Many will understandably bore of it quickly, for there’s nothing to new to discover after repeat listenings. Yet, it contains enough rock solid tracks to make it recommendable to fans of the genre.

It's more cohesive than their debut, and just as catchy.

An uncompromising set of solid songs set on the internal and external eve of destruction.

Thankfully, the music that accompanies their lyrical flights of fancy and ever so stoned imagery soothes the chafing caused by such unabashed and often lurid flower power ranting.

Bergsman's new set pieces offer no more lasting sustenance than the harder to resist but hardly nutritious candies from The Concretes' confectionery.

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.

The music’s references doesn’t sound particularly new, but Batoh sounds newly energized and fully in command of his new band.

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.

When the energy is present, 23 is a strong, pleasant album that connects a number of dots in a way that belongs almost exclusively to Blonde Redhead.

Listening to the work heard here, it may be a bit premature to file Carey's work beside some of the musical touchstones suggested by his record label's press corps (Bill Evans, Talk Talk), but it does suggest a good start and a solid grasp of the spaces that can be created by music.

Almost overflows with a heretofore unheard urgency and shows exactly the kind of energy their songs could -- and theoretically still can -- possess.

Plague Park’s nine tracks seem to be over before they reach their potential. The record gets better as it progresses, and successive listens reveal more interesting facets to the songwriting.

Taken individually, the album’s 10 vignettes suffer slightly from a lack of individual cohesion, their structures incorporating mostly several short, seemingly miscellaneous scraps. Yet over the course of several listens, Toxic City Music does provide some sort of overall flow, its slippery patterns serving as auditory snapshots of dank irradiated zones and heat realm communities quarantined in an airless isolation.

In A Dream ain’t no slouch, but is better piece-by-piece than a continuous flow.

GEM isn't just a fresh take on an old sound; it's an audit of the constraint placed on female artists in the past and a table-turning journey into what might have been possible if musical freedom meant more than obedience to parents, husbands and record producers.

Rolling Golden Holy is more comfortable and assured than its predecessor, but not as eerily evocative. If the self-titled was a twilight vista full of mist and longing, the follow-up ambles through sunny backroads. It has a bit more Johnson, a bit less Mitchell in its mix, though the two artists find intriguing common ground on multiple occasions.

Lewis' strengths are primarily lyrical. The musical arrangements, though good enough not to distract, tend to disappear into the songs.

The People's Key, more or less Oberst's 10th album as Bright Eyes, finds him aiming for the prophetic over the personal, embracing the luxuries of the studio instead of hunkering down in the bedroom.

Whether a frolic or a detour, the latest stop on Hynes's winding musical road is worth a listen. But take his own early words as this listener does: out of context, as an invocation of caveat emptor.

Frantic guitars, hooks that replay in your head, skeptical lust - they're all here.

One of Jamal's best in recent years.

The elements of Eddy Current Suppression Ring have always been very simple, yet they congeal in a primal, supremely compelling way. However, this time around, they’re still fundamental, but perhaps a bit less urgent, especially early on in the disc

Unfortunately, the greatest asset to Splazsh also feels like its greatest Achilles heel. The territory this album spans is substantial, but almost impossible to get into without focused, repeated listening.

By blurring the lines of his influences, Wymond Miles has been able to create an album that is very much a reflection of his own vision and personality.

The Besnard Lakes Are the Ghost Nation is another solid addition to a consistently strong discography. It doesn’t quite hit the heights of my personal favorite, Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO, but it certainly comes close.

When Shining go technical, they do so with a flourish, but often seem too eager to return to the simpler crowd-pleasing verses and choruses that make up the meat of the album.

So yes, they've still got it. But that still begs the question; do you need re-recordings of tunes that changed the face of rock music? Not as badly as you need the originals, that's for sure.

At just 37 minutes, World Music is wisely edited--most of the songs hover around the 3-minute mark, so they speak their piece and move on before you get tempted to start peeling apart the layers to see what they're really made of.

