His delivery is raw, at times off-key, almost too rugged. Despite those lapses, the song retains the album’s overarching concept, which favors music in its most natural form.

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

The Family Sign finds Atmosphere back on his old level of sharp self-criticism, but the album is also a step forward for the whole group.

This album has an eccentric palette and shows off Streten’s wide-ranging tastes; if you can’t find something to enjoy here, you’re not looking hard enough.

The album seems like it had the fat trimmed off in the studio and leaves the listener with a leaner-than-usual, but still enjoyable production. You’ll leave feeling full, but not stuffed.

Not exactly a massage, but a wind-down from the tumult that is Ultima II Massage.

Surrender To The Fantasy is a reminder that Magik Markers is sort of an absurdist band at heart, willing to moon their audience and then have an intellectual conversation about it.

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.

It's hard to tell if the seemingly random, incoherent screeching and shouting from Siegel is meant to be a gimmick, a cop out or a totally genuine mode of expression. Whatever it may be, it's working.

Although most of Careers chugs along with a sandy roadside candor, some tracks, like the churning, heavy Planet Birthday or the clinically pulsing Hong Kong Hotel, play with disparate textures.

What was once an instrumental electronic project has now, in the hands of Joseph Mount, become an inventive, layered, modern pop act, perfectly capable of standing on its own and defending its place among the genre’s very best.

While the band’s return to its gruffer roots on Desperate Ground has its redeeming qualities, the reliance on pop-punk catchiness feels like a crutch.

On an album so concerned with straddling the invisible borders between the material and the spiritual, Wexler's disembodied voice becomes most powerful when seeping through space like a ghost in the machine, mysterious and ubiquitous as the existential questions he sings to life.

Their sound is more pop than R&B or electronic, more domestic than futuristic, and more formulaic than innovative. But it works for them. It’s accessible electro-pop music that you can’t help but be smitten with.

Despite the loftier academic allusions, the band’s music is most affective when dancing on the peppier side.

There are more standalone tracks here, ones with memorable melodies and sing-along choruses coexisting with the band’s fatalistic lyrics and jarring instrumental twists.

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

Shit, Laced is not. The debut album is a testament to Psychedelic Horseshit's incredible versatility.

Aesthethica is jugular-grabbing black metal-startling, complex... and also quite long.

Over the course of 14 songs, when the emotional range is the difference between singing, "I just wanna get really high" and "I feel like shooting up," the content [getting wasted and having a good time] can wear on you--or, much like Andrew W.K.'s party music before it, it can fuel you.

Both aspects of the album exemplify great music played by great musicians and should be anything but a disappointment.

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.

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.

An unequivocally excellent record that never bores. If you've yet to explore this strangely intoxicating genre of music, I would suggest Sidi Toure's latest album as a perfect starting point: accessible enough for immediate appreciation, yet complex enough for repeat listens.

Though Loyal is a nail-biter at its core, the journey Alexander takes you on with this album ends with calm.

III is an album so methodically arranged yet lawless at times that even its more flatlined moments play an integral role in its rebellion.

Rilo Kiley always had the ability to acknowledge the bad without letting it suck you down. That got lost on the weirdly glossy, distant and jaded Blacklight, but RKives restores the balance.

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.