I liked it better when Olden Yolk songs glowed with auras around their edges, when they surrounded themselves with a special kind of air that reverberated with songs in the process of becoming.

The Snake displays many of its predecessor’s strengths--good songs, that emotion-laden voice, the amorphous blend of pop and jazz--without trying to be an action replay

Sylva might be Snarky Puppy’s most conceptually complicated album, but it’s easily penetrable as a listen. The album could make more demands and it isn’t as stunning in its individual moments as previous recordings, but those ideas would resist League’s compositional intent.

Come to Life feels fragmentary in places, still more mixtape than debut album. It can be amazingly disorienting.

Your Blues is a bold step in a new direction, risking over-the-top theatricality, but with its feet planted firmly on solid ground.

Despite the relatively heavy guitars and relatively dense production, you’ll notice a similarity to the smart, earnest, complex material Molina played as Songs: Ohia.

Ultimately, the songs have a provisional quality, provocatively lovely but elusive and unfinished. If you love shoegaze or the Drop Nineteens or both, though, this is well worth checking out.

Songs From the Year of Our Demise never achieves the crunch or the sugar highs that still makes Posies records so addictive, but it never really needs it. This is pop for adults.

As rich as this stuff sounds (it’s hard to think of a working musician with classier production values) or how much she emotes on the mic, it’s calculated, cerebral and a little bit cold.

There are moments, however, when Hung and Power lock into something truly ecstatic, creating passages that more than account for the tremendous amount of pre-release hype that’s been softballed toward these two.

Women's last record had poppier, brighter aspects than Public Strain, and it's hard to imagine what they might add to this sound beyond an amp'd up production that would wreck their very deliberate effect.

8,000,000 Stories provides ample room for the duo to connect and shine, and showcase Blueprint in his brilliant role as narrator.

Overall, though, the mood on Fear Fun is consistent in its constant fluctuations; it's eerie when it needs to be and just familiar enough to lure in the listener.

While Lortz's body of work as a songwriter has grown larger, The World is Just a Shape to Fill the Night may occupy a spot similar to the one Get Lonely owns in The Mountain Goats' more varied discography.

The result makes for a listening experience that's intense and potentially awkward, but one that also somehow rings true.

Provider isn't necessarily going to settle old scores. Its a notable release, though, both as a new work by a talented singer-songwriter and as one of what one can only hope will be several satisfying postscripts in the narrative of a great band.

Quaristice seems most comfortable amidst the modern scrum, a soundtrack for mundane urban maneuvers.

I don't suppose this is an album for the ages, but as tasty trifles go, you could do far worse.

Without doing anything revolutionary--and it doesn't--Cape Dory comes to mirror the leisurely pace of a breezy day at sea, remembered after the fact: the subtle variations, the comforting predictability, the passages of time by turns boring and serenely sweet.

Space is undoubtedly the place here, and if at times you’re left floating, it’s balanced out by lots of good loopy vibes and a couple of jaw-dropping moments of inspiration.

Not quite the revelation of the seamless debut, and missing the duck-down mentality of the Beady Eye in his prime, The Formula is the hip-hop definition of maintaining.

Skullways settled into a sound that's unstuck in time, and works for both the brain and behind.

The spiraling, distortion-drenched guitar solos, the cracked and ruined moan of Mascis, the passive-aggressive romanticism, the relentless beat, the pedals, the sheer turbulent volume...it's just like Where You Been? all over again, with all the positives and negatives that the comparison implies.

Even at Phosphene Dream's best moments, you can't help feeling that this is a very competent, earnest reproduction of things that have already been done.

Czarface Meets Ghostface may not be the stone cold classic the participants are capable of but it is a very enjoyable trip through a world populated by comic book and movies heroes and villains.

The churning, blues-rock approach is a recent (Smog) development, and too often it overwhelms the feeling of cracked intimacy that makes him great. There are other times, however, when it really works.

These might be the awkward years, but they’ve resulted in an album that’s both rewarding on its own merits and a suggestion of interesting progressions still to come.

Landing may take a number of listens to begin to sink in, but when it does, it stays with you.