This album certainly sounds more produced, but the band's investment in studio time mostly means sighing washes of prismatic reverb rather than a new architecture of synths and drums. Still, many of the album's best moments are its most... well, not beat-driven, but beat-bedazzled.

Desire, is a mess: intriguing, puzzling, intriguing and ultimately frustrating as all hell.

Lotta Sea Lice avoids the potential flippancy of a side-project, using well considered song selection and quality lyricism to drive a singular but, we hope, not a single collaboration.

While Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes could have become an exercise in studio-based formalistic noodling, Adebimpe and Malone’s vocals and lyrics give the songs structure and direction.

The interplay of Gibbard's shyly introspective vocals with Tamborello's dense and meticulous backdrops works surprisingly well, at times better than anything to date from Death Cab or DNTEL.

Country Funk frontloads these generic examples, and leaves the rest of the compilation up to artists who managed to eke meaning out of the stylistic changes.

DIIV have synthesized a bunch of fresh influences, including guitarist Andrew Bailey’s penchant for hip-hop, plus the band’s new-found fascination with sampling and tape loops, to craft their most diverse and perhaps finest album to date.

If TaDet Lugnt was pristine portraiture, carefully aligned and composed, then Tio Bitar is the off-the-cuff action shot – freely flowing and effortlessly jammed, its hair ruffled and with a face in need of a shave.

On 4, he tinkers a bit with the trim, options and manufacturing methods, but leaves Dungen’s styling fundamentally unchanged.

While there are some real successes here, Father, Son, Holy Ghost is extremely inconsistent.

SUMAC’s evocative and powerful playing hits you in the gut, as a physical experience, even as it motivates an intensely meditative mode. This is terrific music, in all relevant senses of that term.

Nothing on Fantasy Island is as sharp or cataclysmic as that ["Voodoo Wop"] (the title track comes closest), but the unease is palpable. ... It’s very hard to tell whether Clinic is enjoying the hedonism of their hand-clapping, synth-bopping, drum thumping songs, or just trying to forestall the apocalypse. Perhaps a little of both.

Less folky and more eclectic than his past work, Crow offers ample evidence of growth in Banhart’s range as both a performer and a songwriter.

Having established the hypnotic power of loud, dense guitar marches long ago, Pelican sound free enough at last to explore melodic intricacy and inventive theme-and-variation play without hewing to the old layer of protective gloom.

If you like Woods you’ll enjoy this record. If you’re team Skygreen Leopards, however, you might want to wait for that Red Pink and Purples record, which is very good and all Donaldson.

La Luz takes a big day-glo colored leap in News of the Universe, expanding a spooky, surf-rocking, girl-group sound into psychedelic overload. This is a full-on, trippy symphony, evoking baroque late Beatles, Os Mutantes and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.

These are gnarly, inward-focused songs, but if you listen carefully, you can hear how a different sort of delivery—big voice, big drums, slashing guitars—could turn them into a female-centric version of emo-rock. Even if you appreciate the way the music works here, you might still wonder what that larger scale version would sound like.

It's like Fiery Furnaces with more heart and less irony...and that's not a bad thing at all.

For the people who love this band, their sound, and Hitchcock's songwriting, this album will definitely not disappoint.

The End is Near employs much of fans found so pleasant about Bedhead, particularly the impressive build-up of two and three bar melodies.

The latest, the crustily erotic Distortion, is nearly its ["69 Love Songs"] equal. But way shorter.

Taken as a whole, Brothers and Sisters is a remarkable piece of work. It easily outclasses the two previous Jurado/Swift collaborations, and makes a strong opening bid for one of 2014’s best albums.

Torche’s strongest effort since 2008’s breakthrough Meanderthal.

While Diaper Island doesn't represent a significant break from VanGaalen's existing body of work, it ultimately haunts and endures in just the right amount--making this one of the strongest entries in an already consistent discography.

More important than the album’s conceit and whatever toehold it might offer, though, is that it sports less flab than their critical breakthrough.

