Somehow the mistakes she made before-experiments with Swedish folk tunes, reggae-pop, and fringe-aesthetic miscellanea, having achieved varying degrees of success with each attempt-have become character-building idiosyncrasies she now seems borderline faceless without.

Humbled by a silenced rhythm section and bafflingly reverberated guitars, the majority of Interpol is little more than background static. Maybe it's time for an intervention.

As a whole, it's not consistently buoyant enough to be a good pop record, and the politics that weigh down its middle section aren't sharp enough to make it into anything more than a middle section weighed down by some obvious politics.

They've proven themselves able to change drastically in the past--so, even though Minotaur is one of their lesser works, I can't help but hope that a band as consistently transcendent as the Clientele will continue on into the future.

Familial's far from brilliant, but you-snotty brat of the Radiohead generation, lapping up the languor of both Wavves' bong-odored holidays and the admittedly strange sight of Matt Berninger's kid on his shoulders-would do well to turn the dial of your irony meter from "post-post" to "zero" for a half an hour or so.

My problem with the rest of Memphis, then, is simple: it too often falls into retreading thoroughly explored pop without truly making it their own.

Down to the near-microscopic details, down to the faintest rough edge on his smoothest vocal landscapes, down to the last moments on the final track: it's a self-sustaining, well-rounded album that stands well without Bon Iver-especially without a drum solo.

Grass Widow have channeled a number of distinct influences, tones, and anxieties into an eccentric and strangely cohesive album. Past Time solidifies that there's nobody else out there right now who sound quite like them.

I think All Delighted People is more fun to talk about than listen to even though I have trouble discerning what it is I'm trying to say.

They've rapidly become the standard bearers for the funkiest of instrumental soul, and III suggests they could keep doing this thing for several albums before it even begins to approach boring. We should all be as similarly stoked.

The problem here being that the clean production values are themselves another veil masking Williams' fundamental badness--and so this album becomes, like its predecessors, an exercise in misdirection and deceit.

It's a staid achievement-a soundtrack to unwillingly letting go of the unsustainable, both figurative and literal.

"Murder," "skimask," and "gangsta," all appended with the word "shit," are the terms in which Gibbs characterizes his oeuvre. Str8 Killa is all of those things. It is also breathtaking in its execution.

The starburst drum-fills, the jackknife stabs of guitar, the vocal melodies bronzed with catchiness-all of it soars, nodding at vitality, as though the aesthetics of joy might, if stressed enough, smother sadness until it's finally gone for good.

I'm not sure what this one will sound like when the heat lets up--but what matters for now is that Beach Fossils have crafted a breezy and charming debut that renders such questions, at least for right now, unimportant.

What's the same is bigger and broader, bringing its faults into stark relief. This is, I stress, Best Coast's Proper Album, and so rather than Where The Boys Are's loosely defined "songs" we get Songs: feeble, noise-soaked throw-back translations of everything from doo-wop, girl-group, pop-punk, to pseudo-grunge.

Rick Ross would like you to know he has sodomized women in Acapulco. Lord knows we all aspire to such Olympian heights, but in that admission lies the crux of the impotence of Rawse's extensive discography: this is all pretty unnecessary.

What Infra is, is perfectly pretty, atmospheric, rainy day music.

The result is a mellow, atmospheric album that still manages to embody the delicious, self-absorbed, fuck-all bombast currently making mainstream rap so exciting.

This is exactly the subjective realm that MAYA taps into: it puts its listeners in a position where opinions are formed in large part by predetermined prejudices. Of course, this is true for most music in general, but what makes MAYA tacitly brilliant is that it forces us to engage with those prejudices in a way that pop music typically does not.

Kozelek appears to have returned to himself with Admiral, though the draw here is that (oddly, after so many years) he's finally discovered he can actually really play the guitar.

Backstreet spawn aside, it may finally be settling in that Sir Lucious Left Foot does gather itself around Big Boi enough to make it the best OutKast-related release since the duo dropped Aquemini a dozen years ago (we can debate its merits next to the incredible six tracks or so on the bloated Stankonia, sure). For a Kast fan, this is life-affirming.

It is during this fifteen-minute stretch that the album transcends its familiar, blokey, mad-for-it Mancunian template and, though you've heard all these tricks before, achieves something charming, familiar, fucking good-and this is the level on which Delphic needs to operate more often if they're going to wring a lasting impression from this sound.

The lyrics are less interesting, the songs are uneven, and while ultimately Expo 86 sounds like Wolf Parade-and sounds good, even-it doesn't feel like Wolf Parade, if that makes sense.

The monolithic nature of the album feels necessary, but like any sustained chord, every other song tends to have less interesting undertones.

Typically heavy subject matter aside, Mason actually seems more content in his skin than he has in some time, and anyone who has previously garnered enjoyment from the Beta Band or King Biscuit Time will unquestionably find something to dig within Boys Outside.

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.

Two of Drake's favorite topics on Thank Me Later are I'm young and I'm rich stated with precisely that level of eloquence and imagination; should we start calling him the Justin Bieber of rap?