The sheer breadth of styles Ishibashi incorporates might well throw the average listener for a loop, but if an exceptional talent employing any tools she sees fit to make the sounds she hears in her head excites you, The Dream My Bones Dreams contains a wealth of sonic treats worth exploring.

Jeff Tweedy clearly spent more time than usual talking to himself of late, and the expressive results are strong. His memory went jogging and kicked up enough dust that he had to put it down on paper and on tape, and it all feels like the most direct pathway into his complex psyche that he's ever offered.

At only 22-years-old, Cara doesn't feel gimicky, nor like an over-produced product of a record label. She's raw and pure, an obvious example of an artist who will only continue to build momentum.

Overall though, it's a solid effort in a genre that's hard to nail. Worth repeating all season!

While both rappers have met their match in terms of lyrical prowess and old-school ethos, the cavernous difference in their tones (Gibbs, deep and rough like a stormy sea; Curren$y, squeaky and smooth) keeps Fetti dynamic and wards of redundancy. Better still, however, are the moments when these rappers elevate the proceedings beyond street side cypher-style spitting.

It's their willingness to fall flat on their face while swinging for the fences that separates them from the focus-grouped inoffensiveness of their pop peers. The messiness of the whole thing seems to be the point, part of its audacity. In most artists' hands, that would be a recipe for creative bloat. Yet more than ever before the 1975 prove themselves masters of the form.

Perhaps its biggest fault is being a good album that's just not as strong as the other two in .Paak's "Golden State" series.

As their past few LPs suffered from a bout of structural sameness, Wham! Bang! Pow! Let's Rock Out! contains just enough musical and lyrical variety to place it amongst Art Brut's finest work.

As Shabason bends, stretches, and warps instrumentation, field recordings and interview clips alike, he's working in neo-expressionist portraiture, mining the ambiguities of the abstractions to beautiful, evocative effect.

This compilation delivers on all fronts, dropping in the melancholic with Tokimonsta and Miguel Baptista Benedict, the glitchy downtempo of Lapalux, the funk infusions of Thundercat and Georgia Anne Muldrow, the experimental house of Mr. Oizo and Ross From Friends, and of course new cuts from Flying Lotus himself.

Given how commanding Powerhouse comes off thematically, there are unfortunately moments that simply don't work musically. ... But for its few flaws, Powerhouse is nonetheless rewarding, as Rostron has never sounded so raw and inventive, leaving listeners with the imperfect must-hear album of 2018.

There's still room to grow, but their adventurous spirit on display across the record will hopefully make for some compelling material moving forward.

Not just for Dave Matthews Band fans, Ryley Walker's The Lillywhite Sessions is a reminder that taste is subjective, timing is everything, and you don't always choose the ones you love.

There is a sense of indulgence here, moments that could read as self-important, particularly when Kozelek dips into criticism, but themes of loss, of displacement, and of holding onto what has held you in the past bring completeness.

It's an admirably strange structure--one that doesn't make much aesthetic sense, but keeps things unpredictable for a whopping 83 minutes. ... A weird and wonderful farewell from the idiosyncratic project.

Conley's lyrics and vocals are the boldest missteps on 9. Contained in what sounds like a grown adult emulating the vocal tonality of an angsty teen, are even stranger lyrical approaches.

Thought Gang is for lovers of non-expositional storytelling, crude mystery, lipstick-red esoteric jazz, and noise.

Combining the passionate onslaught of hardcore with a reasonable portion of grunge and radio-ready power pop, the New York group's cynical punk tone often feels effortless. If you're just hearing of Drug Church or weren't sold on their two prior works, now's the time to stay for a sermon.

Queen of Golden Dogs is more than a collection of novel (or classical) ideas, as much as it's a assembly of gorgeously written and expertly arranged musical concepts, showing Vessel making some of the most clear-eyed art of his career.

At only eight tracks, it's the shortest Smashing Pumpkins full-length and it feels less grandiose than most of their work simply due to that brevity, which makes it harder to measure against their other LPs--although it easily blows the last album out of the water and is more immediately catchy than Zeitgeist.

By creating longer songs that echo the hypnotic nature of house, the band draw listeners into the feeling of the beats and bass that anchor Nagano's melodies. In doing so, Little Dragon succeed in giving listeners a taste of the dance world they've entered into, in all its myriad forms.

Artists that push themselves with every release are rare, and rarer still are the artists where each new frontier is a successful one. Objekt is one of those, and Cocoon Crush demands to be listened to intently and completely. The arrangements themselves are never predictable, twisting and turning with opportunistic glee, marrying the fluidity of his role as a sonic architect.

Lyrically, all three mine traditionally sombre territory in their solo work, tying into broader cultural conversations regarding gender and mental health, and the words of boygenius maintain the same power and urgency.

Teetering between organized and messy, the melodic and chaotic, Bought to Rot is what Grace considers her "Scorpio album." Presenting herself bare, she exposes unfiltered honesty through the kind plain-spokenness that's, nowadays, avoided by contemporaries of her stature.

This will probably be labeled a folk-rock record, but at its core Elastic Days rocks.

Tracks like the funky "Can't Fight the Feeling," "Love Jones" and "I Feel a Change" aren't '60s soul throwbacks so much as they are genuine articles, with the now-trademark Daptone sound feeling fresh and vintage at once.

The record starts to lose a little momentum near the end, and some parts of the record float by without registering much of an impression, but the highlights usually make up for this. Sometimes she gets too laidback for her own good, but St. Louis has enough charm to make the record work.

Time 'n' Place is challenging, but its rewards are commensurate, and while the band may lose some of their more fickle fans with this release, it's always refreshing to see artistic growth put first, especially when it pays off like this.