The music is unlike anything Cloud Nothings has done before, and that's a good thing.

Some of the best parts of The Lion's Roar are when the Söderbergs harmonize together.

The results of these bursts of levity are as stark as Quran verses scrawled on Vegas brothel walls and recall why Sumach Ecks remains a rare, unsettling voice.

It's a brand of nostalgia concocted from listless energy, a wandering jumble of drums, soothing, eyes-closed croons, sighs and elastic vocals that recall different influences at every turn.

The Big Pink has put out an electro-rock album that does not exactly redefine the future of music like the album title may suggest, but it does redefine the Big Pink.

Though Le Bon composes in the dark, she shows us a lighter, quirkier side in CYRK.

There's a lot to enjoy in the Gringos' second effort, but mostly if your musical tastes never got past 1969.

Spectrals' debut is mellow and accessible without being boring even though it has less fuzz than fans might be used to.

At every turn and every track the album is pushing up the RPMs to the point the engine begins to whine, smoke and threaten to explode.

For all of its work with dance music, some of Canyons' strongest tracks rely more on sounding like a band rather than a production duo.

CSP original tracks like "Mean Visa Kmean Bai (Have Visa, No Have Rice)" are a testament to the groovy (and peaceful) "golden age" of Khmer pop.

It's no-bull, gritty hip-hop for hip-hop's sake, forgoing radio-friendly hooks or overly flashy production in favor of inspired storytelling and colorful slang.

No Kings provides a kind of artistic oasis, a glimpse into how great hip-hop can be when placed in talented hands.

His song progression is static, manic and as mutely thrilling as ever.

Freeclouds seems to be a culmination of many different ideas and styles all brought together in one album, and this diversity of sound is exactly what makes the album work so well.

It's too cavernous and intangible to dance to but too wired for relaxation.

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

You may categorize An Album By Korallreven as background music. That's by no means a bad thing-if anything, such a distinction solidifies this album as an intense experience: a wintry escape to the wilderness with a slight detour to the dance floor along the way.

Carrion Crawler/The Dream could very well be born from a desire to please crowds as easily as it could be Dwyer wanting to craft jams as musical meditation.

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

They haven't lost a bit of the cheeky lyrics and determined instrumentals that made them who they were; they've just tweaked it all to suit who they are now.

The album's tight production will draw you in and leave you dancing damp from sweat until the early hours of the morning.

On the album as a whole, the guitar riffs are what stand out the most from the thrashing drums and growling vocals.

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.

The songs feel like the first days of fall, where you're clinging to that last bit of summer warmth while eagerly anticipating the slower pace of a city being cooled.

Kinshasa One Two's myriad of styles and motley participants never cease to criss-cross and collide, sublimely blending earthy tones with sleek production maneuvers to create one of the year's most unique records.

An audacious compilation of carefully arranged instrumentals under reflective lyrics.

Sankey and Warmsley still have a lot to offer on Welcome To Condale, with Sankey's large vocal range that easily adapts to the feel of each song and Warmsley's ability to match her perfectly in background singing.

An hour-long exploration of the group's first full-length work that is every bit as diverse as the artists chosen to work on it and as iron-dense and deeply bassocentric as the original.

Deer Tick shows off a level of versatility on Divine Providence, making for a record that will please long-time fans and newcomers alike.

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.

Bright And Vivid takes enough elements from both Calder's debut, Are You My Mother?, and her work as part of the New Pornographers to retain its very Calder-ness, while still evolving into a robust folk-pop record.

Jarvis finds his stride when singing about the uncomfortable.

The instrumentation on each song, though, is rich and brooding, weaving a distinguishable sound that suitably ties Apokalypsis together.

A few listens into Gauntlet Hair and its charms start to coalesce.

This is a solid debut for the highly anticipated band.

Ultimately, under the unifying sound of Casiokids' youthful pop, African, Asian and Norweigan influences combine in blissful harmony to create the ultimate musical expedition.

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

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

Will The Guns Come Out is a collection of pleasantly rough and catchy minimalist-rock tunes.

