The Silver Gymnasium has Sheff getting increasingly personal, though it sometimes seems as if he has no more personal secrets left to reveal. The new experience is stunted by the fact that everything really just sounds like a memory.

This time around, the specifics are there. And though each isolated moment may not be immediately relatable, they create a universal portrait of our struggle with the loss of youth and the arduous task of soldiering forward while a part of us grasps for those milestones of the past.

Killer Mike gets the most quotable lines, turning simple statements into punchlines and investing each syllable with a sense of rhythmic possibility; you’re never sure exactly which word in a given line he might decide to pluck like a stray beard hair.... Despite abandoning some of the more layered and mannered production flourishes of his solo work, El-P still packs these songs with stray details--the roar of a tiger, those gorgeous organs, the squeal of a dolphin--that can be jarring on first listen but gradually reveal themselves to be essential.

From the first drum hits and piano chords of the opening title track, it's evident that this is a match made in black-light heaven.

Wagner has poured her soul into recordings that may seem too mature for the 23-year-old but highlight the talent that Wagner has at communicating difficult subjects with ease and forming truly compelling songs.

Much as it is a thrash-and-burn album, the self-titled release also hints at subtly sensitive undertones.

With all its messy emotions, unfiltered memories and contradicting revelations, Anxiety shows that it’s not only possible to write a self-conscious record without the protective shield of anonymity, it can be just as thrilling.

It will take repeat listening to capture the total gist of the record, as well as digging into McCombs' back catalog to get the whole story.

Producer Alex Newport (Death Cab For Cutie, Mars Volta) captures a more complete and complex sound with lush acoustics and electric instrumentation that moves the album along, providing a live-show atmosphere recorded and mixed straight to tape.

Whether you are listening to the album for its monetary-political messages or just hoping to enjoy the band's indie-punk sound, Local Business will sate both sides.

Positive Force will uplift you.

Deeply rewarding and slyly addictive, Channel Pressure is an uncommon gem, a difficult record that really isn't difficult at all.

Overall though, there’s more comfort than debauchery on Alvvays.

There is something refreshing about an artist that tries to create well written and well produced songs instead of ones that smack you in the face with the frying pan made of catchy hooks, beats and shout-along choruses.

More often on the album’s 10 tracks than not, Nielson keeps the balance, giving each part equal time in the foreground and using understatement to his advantage.

Matangi‘s top moments aren’t riddled with thumping bass or explosive mania. They are steady builds, relatively simple and not of a too specific trend moment, plus they have feeling.

Condon's songs have always been flooded with emotion that sound both deliriously pretty and endlessly sad or foreboding, and The Rip Tide is no exception.

The album can simply be described as a great band supporting quality lyrics, served up as organically as possible.

Crystal Stilts hasn't broken from what made it good in the first place -- but In Love With Oblivion proves that the group is coming into its own.

As Hauschka takes his orchestral style into this new musical sphere, his music demonstrates the constant evolution ignited by combinations of diverse musical influence.

There are no throwaway songs about weed, women or cars here, just 11 separate streams of consciousness, each with subtle lyrical and instrumental nuances.

It seems that this band really is fresh and only, for it has music brimming with originality via masterful combinations of genres.

The album churns away on a mid-tempo path throughout, ethereal harmonies skimming past and back to Adebimpe’s yearning lead vocals being the main thread through it.

Still Corners' debut is full of the deceptively simple and the intriguingly confusing without straying far from its cinematic sound.

Tremors makes it clear that he has plenty of his own material to work on. His reliable vocals lead us through the enjoyable confusion that the album establishes, ever cool and whole-hearted, with a genuine sense of emotional investment.

While Bish Bosch may not be the most easy album to digest, it doesn't lack for talent or shock value.

Happy, nature-oriented psychedelic pop that bring to mind images of sprawling meadows in mid-summer.

Electronica bands run the risk of entering an ethereal, psychedelic realm and never leaving, but Little Dragon always maintains its tie to the tangible world through Nagano's voice.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra’s proto-punk only gets better with age and maturity, but Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything believes that today’s youth are everything for tomorrow.

As this particular summer winds down, Family Of Love will provide a comforting soundtrack as it gets chillier on those late-night smoke breaks.

While Mean Love is his most experimental album to date, it’s also his most precise.

If the album has a significant weakness, it's that despite the impressive attention to detail and the impeccable production work, the record can't quite shake that side-project feeling.

At this point, Marshall is one of the most naturally gifted songwriters on the scene, and 6FBTM is solid evidence of that.

