling and even when their concepts are modest, they deliver a final product that's psychedelic pop/rock/funk/soul/prog/what have you at it's very best.

A bevy of producers, highlighted by Jennifer Decilveo (Bat for Lashes, Anne-Marie) and Daniel Tannenbaum (Kendrick Lamar), do admirable, evocative work, but the songs and feeling get lost under the layers of sound, particularly at the album's hour-long running time.

Tunes such as "Rainlines," "Dolphin Spray," and the amusingly titled "Cafe del Mars" are among his prettiest and most straightforward, respectively, dealing out throbbing and knackered house, intimate dancehall, and vaporous techno. The few purely ambient pieces, highlighted by "Doves Over Atlantis," are almost as evocative.

Hole Erth is definitely something of a departure for Toro y Moi and Bundick as he's never sounded quite as modern and rap friendly as this. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has been following him since the beginning, Bundick handles the shift with sure-handed aplomb, and everything he tries works out perfectly. As usual.

At times, The Odd Couple is a more beautiful record than its predecessor. But all too often Cee-Lo relies on the same sort of lyrical cipher as on St. Elsewhere, although none of them are as effective.

Era Extrana's lavish electro-pop proves that Neon Indian can be more than just chillwave.

It is a mellow, melodic album that switches between stripped-down, folk-inspired material, downtempo pop, and up-to-date productions designed for both home and club listening.

It’s a wide, spacious, summer storm of a record that bounces around genres like an open-world RPG game, and while there may be only 12 locations you can fast-travel to, there is enough treasure in each to keep the adventurer occupied for a month of afternoons.

On Holy Fire, the third album from the English band, the post-punk revival is given a newfound sense of depth, creating songs that are rhythmic enough to draw listeners, but hypnotic enough to leave listeners lost in their wide-open spaces.

Whoop Dee Doo is the Muffs playing near the top of their game.

Turner nails the concept, wallowing in warped dreams and painting widescreen soundscapes, but the foundation is wobbly; at a glance, it's impressive, but the slipshod details reveal themselves upon close inspection.

This compilation won't do anything to make Maus' bizarre intentions more clear or his cloudy legacy more cohesive, but for those already converted, its 16 songs will be essential.

Bunny seems more like an album to mentally pick apart than dance to, yet it's not hard to lose one's self in the rush of Dear's inventive rhythms.

Unlike Vol. 1, which ran out of steam during its last third, Vol. 2 keeps its momentum from beginning to end, clattering and shambling through its 33 minutes without a false step.