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

Kill for Love may not be nearly as focused and razor-sharp as Night Drive, but it's twice as much fun and just as confidently personalized--just as purely Chromatics.

Introspection of this kind can be a difficult thing to pull off convincingly, but Nostalgia never veers too far into sentimentality to let its edges be sanded down.

What this means in terms of structure and pace is that Tommy is leisurely, which to some people might suggest “boring” except that this is a very dynamic sort of leisure.

Plague Park is in many ways a darker, less inviting listen than his previous work.

The Fresh & Onlys have achieved something captivating with Secret Walls, conjuring up vast, mysterious spaces within economical songs, songs demanding repeating listens to decipher.

It's not that the record is so unclassifiable--shit is downright pleasant to listen to--as it exudes the confidence to acknowledge its influences and contemporaries with the same convivial grace that has marked Q-Tip's entire career.

This is an album made for car trips by a band best suited for noisy bars; you’re going to want to play it loud.

This is the Strokes’ first record without its adherence to formula and form, with better guitars and bigger chords. And, you know, more fun.

Musically, Mirror Traffic flows lazily, songs streaming into one other. Like an engrossing 3 AM conversation lasting until daylight, it's too immersive to give notice to the passage of time, but once it's over it's difficult to recall in detail, some heady dream.

With Total Life Forever, Foals have objectively identified the shortcomings (shouted vocals, claustrophobic song structures) of their first album, and erased them while keeping their trademark mathematical riffing intact.

While MGMT may no longer peddle the kind of instant-pleasure-point melodic textures that propelled the band's most well-known songs into so many playlists, they're up to something far more interesting: releasing a major, mainstream objet d'art without for a minute fooling themselves that it "matters."

This is essentially the recipe for Coming on Strong: booze, dance, white-boy rap, sleepiness, and a list of influences that spans your favorite records of the last three decades and your favorite hip-hop singles of the last three months.

It is overarchingly ambitious for a solo debut, and despite Casablancas’ pre-release claims that this was going to be some classico-synth detour straight out the asshole of Tattooine, the album rarely, rarely stumbles into po-mo theatrics.

Beat-wise, IV doesn't attempt to outdo the top-dollar Carter III production, whose murderer's row of producers and beats is likely to remain unparalleled for some time. But Wayne uses the less showy selection this go-round to deliver a definitively rawer album that only smartens the impact of some of his career's best vocals.

The Imaginary Adventures of Pardon, Mannerfelt, and Co. just happen to be a wonderfully suitable and measured vehicle for the dense and compelling work of Roll the Dice, and In Dust is sure not to leave anyone wanting for a more promising wilderness to explore.

Masta Ace’s maturity informs his simplicity; experience strengthens the straightforward so that his words come methodically and sincerely.

As relatively good as most of Bitte Orca is, 'Stillness Is The Move' alone gives us reason enough to be optimistic: should Longstreth pursue his newfound fascination with mainstream music further, it's proof that the Dirty Projectors are capable of evolving into a far better pop band than their experimental selves ever let on.

Love is All has refined its basic ideas and yielded a follow-up much more playable than its predecessor.

Van Pelt is not designing sounds to blow us into a new paradigm, but crafting textures to drawn us in, to subsume, to mesmerize, and perhaps, through a combination of these effects, to softly awe.

It has its flaws, and it certainly isn’t some great reinvention of krautrock, but Transparent Things is an incredibly likeable album.

A truly rocking dance punk album that fulfills on the promise of a dubious genre; other artists in this so-called movement have only hinted at something this fun and dance-able.

A punk band with a Steely Dan fixation they most certainly are not, but in their best moments these kids do rouse something as opulently degenerate and self-destructively lax as the Dan's cleanest work.

By no means is It's All True a masterpiece; the duo don't stick their necks out enough to entertain that notion. But by creating a palpable tension between smart songwriting and their knack for texture, Junior Boys have pulled a legacy back from the brink of indifference.

You can get long way into Underneath the Pine without gaining any clear impression of exactly what kind of record it is that you're listening to. But amorphous isn't the worst thing in the world to be.

A fractured LP, compelling and convincing in its intent, but just plain less satisfying than Vespertine or Post.

By showing a willingness to diversify their sound while cutting down on bloat, Phosphene Dream is easily the Black Angels most listenable record to date. It also suggests that they're keen on that most outmoded of concepts in the blog era: career longevity.

Azeda Booth achieve with their style one of the best and most exciting grafts yet of pop with electronica.