The way this band turns well-used Americana sounds into something frightening is impressive. It's like hearing a loved one's voice when you know that you're alone, scarier in its way than any unfamiliar sound.

This austerity is reflected somewhat in the duo's avowed debt to the ambient tradition of Harold Budd and Brian Eno and, whilst that's not bad thing at all, it does mean that, at times, Ursprung tends to fold itself into the background.

A pretty percolating electro-pop record that embraces sweetness and strangeness in equal measure.

Kleyn sounds just fine accompanying herself with adept piano and efflorescent harp flourishes, her music FX-free except for a little echo, and I can imagine a less skyclad presentation simply gumming things up with New Age goo.

Escovedo and Don Antonio play with that search through country, rock, cool jazz, and more, reflecting chaotic but exciting sensory experiences. The Crossing, with its big scope and questionable coherence, can be a bit much, but it’s a welcome and valuable statement from an artist capable of pulling it off.

He’s smart enough to be aware of his dorkiness, and by the end of Live From Rome he has almost turned it into an asset.

Incorruptible Heart really is a wonderful album and something beautiful to listen to, but I find myself having a very difficult time emotionally connecting to it.

There are plenty of moments among these 15 songs that are devastating in a way that’s unique to Xiu Xiu, but also moments that leave me frustrated and baffled. Essentially it’s business as usual for this brilliant yet confounding band. They challenge you to turn away, yet reward the brave and patient listener with flashes of startling beauty.

Drones and feedback accumulate, intensify, and the whole thing threatens to collapse or combust. It does neither. ... Menuck’s difficult record is clearly a post-Trump artwork, a soundtrack for outrage fatigue. Its odd power raises questions.

There's plenty of kicks left over, but it tilts the impression of the band. The Teen Beat questionnaires that come in the disc jacket (What's your favorite color? What's your shoe size?) and the shortened tracklist end up emphasizing the nerdiness over the jerkiness.

Luminiferous burns hard, but it’s searching for an attitude adjustment that could make the flames grow higher.

Carnival is far more subdued than Shanghai, simmering with supernatural menace, but never quite breaking into frenzy.

The melody is maintained, with the only difference between the two sections is a very pregnant pause added to the notes, the whole of robotic Europop from the '70s lodged into one oversized chrome éclair.

The Coathangers are clearly a band in transition, and it's very possible that this album's disjointed nature is a result of the band throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks.

Axis of Evol may not be a great album. It remains prey to some of McBean’s obnoxious corner-cutting. But it is his most resolute outing to date, certainly the first record he’s made that can be heard front-to-back, repeatedly, without losing most of its shine.

Screaming Females do not get me because I'm not surprised by them. I enjoy Castle Talk, but it's academic.

We are Him is more varied in texture, more resolute in execution and, to the probable amusement of Gira’s long-term coterie, an altogether darker disc.

By most measures, Cream Cuts is Tussle’s most enjoyable and fully realized release yet, but its excellence can’t compensate for the nagging sameness that plagues most of its songs.

Though it doesn’t hit the peaks of No Earthly Man, his 2005 foray into the pure history of the ballad, Spoils easily holds its own.

Castlemusic is short, at 31 minutes, but diverse enough to suggest real potential.

The balance of melody to unease is rarely this well maneuvered.

Whereas [Michael] Hurley tends toward the absurd, often pushing the limits of song structure in the process, Rose always has one foot planted in tradition. Although not always the same one.

Richard Youngs has given us an album that just about anyone can pick up a guitar to play along to, but that doesn’t mean the experience of listening to The Rest is Scenery is an easy one. Fans of his, of course, wouldn’t have it any other way.