Car Seat Headrest feels, at this point, like it’s about half under control, with Toledo at the wheel, yanking desperately to keep it on the road, and yet it’s sort of magnificent.

Shame’s standout songs combine the band’s ugly intensities with inspired bursts of melodic riffing.

“Dayvan Cowboy” is almost worth the price of admission, but it makes the remainder of the album seem derivatively “New Age.”

The music on the album is rarely as urgent as the image that adorns it, and never as explosive as the heavy artillery that is found on its back, but the disc has a more subtle appeal than both.

The songs/pieces/tracks are too long. They take too long getting where they’re going. Everyone loses. But it’s a good record. Hang onto it.

What A Place to Bury Strangers creates is satisfying, nothing more.

Most of White Bread Black Beer is almost unbearably lovely.

Akron/Family II really captures a feeling of happiness and at the same time melancholy, and that's what makes it beautiful: those two feelings at the same time.

Songs to Play is a quiet success, maybe not as quiet as it seems at first, but operating with a definite modesty and restraint. It’s a record that takes some playing before its warbly charms come clear, but it’s worth the time.

Emanon moves through dimensions and times with a surprising fluidity. That the album includes three discs and a graphic novel gives it unusual heft, but Shorter’s construction of the segments provides insight into his recent era, particularly stemming from 2013’s Without a Net.

Love and Curses is a rock ‘n’ roll record with neither pretense nor manicure, a clean glimpse into rock’s exposed essence.

The songs here have engaging, melodic hooks to spare.

Remarkably, the substitution of instruments seems not to have affected Segall’s overall aesthetic much. If you didn’t know, you might not recognize exactly what’s different about First Taste, except that it feels a bit more overstuffed and baroque. Yet whether it’s due to the change in instrumentation or not, there are some diversions from the usual.

It retains Mountain's dense production, but swaps out its calculated affectations for raw sexual urgency, deep-black humor and desperate foreboding.

Where Horn of Plenty still had spare singer-songwriter arrangements, Yellow House sounds far more elaborate.

Ultimately, the album is explicitly notable for its musicality, rather than its content.

Psychedelic Pill is earnest and perverse, simplistic and complicated, epic and underachieving--guess the old cuss still has it in him after all.

The overarching narrative structure and sequencing make this album a well-conceived exercise in storytelling.

Five years is a long time to make fans wait, but the quality of the material and willingness to tinker with their fairly rigid pop formula has resulted in another memorable, extremely listenable collection of songs.

Little Hells, for all its melancholy, gives Nadler’s fans another reason to celebrate; any continuation of the momentum birthed with Songs III is a happy thing, indeed.

There is nothing uncertain about You Stand Uncertain--this is one of the most assured albums of the year in any genre.

Horizontal Structures proves that this music has legs. You don't really need to know who is in this band, or what else they've done, to appreciate what they do. You just have to like your hefty sounds to come wrapped in plush space.

Even when you don't understand fully what's going on (is this song about L.A. or Baghdad?), the songs are catchy enough that you don't mind.

Their charisma lets them make a few risky moves (such as the African percussion on the extended closer "Church") and yield massive returns.

One of the great pleasures of The House at Sea is that you can enjoy it without thinking about it, on a purely sensual, intuitive level, without feeling that there's nothing there to consider.

What makes the piece, and much of the album, so interesting is how the players just hold things in particular spaces of tension and release. It’s not done at the expense of those imperceptible transformations that characterize the band’s work overall; it’s more like a different, less certain but possibly more engaging way of realizing them.

Dupuis’ reference may run more to punk and indie, rather than disco/R&B, but the effect is eerily similar: gender studies inquiries encased in the kind of music that once looked uncritically at female disempowerment. Yet while it’s serious stuff, it’s also fun, with big bashing choruses and somersaulting strings of words that surprise and entertain.

It’s an interesting artifact. Better, though, it’s another strong album from the young singer. Wall’s voice alone would carry these songs, but they’re each well crafted for the coherence of the larger picture.