The band aims for epic heights but all too often goes with the assumption that grandness is necessitated solely by noise. That said, there are glimmers of great things to come all over this record.

The bass churns, chimes tinkle, and tribal drums patter rhythmically, drawing listeners into wide-eyed sonic journeys only Prince Rama could cook up.

Bobby is sleepy and hypnotic; elements that guarantee a hauntingly enjoyable listen.

Towards the end of the album, tracks tend to blend into each other. Jesus definitely continues to push what she's good at, but this doesn't make for much variety.

Twin Sister has a sound, a well-produced, dreamy, indie synth-pop, slightly funky sound, and In Heaven sees the band blend teaspoons of different genres into that mix.

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.

Certain moments, like the opening and closing tracks, reach a little further past doo-woppish hippie funk into Ravi Shankar super-hippie sitar and ambient electro, suggesting a potential for experimentation in the second year of the Stepkids' existence.

Clash Battle Guilt Pride sees Polar Bear Club's likable mix of working-class suburban punk and arena rock getting glossier production.

Creole's comeback mixes genres, wit and personal history with an amicable charisma that could only be cultivated by the type of guy who wears a zoot suit and a fedora any time after 1943.

The result is a terrific, fun and most of all, genuine follow-up from one of the best surf pop bands of recent memory.

Thrice's latest, Major/Minor, is one of those elusive, much-needed types of LPs: urgent, aching and filled with heaviness-like pouring-liquid-steel-into-a-cast-iron-mug-and-chugging-it-straight heavy.

If you're fording a desert highway at dawn, these songs will get you across. They're consuming and expansive, steady and constant.

There's a lot of heaviness swimming around this album, and though some songs, like "In The Grace Of Your Love" and "Miss You," play it lower and slower than your average dance jam, this is still a lively record.

The Golden Age Of Apocalypse is all warm vibes and morning sex instead of Cosmogramma's seriously zonked and far-out space grooves-light and airy melodies carried out on bass with the tinkle of synth and keyboard, clear uptempo drumlines and a high soul-influenced singing voice doused in reverb.

This type of zip-filed nostalgia is not particularly rare or new, but what makes this meeting of the minds work better than other collaborative vanity projects is the way these two artists' sensibilities flow seamlessly into one another, erasing any sense of the cut-and-pasting that brought the album to life.

Hurricane Dub is the original album chopped and screwed and recorded at the bottom of the sea, all murky bass, Jones' deep voice and rasta-twangy guitar.

While he might not be saying anything groundbreaking or mind-bending, Alcala's lyrics speak to his band's earnestly lovable and saccharine nature.

Despite its inconsistencies, La Liberacion undoubtedly mixes it up.

Rapping With Paul White is part Afrobeat and/or ambient instrumental hip-hop, part energetic and demented rap, and part scavenger hunt of all the painfully obscure samples that sprinkle through White's beats.

By not exerting himself, Hynes manages to craft an easy-to-listen, easy-to-enjoy album that will be spun as a change of pace.

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 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.

The meat of Still Living isn't its quirks or vibes-it's the songwriting itself, and since the album fills two LPs and almost an hour of play-time, it has a whole lot of that.

From Africa With Fury: Rise is a solid sampling of Afrobeat, and if Kuti's goal is to show that his father's influence was not wasted on him, he succeeds brilliantly.

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.

In between the tape hiss, the nature sounds, the subtle reverb, the sighs, it becomes clear that Bad Vibes has a soul.

While the record might have benefited from some more discrimination on the cutting room floor, it's still a focused, complete record and a pleasurable listen.

Maybe Vampire Weekend is African-inspired indie rock and Fool's Gold is indie rock-inspired Afro-pop, but it's hard to deny their similarities.

Blue Songs may not have an incredible single, but it does give you a collection of 11 solid songs.

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

Satin Panthers doesn't contain the most organized or most complete 15 minutes of music in the world, but it's an EP-it's just frenzied enough to provide a taste for an album to come. It might not be vital in itself, but there are enough ideas to show that within the mind of Hudson Mohawke, there is much more where this came from.

