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.