Future Times takes a few plays to sink in. Its balance of the monumental and the delicate, the personal and the epic, shift as you listen and only draw you in gradually over time. Stay with it, though. It’s worth it.

The album is vigorous in its grooves and leaves a powerful, unifying impression with its words.

Harm’s Way is sharper and more exhilarating than its predecessor; it’s the same aesthetic but more clearly, exuberantly realized.

It [“Walk Through Fire”] jives together with machine-like precision and fluid grace. The rest of the EP is pretty good, too.

No You C'mon connects more quickly, but it’s the lightweight one. [combined review of both discs]

When McCombs gets deep into his vision of the world, or maybe a liminal state between ours and his, he’s at his finest on Tip of the Sphere. He needs a lifeline, though, to keep him tethered enough to this one that neither he nor his audience wanders off. He hasn’t gone too far, but the steadiness works better than the spiraling as this disc goes ‘round.

Stainless Style's problem isn't the music so much as it is the ambivalent authenticity; it's impossible to determine if it's supposed to pay tribute to, make fun of, or be fully situated in the time and place of John DeLorean's rise and fall.

This is world weary pop, but it’s completely uncynical. Reserved and melodramatic at the same time, it doesn’t worry about the incongruities, satisfied to be both wilted and very alive.

An album about finding meaning in the quiet, and even people who will never take psychedelic drugs or visit remote Ecuadorian caves, can get something out of that.

Andrews’ band is first rate, particularly organist Daniel Walker, whose weedy, wavering hum imbues these songs with a mournful depth of field. ... What’s new, here, however, is how damned strong she is, how fierce a belter, how indomitable a chronicler of the middle-class struggle.

Here is a pretty, pleasant record; and maybe that would be enough if Teenage Fanclub had never done more, wedding angst and bliss in a way that few other bands ever did. ... Teenage Fanclub seems to have swallowed the Serenity Prayer whole, accepting a lot and changing little, and it’s hard to say whether that’s wisdom or stasis.

After dancing through all these keys of fear, loss, and distress, the record ends with “Send for Me,” a simple and moving pledge to come pick you up, whatever happens. The slow bloom of warmth feels hard won, but not even remotely fragile.

Exuberantly weird ... The opening songs feel a bit thin, returning to trippy terrain that GT Ultra had already adequately investigated. ... The album’s second half, however, is terrific. The mix thickens with idiosyncrasy, glimmering electronic flotsam and some assured singing from Carlson. She doesn’t have enormous range, but she conjures compelling presence.

All in all, the album is a genial bird’s eye view of life presented in aphorism, perspectives from a man well aware of his aging and embracing it. There’s something joyful even in the moments of tension, as if their eventual dissipation is a given.

Much of what made Shallow Grave so striking was its density, its pairing of deftly constructed lyrics with rapid-fire notes and chords. At times, some of the songs on The Wild Hunt--specifically "You're Going Back" and "Love is All"--lead with the more abrasive side of Mattson's voice but don't land with much impact.

On Shook, Franklin James Fisher, Lee Tesche, Ryan Mahan and Matt Tong sound refreshed, energized by collaboration and completely confident in their identity.

The slower songs on The Warning have a kind of raggedy, pioneering charm.

Here’s a band so fond of their particular brand of mid-tempo dream pop that they do not feel compelled to try anything else. At least they take the time to be particularly observant as they comb their territory.

What’s key here is that Winged Wheel is travelling together, as a unit. The eclecticism in mood proves that they’re enjoying the voyage.

Right from the start, it’s the attention to detail in the arrangements — what Frank Zappa used to describe as “eyebrows” — that brings Norm to vivid, radiant life. ... Regardless of how gorgeous it all sounds, sometimes the songwriting does feel a little wanting, as if Shauf has penned a decent verse and chorus, then run out of ideas about how to add another section to take the song to the next level. ... By keeping all the songs to a succinct few minutes, Shauf stymies their potential to evolve into longer, more complex pieces.

