By maintaining forward momentum while having so much going on in every song, the band makes Shaky Dream an album that provides plenty of depth without sacrificing accessibility, striking a fine balance between catchy melodies and murky atmospherics.

Push Any Button is what Sam Phillips fans have come to rely on over her course of her career: a perfectly crafted album that overflows with melodic hooks, musical grace, lyrical insight, and emotional depth.

Howlin is good enough to make you forget most of the bands they were influenced by too, as it both embraces and somehow transcends the '90s in a flash of sound and vision.

As someone whose success has come mostly as a singles artist, Jay Sean fails to deliver anything quite as charismatic as any of his greatest hits on Neon, leaving the album feeling largely flat.

An amazing journey from the outer limits to street level with a wormhole in the middle, Back on the Planet is stellar.

Despite being a shade too long, this is a solid endeavor that asks many questions even as spins its tales.

Ultimately, with Last of the Great Pretenders, Nathanson turns his memories of the city by the bay into a universally relatable metaphor for coming of age, reminding us how a place can hold sway over your identity long after you've moved on.

Music for Objects is a fine listen, offering CFCF fans the restrained, smart music they crave.

No matter how carefully constructed this whole enterprise is, See You There doesn't carry the same weight as Ghost on the Canvas.

With Big TV, White Lies combine the urgent passions of their debut with the conceptual ambitions of their sophomore effort and by doing so, make the best album of their career.

It sounds fully colored in and unless you're a big fan of cold and lifeless, it's a huge step forward for Washed Out.

Formed via a craigslist ad, the band's internal anonymity is hardly relative with regard to its cohesiveness, as each track on the brainy yet intuitive Dark Eyes sounds like the sum of its parts, but there is enough space between those parts to suggest a sort of unspoken agreement to avoid any sort of showboating.

The album's more intimate moments, such as "The Swollen Map" and "Down in the Liverpool Stream," have just as much impact as the showier ones, and reaffirm that Pinkunoizu have gained more than they lost by paring down a bit on The Drop.

It's an impressive debut from a very promising group.

Not everything works on Imps of Perversion, but it's still a strong second album that broadens Pop. 1280's horizons without sacrificing their pummeling impact.

It can take a while to deconstruct the narrative, but when ignoring the weighty plot, the songs' key themes of mortality, love, and loss still manage to make an impact.

The album's a cathartic self-study, executed without drama, during a time of major personal upheaval, and it will truly resonate with anyone who's ever found themselves at the end of a relationship.

Ultimately, the golden age of dream pop and shoegaze lasted roughly ten years, a blink in the eye when it comes to pop music. However, for Swim Deep with Where in the Heaven Are We, it’s almost like it never ended.

Haines is still a force of nature, more Uriah Heep than David Copperfield, and his sharp-tongued critiques, especially of his chosen field, though tempered with moments of sentimentality, remain as volatile as ever.

While Norma Jean were no doubt exhausted by the creative process that went into Wrongdoers, fans will be happy to reap the rewards of their hard work and the perseverance of a band that still holds true to the spirit of metalcore.

The album just offers up a heaping pile of midtempo heaviness that harkens back to Metallica's middle years.

Of Copeland's experiments with more traditional beat-making, it's easily the best, most accessible work and still manages to be more stunningly weird than the majority of everything else out there.

Despite using occasional strings, steel drums euphonium, woodwinds, and even a mellotron, this is not a slick affair.

The versatility and strength of The Blind Hole will be impressive to anyone versed in hardcore's various hyper-splintered genres, mainly due to the band's ease when it comes to seamlessly combining so many different heavy styles.

Tides End is so smooth that some of its nuances may be lost at first, but before it slips away, it takes listeners on a deceptively breezy and surprisingly affecting journey through moments that can't last.

Perhaps the most tightly performed Joan of Arc material, Testimonium Songs feels less like a proper album and more like a sidebar, deeply aligned with the harsh tones of Reznikoff's bleak poems.

All told, Prince Avalanche is a beautifully subtle and introspective score that highlights the strong points of its composers while serving the needs of the film it was written for.

Although Bloodlines takes its time to get under your skin, when it does, it sinks in deep.