The home stretch of the album is where the band really opens up, unleashing haunting melodies and intricate movements that create a soundtrack for a virtual fever dream.

The instrumental packaging (which sounds even more lux and sophisticated than ever) shifts constantly, but there's always a catchy melody to carry Nocturne through.

A passive 12 song set that toes the line between nostalgic sadness and bright optimism with remarkable ease.

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.

Enterprising Sidewalks is a multi-layered listen.

Maybe Khan is excessive in the thought process of his message regarding the world; maybe he is in fact understating the necessity of awareness to the problems our world faces; maybe it’s somewhere in the middle. Regardless, all of us could use a little bit of the soul the King Khan And The Shrines is willing to share on the record.

The sounds are bigger on Junip, but it’s the audible give and take among the performers this time that makes the album intimate.

Palladino and Church may drown their sorrows in a pool of gloomy effects, but they still make even the most heartbreaking sentiments sound sweet.

As a debut and a fleshing out of Stelmanis' previous eponymous work, Feel It Break is a solid place to build from and a reason to expect good things from Austra in the future.

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.

Not good, bad or disappointing, but frustrating.

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

Frustratingly, the album’s lowest point comes directly after one of its high points.... That’s not to say that Surfing Strange isn’t impressive as a whole.

Sweet and thoughtful but not without edge, Lemuria knowingly toys with us on The Distance Is So Big, reveling in the loops of the lyrics and the strength of their unique saccharine force.

The band’s adept at sustaining a singular sound throughout via rabid drumming, guitar fuzz at burning moss level and the fractured harmonies at freaky.

Although the dark, pulsing beauty of “Katla” feels like an appropriate close, somehow No One Dances Quite Like My Brothers feels too brief in relation to the depth of its emotions.

While artists such as Dam-Funk, Onra and Krystal Klear resurrect this sound some 20 odd years later, Back To Reality establishes that Tony Cook was, and still is, the real thing.

Tear The Fences Down is open and inviting, and it's hard not to be pulled in by its verve and genuine sincerity.

If there’s anything missing from Goddess, it’s something that could set Banks apart from the lanscape of beats + vocals that’s so saturated today.

The album doesn’t bring anything new to the table, opting instead to build on established structures.

El Guincho dons his best Animal Collective costume on his third full-length, an album filled with Afrobeat and tropical rhythms. Yet it doesn't sound derivative in the least.

The issue on here is that not enough tracks combine both of these two, cool, newfound elements--Kinsella’s vocal and lyrical growth and the expert jamming that surfaces throughout.

That all changes with Nursing Home, as production legend Steve Albini sharpens the group's teeth into the fangs Let's Wrestle was always meant to bare.

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.

On its fourth LP, Arctic Monkeys combines its clever, tongue-in-cheek wordplay with a wider variety of sounds than it ever used on its other releases.

Listen to this album with the volume cranked.

It’s exciting to listen to an artist just go for it, and that’s obviously what Me Moan is: an attempt to synthesize genres of music that don’t quite belong together.

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.