One of Stern's greatest strengths is that she never relies on any tried and true shorthand when it comes to self-expression.

While Picaresque is a significant step forward, it’s also a logical one. The band’s sonic palette has expanded gradually from album to album, and appears to have come full circle here.

Whatever its origins, Psychic Chasms extols no actual reasons for being those ways, instead touching on now-expected tropes and empty gestures to fund a handful of ready-made critical anecdotes and popular opinions.

The tone is set: They Want My Soul gives pleasures immediate and unlocked, a freshly bitten peach dribbling sweet nectar down your chin.

Together these four pieces create a single, near-breathless listening experience, robust enough to envelop but varied enough to leave you both craving and curious for more.

It feels self-contained, wholly its own, and this is what allows it to hold up such a pristine and vast mirror to the scenes that surround it.

But the real appeal remains Zedek’s humbled insights, a worldview informed by an affirmation of our common suspicion that “there are some things you can’t see / with a roof over your head,” and, having lived as such, her solitary cold comfort: “if you don’t like the answer / maybe you shouldn’t ask.”

Gira's half is solid, but Akron/Family can't help but demand most of the credit for the record's artistic heft and overall cohesiveness.

Though these variations are often enjoyable, particularly on an individual track level, taken as a whole they're just too slight, making Civilian difficult to fully engage with.

Inch by inch -- concept, production, groove -- Scale will measure your desires and dole out exactly what you want: depth, politics, creativity, or club-ready curios.

Burst Apart, while far from perfect, is sort of a special album.

Ultimately, Avatar’s change in direction is hardly an unpleasant one, partially because it’s really fun to lip synch “Let it burn / Let it bleed!” while playing the air guitar on your knees, but mostly because it still rocks frighteningly hard.

It may be hell for him, but it’s compelling listening for anyone smart enough to shitcan the Kanye comparisons long enough to sit down and give this record the attention it deserves.

It’s a fun and somewhat liberating thing to listen to, a horribly frustrating thing to try writing about.

Wilderness is nothing if not consistent, and even its dullest points are palatable given the right mood.

Monomania is the sound of a healthy and aware group of musicians who have experimented with artifice and ultimately moved beyond it.

Andrew Bird has thrown down his gauntlet brimming with post-structural imagery, swirling entropy, a truly floral arrangement of genre pieces and genre mixing.

Like any Books album, The Way Out is best embraced as a headphones record, but it could also work at a party, on a morning commute, over dinner, under a squeaking bedframe--it's the poppiest ambient album I've heard in some time, surprisingly accessible given the band's track record.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor offer a majestic, beautiful coda for a version of protest that is dated and unhelpful today. I missed having their music around, but I wonder whose eyes they're opening with a record that sounds like a document of yesterday's anger.

I am aware that I am giving the following guy an 85% on Cokemachineglow. The thing is, he deserves it.

CUD aren’t the first or best among many, but what you can hear when you listen to Boca Negra--in addition to a really excellent neo-jazz record--is the sounds of a band improvising while actually not really improvising. They’re unconsciously pulling from something rich and energetic and fundamental to the way we appreciate music.

It's just wonderfully consistent, satisfyingly familiar.

He may no longer be the novelistic observer of Black on Both Sides or the fearless explorer of The New Danger, or even the wised-up star of True Magic, but The Ecstatic is still imbued with all that and not making a big deal out of it, perhaps the first truly mature thing Mos Def has ever admitted.

A record that progresses as a sequence of dislocated sounds, an expressionist's puzzlebox that comes alive when distanced from one's preconceived notion of what a Built to Spill record should sound like.

No shocking directions or paroxysmal about-faces, but Lie Down In The Light is still some glorious stuff, expectations met and mettle once again tested.

The songs, sometimes overtly formalist and stylistically unadventurous, are invigorated by the enthusiasm and character of their delivery.

Like all of his records before it, Devils & Dust sounds at once like everything and nothing Bruce Springsteen has ever released.

Assured in its fastidiousness, with enough schizophrenia to make whiplash a factor, Los Angeles cements Flying Lotus’s status as the best producer in a burgeoning scene bursting with talent, categorization eluding whatever scene that may be, whatever it means to be a producer.