While it's easily the most accessible material from the project to date, a few listens will reveal that it's every bit as chaotic as their early outsider sounds.

At its best, My Name Is Safe in Your Mouth is a hauntingly lovely reintroduction to an underrated talent.

By combining the autobiographical perspective of their earliest work with the flexible sounds of their later albums, Powerhouse showcases the entire scope of Planningtorock's music--and the results are moving in more ways than one.

The mysteries of love, life, and the world are broached with a light yet nevertheless unshakeable touch on Faithful Fairy Harmony. Foster has made a record that feels like a psychic connection to inner worlds as well as an outer one, and the visions she summons are at once vivid and rarified.

The previously released portion of the compilation, significantly less than half of its 36 selections, all dates from 2010-2017, an era represented with Teebs and TOKiMONSTA's warped beatmaking, Daedelus' MPB-tinged folk, Martyn's pellet-spraying U.K. garage mutation, and disparate varieties of funk from Mono/Poly and bass god Thundercat. ... Among the other exclusives and glimpses officially issued first through this set are Thundercat's trippy "King of the Hill" (with BadBadNotGood), Miguel Atwood-Ferguson's sublime "Kazaru," and Moiré's Prescription-meets-Dial beauty "Lisbon," progressive slices of soul, jazz, and house.

Walker plays it exceedingly straight, even when he's delivering good-time numbers like "Kit Kat Jam." This po-faced sincerity winds up underscoring Walker's debt to Dave Matthews Band--they now seem like a clear influence on his adventurous folk-jazz--while also highlighting the imagination behind the original set of songs.

No songs are highly energized, but Carey sounds like she's deriving joy from each one.

As alluring as his spooky, skeletal arrangements are--steel guitars are used as howling accents, not solos; he occasionally gooses his band to follow a train track rhythm, but is usually content picking out support on his hollow acoustic--it's Wall's concrete sense of time and place that gives Songs of the Plains an unusual resonance.

Despite FM!'s brevity, Staples jams so much into every bar that it fully satiates, all while still managing to end so abruptly that it comes as a surprise. The electrifying thrill of FM! is a triumph for the rapper who remains at the top of his game.

This Is My Dinner isn't a radical departure from the albums Kozelek has been pumping out since Benji, but it's clear evidence of how tedious and self-indulgent his style has become.

There's much to admire in This One's for the Dancer & This One's for the Dancer's Bouquet, but the good ideas don't always sustain themselves in the execution, and perhaps the coming Spencer Krug projects will reflect a concision and clarity of focus that is not always apparent here.

Despite--or perhaps because of--its brevity (just over 30 minutes), El Mal Querer is arresting in its tension, passion, and creative ingenuity.

A somewhat lengthy collection, the album does tend to drag a little in its second half and while there are no outright duds, a bit of editing might have turned a strong 14-track outing into an excellent ten or 12-track one.

This kind of well-manicured production, when paired with a series of songs focused on internal journeys, ultimately has a lulling effect. There is a pulse, but it's soft and turned electronic. There is emotion, but it's been intentionally encased in a digital cocoon, one that flattens the group's bold accents (such as an embrace of vocoders) and turns Delta into soft, shimmering background music, ideal for any soothing setting you'd like.

Corgan delivers something unexpected: music that's rich but settled, music that plays to his strengths, music where he seems happy in his own skin.

Lynch and Badalamenti aficionados will no doubt revel in its many strange charms, but perhaps above all, they'll appreciate the sound of two old friends having a great deal of mischievous fun.

Black Velvet is a collection of odds and ends and not a proper album, and sometimes it sounds that way as it moves from track to track. But it is full of the heart, soul, and spirit that Charles Bradley summoned every time he stood before a microphone, and this is a moving reminder of how much he gave us, and how much we have lost.

Ghost Forests offers listeners an expansive offering of the duo's strengths in improvisation, songwriting, and interpretation. Yet, for its considerable imagination and creativity, there is also an elegant restraint that allows listeners access to an interior world of sound and poetry perhaps previously unimagined.

B.E.D, is a delight. The performers work to fit their individual skills into a cohesive unit.

With some of the best and most interesting flashes of library music's colossal archives, Unusual Sounds offers a look at an arcane avenue of music that will engage those previously unfamiliar and well-versed fans.

As a vocalist and songwriter, Miller is in solid form here, though as with most of his solo work, this lacks a bit of the heart and soul he brings to the Old 97's. But The Messenger has a stronger individual personality that most of Miller's solo work, and he and Sam Cohen make a good team in the studio.

Lover Chanting--the band's first release for underground stalwarts Ninja Tune -- maintained the productivity with three new songs.

There's both a sadness and warmth to Streisand's performances on Walls that befits the album's subject matter and speaks to her own ability to communicate to, and often for, her audience.

He might have made an album that doesn't follow the Blues Explosion's template so clearly. If you dig Jon Spencer, you'll have a good time with Spencer Sings the Hits. But probably not as great a time as you had with him before.

Only the less impressive closing song "Fingers" sounds primed for mass appeal with traditional hooks. More compelling are the moments that showcase Lil Peep's unique relationship with self-expression and self-destruction. His delivery, lyrical choices, and sincere examination of difficult feelings seemed curious when he was alive, but take on a profound significance in the pallid wake of his death.

As good as Martin's remix is--it may not be as revelatory as his stereo remix of Sgt. Pepper in 2017, but it does manage the trick of sounding rich and bold without betraying the feel of the original--the real appeal of this deluxe reissue is the unreleased material, all presented in sparkling fidelity. This high fidelity is especially welcome on the Esher demos. ... Taken on their own, the session tapes are absorbing listening, but they also have the side effect of making the finished The Beatles not seem like a mess, but rather a deft, cleverly constructed album that accurately reflects the abundant creativity of these sessions.

Holy Hell is both a teardown and a rebuild, and while it isn't always an easy listen, there is some hard-won catharsis to be found in its attempt to distill the messiness of grief into four-minute blasts of sonic demolition.

The group takes pains to be able to fit onto every kind of playlist imaginable: rock, pop, electronic, soul-any popular sound that can be sculpted and shaped by a streaming service. As such, listening to Origins uncannily re-creates what it's like to experience-or maybe more accurately, consume-popular rock-oriented music in 2018: everything sounds vaguely familiar, vaguely connected, all designed to function as a soundtrack to whatever task you'd like.