As Cunningham pans across the channels, his sound design strikes the ears and creates synaptic leaps that draw pull the listener’s focus. Many of constituents will be familiar to fans of Boards of Canada, Two Lone Swordsmen and Aphex Twin and if the early tracks of Statik sound more challenging in their discordances, you will feel borne along by the idiosyncratic juxtapositions Cunningham creates.

The Tree of Forgiveness, ten breezy songs and thirty-three minutes long, is slight, but its brevity fits. The Tree of Forgiveness doesn’t rage against the dying of the light. Instead, it’s funny and it’s sad. It’s complicated. It’s over before you know it.

Most of White Bread Black Beer is almost unbearably lovely.

There’s not a bad song in the bunch, but the songs from Death’s only official release are the clear highlights on ...For the Whole World to See.

Hopelessness has occasional flaws. Not all the songs conclude satisfyingly, and some of the lyrics are vaguely trite. But despite them, it is a missive from an artist who has never ceased to evolve and now asserts herself with gusto and unflinching purpose.

Estara is not as musically challenging, hooky or advanced as some albums by similar artists.

Holly Herndon is far too conceptual to ever really merit banal classification as a techno or electronic producer, and with a bigger platform (intentional), she shows that her vision opens a multitude of possibilities that go beyond genre. Platform isn’t the album to realize that potential, so obvious since Movement, but it’s a tantalizing taste of the future.

The Power Out may surprise and confuse listeners expecting Rock It redux, and the new album has a few rough patches and a general inconsistency due to Electrelane's willingness to experiment.

None of Molina’s songs gets an extreme makeover here, and, indeed, one or two wild cards might make the whole collection more interesting. However, it’s telling that so many young, vibrant acts honor the material enough to deliver it straight.

There’s a good deal of spoken word on this album, the sort of poetry that’s meant to inspire but seems a little overblown. It’s part of the genre, obviously, and it gets swallowed, soon enough, by groove. But you have to stick with it through the flute-scented rites of “First Peoples,” the downtempo intro to “Re-Memory” to get to the music. I could do without it, personally. The music, though, is pretty great.

This is mom-and-dad rock, no more ready to pack up the fuzzboxes than it is to become a grandparent.

His most personal recording yet.

“Why is this happening,” a listener might wonder as the music jumps from one notion to the next? “Why not? Now hold on,” would be the response, if anyone were of a mind to put such matters into words. ... Sometimes the music coheres into a tight, catchy chant or a propulsive passage, but these moments end before you’re ready. Perhaps the freedom not to keep doing what you’re doing, and not to have to make sense while you’re doing it, is the point?

The songs hover around the four-minute mark, and are economical in their implementation, with an overall sheen that does occasionally come close to overdoing it.

If Dents and Shells stands apart from Buckner's oeuvre in any way, it's in the prominence and evenhandedness of its instrumental arrangements.

This is Quintron's best summation yet of his iconoclastic melding of raw rock & roll, R&B and funk, experimental electronics and art.

The Danish four-piece tapped Spaceman 3’s Sonic Boom for production on this uncharacteristically uplifting endeavor, and you can see the uneasy alliance of the bright colors of Peter Kember’s recent work mixing into the half melted, slushy desolation of Iceage’s aesthetic.

Egyptrixx avoids the brittle tastelessness of modern electro and Fool's Gold party-starting by allowing a touch of that cold, spacious futurism to creep in.

The cadre of eclectic guest appearances... make it seem like this record would play more like a mix tape, but Shadow pulls it off, and for the most part, each of the guest artists deliver the goods.

Like most things that result from improvisation, it doesn't always sound as new as it thinks it does, but the reggae stalwarts' freshness is timeless.

The nuanced defeatism on Nothing Fits separates these brash, loud punk anti-anthems from the standard hardcore fare. The most ephemeral evidence of this is also the most effective: instead of battering you into submission with unadulterated force, songs are separated with just enough silence to make you uncomfortable, impatient. The subtle natures of hell are often the worst.

