It's a sweeping, expansive album, that covers a lot of ground and leaves the listener satisfied.

Even if Lost Girls often sounds like scrapped ideas taken from a larger project, Khan doesn't go too deep into nostalgia—still working firmly within a pop framework.

While Eavesdropping On The Competition and Jonesy Boy won’t necessarily being appearing on any coffee tables in the near future, they don’t feel up to the standard of the other nine songs. This is a small complaint because when Catacombs works, it really works, and it mostly really works.

Obsidian is a shallow and unsatisfying exploration of this dark side.

As strong as the hooks and melodies are in British Home Movies, it’s her artful narratives and evocative choruses that really stick, enveloped in micro stories of traveling along paths that are paved with memories.

Songs distort from their structures, allowing for a gelatinous cortege that serves to distinguish the album with flair and maintain a fetching edginess throughout.

Grounded enough to know the limits of the listener (songs meander, but only to the confines of their ideas, never tiring out a single theme), but more than adventurous enough to remain extremely exciting.

Stylistically eclectic, or maybe even chaotic, Obey is a sublime release, its melancholic moments offered grace and any ounce of frenzy more subtle than overt.

Their amalgamation of indie and electronica is by no means revolutionary in itself, but their form of guitar infused music is an important one.

It is by far their most focused and polished album, and Danger Mouse makes sure that everything is sonically smooth (even if a few feel almost like Broken Bells b-sides).

Real Emotional Trash feels like a compromise, for Malkmus and for us.

The album mostly screams avant-garde in its minimalism, sometimes to its detriment, but there's no denying they have the talent to justify the mystery they've built.

Stuck on Nothing opens strong, closes strong, and the intermediate tracks are interesting enough to maintain interest. Free Energy haven’t created anything cataclysmically new, but they have created an entirely likable pop album.

In lengthening the song lengths and trimming the tracklist, No Mas jettisons the spontaneous, off-the-cuff energy that made their debut so incredibly fun.

By attempting to give us what we want, and provide reassurance that the Sonic Youth legacy is in safe hands, Moore has somehow managed to make it look weaker and less appealing than it ever was.

Tres Cosas does then what all good third albums should do – it takes the best bits from her earlier works, perfects the model, and then goes a little bit further.

Selecting highlights feels like a fool’s errand. Ballgame’s ballads (“You’re Not My Baby Tonight,” “Goodbye My Love”) soar gracefully. .... The higher-tempo numbers are equally effective.

You only need to read through the song titles to get a sense of it all, but the carefully constructed builds of tracks like Wish We Had More Time and This Is Where It Ends make spending time with sorrow hard to resist.

Is this record the cure to the ails that is the sophomore LP? Yes and no. Yes, it's new and fresh and spilling over with more of their unique brand of high-energy rock; no, as there's some missteps and growth is often traded out for immature jabs.

While it shares many similarities with the quieter side of their first record, it never quite achieves the same heart-rending beauty we know they're capable of.

Given the long list of contributors, the singularity and cohesion achieved in Goodnight City is something to be applauded. It is also solid evidence that Wainwright’s creative well has not run dry, but rather thrives upon the influence of others.

It's an album of striking and stark beauty, with finely crafted songs that feel stripped to their bare essentials, and just allowed to be what they are, unadorned.

A 37-minute album that feels closer to feature-length.

Dig into it deeper and you’ll find a surprisingly rewarding account tell-all that sounds like an extraordinary premise to a film. And the score they write for themselves, as thrilling as it is, can be somewhat overwrought at times, resulting in an aural mood that could've used some dramatic nuance.

Sonic Youth have captured that exploration perfectly and transformed it into a piece of work that not only embodies the various degrees of emotions and thoughts we all experience, but it creates new ones whilst doing so, through it's exploratory and deeply affecting methods.

It’s a buoyantly hopeful album where Hyde gives a final wave goodbye to his darkest days before moving on to greener pastures.

Where Chapman excels where others fail is that he's endearing about his self-deprecation, often conveying truths that read as casual as his relaxed arrangements. He also likes intertwining astronomical reasoning and science into his contemplating, because why wouldn't he.

The ambition they pursue overall shows in what Young himself affirms to be the band's best work, and their belief in that shows through and through.