Whether she’s howling about airport security machines, falling in and out of love or lust with someone or turning a jaundiced eye on the past, these are as solid, anthemic and moving a set of songs as any Against Me! have put out.

If G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! frequently felt like the massive, sweeping motions of some sort of gestalt entity, it’s fitting that things here feel fractured at times, if no less cohesive.

An album of subtle yet emotionally resonant songs.

The album's vocals exemplify the real problem here, which is that while the music is appealing and well-executed, everything feels perfectly coordinated and absolutely calculated.

This is no victory lap around the baptismal fount, but rather a document of spiritual struggle and hard-won artistry.

Back-to-back tracks recorded years apart seem inseparable, and some of the recordings here are the strongest the band – or anyone else – has ever put to tape.

For all the sturm und drang on Half Divorced, the component parts of each song are well-differentiated and clean. You get a clear sense of both the individual performances and their interaction.

The end result is that, as far as we know (for now), Album of the Year is Black Milk continuing along at his very best.

Zomby's achievement with Dedication is in plausibly connecting these austere sounds to underground bass music. The best DJs can do this, but few producers even try.

Overall, Battle of Ages is a genuinely impressive release. More than your standard bro doom, it’s got reach, smarts and heart.

Fever retains the cheeky humor of other dubstep artists, but its vivacity makes it his most immediate, and compelling, release yet.

The songs feel physical and unpremeditated, without theoretical underpinnings, but executed with such conviction that they carry you almost bodily from one track to another.

These tracks are surely less orthodox than starting from the masters (properly name-checked in the liner notes), but even the experiments that don’t quite pay off are worthy listens. And anyone will find more than enough here to make this worth their while.

It’s not a bad album, not by a long stretch, but it feels like Miller & company are treading water, revisiting things that worked before.

Despite the band’s articulate playing, Song of the Rose has shortcomings--regularly, Arbouretum is content to indulge in an all too familiar canon--incognizant of any current trends, their musical DNA arrested in amber.

It remains a little bit of all its influences, at times more like soul, at times almost straight country (particularly on “Here Is Where the Loving Is At”), but more often the proverbial blender mix.

Not groundbreaking, but it sounds great. And yet, these time-tested, still electrifying punk rock torch songs have been neutered somewhat here. The performances are professional, perfectly calibrated, even virtuosic.

Even at their most spacious, these songs are taut and well-crafted pieces of music. Previous Modern Nature outings showed that the band can be expressive and daring; with The Heat Warps, they’ve proved that realism can be just as intriguing.

There are times when Lenker approaches Marissa Nadler’s eerie otherworldliness, though not for long. ... Couple that with a really good, dense, aggressive musical attack, led by Meek, but supported by bassist Max Oleartchik and drummer James Krivchenia, and you’ve got something special, especially in the more rock-oriented tunes like “Masterpiece,” “Humans” and, especially “Paul.”

Over the course of Spike Field’s 50 minutes, the songs’ prevalent mood can prove hypnotic if you’re receptive to its atmosphere. MBC is certainly adept at conjuring and sustaining a melancholy, nocturnal scene.

One of the best Mountain Goats records.

For all its formal and conceptual experimentation, there is a visceral, emotionally unsettling core at the heart of Lack 惊蛰.

The songs themselves, even when they are not traditional folk songs, share some of the time-worn general-ness of the folk genre. You do not, very often, feel that you are glimpsing directly into Gubler's psyche.

In combining antiquated influences with their own postmodern sensibilities, Broadcast and the Focus Group have together created an evocative and imaginative work that is in many ways more challenging and rewarding than the former’s own proper albums.

Nothing here is as punchy or infectious as Make Out’s “Boys Who Love Girls,” or Unwind’s “You Better Get Ready,” but the bangers aren’t missed; Birds Make Good Neighbors finds a lovely, whisper-quiet continuity to supplant the unevenness of these previous efforts.