Subtle differences aside, Magic Trick delivers the same kind of trippy, guitar-jangling, tambourine-shaking pop as Fresh & Onlys.

Hayashi’s eclecticism gives the album the feel of an anthology and although his beat making is terrific and provides a thematic backbone, the real interest here is what’s going on around, beneath and between. If his wish were to destabilize and upend expectations, then full marks, but too often he seems to retire behind his tools and allow his technical skill to overshadow his considerable artistry.

Earth Junk doesn’t sound like anything else in his discography. However, it does betray Hagerty’s encyclopedic knowledge of rock history, which yields some respectful iconic nods and a few bizarre what-ifs.

For those, like me, who previously dismissed Aloe Blacc, Good Things warrants our reconsideration. Blacc's changed his tune. We probably should, too

Mostly, though, the record shows off Grass Widow's continued ability to hone their own style.

As a statement of intent from that band, Pyramid is promising in a shaky kind of way: it's clear that there's still creative magic to go around, but also that the old chemistry is going to be a tough one to reorient.

Freaks of Nurture needs a bit more abrasion to leave a mark. Sunny and pleasant all through, it blurs together like vacation days, each enjoyable, but hard to remember afterwards which was which.

Most of the record is engaging stuff, noisier than pretty, stranger than it is studied.

It’s its own thing, and a pretty good one.

While some may regret Barnes's toning-done of quirkiness or ambition, False Priest plays to his best qualities while minimizing his weaker ones.

What ties all the disparate elements together is a taut thread of hip hop breaks, clattering electronic beats and wobbly dubstep bass.

Like the new Spider Bags, the fun seems to be slowly bleeding away. Not that it makes them any less catchy.

Nothing Hurts goes in the ear loud and fast. And out the other ear just as quickly.

It is a very accurate document of Wire's 2011 live set; its strengths and weak spots correspond exactly to the ones of the concert they played in Chicago the same year.

The momentum picks up a notch on “Whitewaterside,” in which O’Connell recounts standing in cold water, watching the ripples and admiring the quiet stillness of night. The stage is immediately set for a stark, reflective listening experience, with nature as a focus, rendered with zen-like clarity.

If there's a flaw on Original Colors, it's that these 10 songs are so closely related--in tempo, vocals and instrumentation--that they're enjoyable enough on their own but become an undifferentiated blob when played back-to-front.

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.

Everything in Between is as fine a monument to imperfection as they've built so far.

The music is what stands out. Vile has no problem bringing any of his talents across--steady-handed, Appalachian-inflected psychfolk reels, doe-eyed wisecracker vocalese.

Goreas’s more prominent vocal role provides a payoff that helps to balance the moments on this album where the group’s musical ideas aren’t quite as seamless as on its predecessor.

Much of Real Gone has been stripped so bare instrumentally that its heavy accumulation of rhythmic noise -- manipulated groans and grunts (“Metropolitan Glide”) what sounds like a cracking horsewhip (“Don’t Go Into The Barn”) -- establishes a sustained, bristling mood that electrifies particular songs but bogs down the album as a whole.

At some point, you may, in fact, find yourself hankering for unaccompanied Mods, and to that end, let me direct you to “Megaton” with its loopy, pinging beat, its hammering bass pulse, its artful disdain.

Unlike the dark, industrialized beats currently populating many dance music playlists, Woo is light on its feet--more the soundtrack to an evening of beachside serenity than a 5 a.m. scream from some Mancunian warehouse.

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.

While Work doesn't feel emotionally engaging or really deviate from an amiable pace, it's still engaging enough to hold one's attention for most of the 41 minutes.

Her narrative sees all, experiences all, but keeps a remove in the dry, mechanical beats, the tamped down drama of synthetic accompaniment, the vocal lines that only once and a while slip past a murmur into wilder swoops and yelps. This is a cerebral, abstracted album about the physical, one that deals in potentialities and implied trajectories, rather than the immediacy of pulse and sweat and organ functions.