For now, it is refreshing to hear a band mining the searing sounds of ’81 as a cold breeze that kind of shakes you awake rather than making you want to run back indoors right away to cower under your own fears.

An album that, musically, strikes a gorgeous balance between restraint and cosmic expansion, but vocally suffers from just too much control.

Root For Ruin is the best synthesis of its pop and oddball sides yet, with flailing, manic surges serving as comfortable bedrocks for solid melodic hooks.

Man Man has an image to uphold, and it does that while refining its focus. The group has moved forward conceptually but at times still sounds like the trained animals and clowns from the circus that ambushed the orchestral pit, and that's just fine.

The music is still driven by the same conceptual forces, instrumentation and voodoo tradition that Orchestre Poly-Rythmo has always been known for. Contonou Club is not only a symbol of the group's reunion; it marks the continuation and growth of a West African musical revolution.

Not necessarily a great narrative rapper, Monch's lyrical strength lies in his ability to flip phrases maniacally and tease out tangential theoretical connections through his staggered, pile-up rhyme schemes.

With a sound that comes off as natural, Warpaint represents a much needed departure from the ubiquity of synth-pop, and The Fool is a welcome detour.

Deerhoof Vs. Evil is a stylishly composed work done from four gifted musicians who are more than happy to be sarcastically snarling at you the whole time.

While less in your face than his work with the Fresh And Onlys, the album stands its ground and ends on a powerful note.

The biggest caveat of this album is that the retro aesthetic mars Grossi's attempts at emotional connection--it tries to resonate, but by tapping into our memories of heartstrings and not our actual heartstrings, it falls short. But as production goes, it's a success.

While each song on the album seems to tell a different story, together they tell one: Some things may have changed in that six-year interim, but those changes have only worked in Lewis’s favor.

David Byrne and Annie Clark (and to an undetermined extent, St. Vincent producer John Congleton) achieve a remarkable symbiosis on Love This Giant.

It's less bedroom, more band-centered than his previous work, but the music still feels uncomplicated.

The band plays it safe here, but after going way off to left field on its last release, this isn't a bad thing.

It's the motion of the album that compels you through it, leaving you with a need for some resolution in what the next track will bring.

For Mogwai, it works; the sound's grandiloquent and goddamnit, loud.

Songs will reward repeated listens, and firmly establishes Deptford Goth as a talent to keep an eye on.

Where the Beets lacks flair in its musicianship, the players make up for it in their singing.

With only eight tracks and a run-time just over half an hour, this debut is a light one but hits like a featherweight champ.

They were scratching at the surface of their emotional capabilities on their debut. With Hummingbird, Local Natives show that they can dig deeper.

There’s a good amount of experimentation here, and very few misfires.

It’s good right away, but it doesn’t make sense until later. Gist Is might take patience, but it pays off.

The story [House of Baasa] is a mix of glee and despair, and it fits with this album, a venture into the bliss and torment of matters of the head and the heart.

While many artists choose to play it safe on their debut album, Doldrums has decided to take us on an untidy journey into his own headspace. Lesser Evil is an unflinching and unashamed document of that trip, like a travelogue of a doomed vacation through Woodhead’s brain.

Refuse be fooled by the any cutesy pop leanings. La Isla Bonita is wonderful, but there are no all-inclusive resorts on this island.

This is a remarkably self-assured album, precise in its themes, particular in its language and modest in its ambitions.

Liberation! may not achieve its loftiest goals, but Bauer does manage to launch his solo career with talent and class.

A solid, ambling around, summer daytime soundtrack, rather than the numerous nighttime ruminators we’ve already been frequently offered this year.

Through the clever synchronization of spaced-out vocals and rambling drums, Poliça dispels psychological trauma in an easy-to-swallow, electro-pop pill.

Hauschka’s ingenuity to rework his instrument into a entire orchestra is astounding. But his ability to avoid the usual, overtly romantic notions of forgotten cities and instead replace it with a portrait of refined desolation is equally impressive.

Now we have Street Punk, less than 30 minutes of raw, hasty, goof-garage, with not so much as a coy wink.

His luxuriant loop-based instrumentation on display is easy to lose yourself in, making your life seem, for just a moment, much more epic than it actually is.

Every track on this album is relatable and takes us on an emotional journey through the steps of a breakup, which in Li’s interpretation seems to be frustration, pain and ultimately loneliness.

Although somewhat too sleepy at times, the album's journey of personal admittance uses the instruments strategically to ignite little bursts of hope and newness.