It took a lot of experimenting, jamming and digression from its old songwriting techniques for Pepper Rabbit to produce such an enjoyable album.

On Skying, the group has definitely matured, jettisoning much of the divisiveness that marked its brash origins, but it feels like some of the edginess that first made the Horrors notable might've been discarded with it.

It's an album that takes Rogue away from the familiar efforts with Rogue Wave as it harbors eloquent and delicate melodies that pioneer a soft-spoken but and delightful album.

The past four albums have focused mainly on the singer/songwriter. On Tripper, Johnson turns that formula around and focuses everything outward-the lyrical themes, the more-involved instrumentation and the mood.

Listening to Quadruple Single is not a passive experience in the least.

Wicked Will offers a sprint through Ettes' tumultuous world, and in the end, the whole ride lasts for little more than half an hour. Oddly, the one emotion that the band avoids-joy-is the one that it leaves you with in its wake.

The band's latest album, Join Us, expresses the group's signature nerd pride with a combination of simplicity and fantasy fit for ex-losers, children and those weird kids in high school.

Perfect Darkness becomes half a dip in lukewarm water, when it should be a moody walk on a cloudy day.

Chillwave touchstones are alive and well on the record; tender, nostalgic vibes still emanate from each throwback synth pad and ethereal two-part harmony, and there's still plenty of reverb to go around.

Krug won't make any new fans with Organ Music, but that's not what he's trying to do here, anyway. He's just having himself some fun-or, as he put it, "lurching toward" his musical ideas "impulsively."

Listen to this album with the volume cranked.

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.

2009's Dark Rift had its grating, overarching qualities, but Thee Physical sounds more streamlined; however, this album isn't polished to perfection.

The album is deceptively simple. Upon the first listen, it feels like a collection of fairly commonplace, but good, indie pop tracks that have a strong tendency towards the, well, radical.

Dedication, while a great exercise in atmosphere, doesn't get anywhere past where it started. It begins in gloom and minimal electronics, remains there-hell, it wallows there-and finishes off its life there.

Last Summer sees Friedberger stretching her limbs as a three-dimensional indie darling.

Nothing more than Inglish's beats and Rocks' rapping are needed to prove that When Fish Ride Bicycles was worth the wait.

It seems like in each song Wiley is talking about a million different things all at once, but there's always the possibility that it's totally focused and you're just not keeping up. It's hard to tell.

The lift isn't too high, but the album isn't meant to be a mood elevator. Instead, Pleasure gives you the smoke and confusion that is left when all extrinsic distractions are removed.

This certainly isn't music to hit the beach by, and it's also not as concerned with maximizing texture as chillwave is, creating some of its most intriguing moments with negative space.

The back half meanders through woozy loungers like "Chemtrails" and "Sunday Morning" before wrapping up with the spindly, tom-heavy "Neon Dove," which breathes just enough life into the pacing to make you feel like you've listened to something complete by the time the percussion's abrupt exit signals the record's resolution.

Earth Sound System is structured with actual musical tracks interspersed between organized chaotic electronica. The attempts at the two different approaches to this type of music come off as undecided and incoherent, yet there is merit in the tracks that actually offer stable grounds for musical exploration.

Although some of the sounds used are radically new to the Miracle Fortress repertoire, Was I The Wave? demonstrates the perfect amount of experimentation and development of the band's sound while remaining true to the music of its past.

Black Up is a wild ride, but Butler's songwriting is not haphazard. To be sure, his laid-black flow channels a vibe similar to the who-cares attitude of those on the opposite side of the left-field hip-hop divide, but don't let that fool you; his music is weird, but it's also deliberate.

The songs on Champions might not add up to the best record proper, but those guys in front of the stage probably could care less. They've got some more fuel for the party, and at the end of the day, that's all that really matters.

Even at its most far-out, the songs on Culture Of Fear always seem to know where they're going, even if they choose to take the scenic route to get there.

Where For Emma, Forever Ago thrived on its sparseness, the new record's sound is richly and carefully layered.