It's always a pleasure when a concept album can stand on its own without the concept, and that's what NewVillager is--a bunch of fun, carefully crafted songs.

The new record finds singer Paul Banks and company reorganizing old reliable, post-Joy Division moves to deliver a fresher (more cheerful even?) atmospheric post-punk plate.

It’s that ability to toggle between the doom and gloom of post-punk and the restless energy of fuzz-pop that makes Jinx such a gripping, vital listen.

Sure, Lennox makes a lot of pretty noise on this album, but sometimes you just want to pluck him from his own sound waves and have him try to navigate them from the inside of a more firmly constructed ship.

For now, this band’s M.O.--Graves’ machine gun mouth racing the bands’s nerve-strung music to the finishing line of each 113 plus/minus-second blast--is welcome in the currently, often drowsy world of indie guitar music.

Weirdon is stacked with some hefty singles guaranteed to bring this band to an even wider audience, and it succeeds because it ups the ante in terms of songcraft and production, but never at the cost of the weirdness.

Through it all, Lekman's wit remains intact.

The synths are so smooth sounding that after a few moments they begin to lull you but not into sleep. This is way too dark of a place for sleep; it seems more like hypnosis.

Every move on the album is intentional and nothing is unchartered territory for Zammuto.

Altogether, it’s some irresistible glitter-on-the dancefloor delirium.

The infectious beats and catchy hooks are still a driving force, but Lewis has abandoned the bedroom vibes to surge ahead with full-on amphetamine-induced vigor.

In addition to featuring some creative tongue-lashing, You’re Gonna Miss It All expands on the musical ideas and tendencies that made Sports such a hit.

If you were someone who felt stood-up by Yuck’s follow-up to their self-titled debut, Cheatahs will follow through on the promise that great rainy Saturday afternoon shoegaze isn’t all gazing into a rearview mirror.

The duo is quite adept at keeping the dopey momentum going, but without a respite or a break in the haze, Return To The Ugly Side is often impenetrable. But that's kind of cool--a half-hour album that stretches out (or drags on) to feel like far longer.

Every detail of Ray's second full-length alongside Her Happy Hookers is imparted with vigor--be it her razor-edged howling, or the biting lyrics that comprise them.

This album’s most striking moments often come when Mascis commits unreservedly to the ballads.

For all of their individual, conflicting quirks, Miller et al. operate like some strange musical beast, spitting out hooks and devouring them with brute force.

While not all of the rough edges have been smoothed out, there's a sense of soaring ambition, and there's no reason why there shouldn't be.

Tropics Of Love is an experiment in inertia. When it’s good, it stays good, and when it’s not, it’ll be over by the time you swallow your pina colada.

Though taken individually some tracks may have a strikingly similar feel with a lot of big, synthy crescendos, it's the cohesion of the release that makes it work in the "epic" way that Gonzalez envisioned it.

Shriek is a refreshing dive into the ambiguous depths of the indie-pop pool, made possible by two musicians who have shown great conviction in revamping their sound without ditching the fundamentals that have made them such a powerhouse.

This is the aching beauty of Obsidian: its ability to be so matter-of-fact and reposition the taciturn as commonplace.

Rise Against have slowed their music, and in the process, have created a hell of a rock album.

Neatly countering the initial pedal-to-the-metal energy of "My Girl," "Sweet Dee" is a slow-burning sunset cruise that makes Tiger Talk's destination entirely worth the somewhat familiar journey.

It doesn’t push boundaries in the same way that Feel It Break busted up notions of genres, but its smooth production stabilizes the lyrics’ emotional bombast.

It's an elegantly lush record, brimming with imagination, that was no doubt slaved over in the studio yet sounds entirely natural.

Smoothing an epochal shift with a sonic mix of new and old isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Arguably, the band did the same thing when it cast aside the spacey sounds of Leave Home for the alt-leaning Open Your Heart. But on New Moon, the transition is rocky, more of a cop-out than a compromise.

Mount Moriah remains committed to a sparse, skeletal vein of Americana that values precision over ambition. That’s not to imply the album isn’t a rich and varied listening experience, but its ambiguities and complexities are shaded in charcoal, not paint.

Despite the heartbreak overtones, Belong is not a depressing or down-tempo album. It remains upbeat and concludes in a manner that ties up the loose ends of the story, all while raiding your new-wave album collection for inspiration.

Brittle, spare yet maximalist in sound, Content Nausea is mostly successful, with a few key missteps.

With No Mythologies To Follow, MØ has established herself within an emerging circle of powerful pop dominatrixes but with her own distinct sound full of versatility and vitality.