It’s a solid record; put it on and forget it.

Sunbather needs not to be judged as black metal, post metal, or any other subgenre, but simply as heavy music--loud, visceral, beautiful heavy music.

Crawling Up The Stairs has strong riptides that have no qualms over carrying you away, but if you embrace them you may be pleasurably surprised.

While it would be remiss to question an artist’s chosen working methods, perhaps if Elizabeth hadn’t been quite so fiercely independent in its recording, and had had to compete with the usual unwanted distractions of the outside world, then Dancing might not have been just an impressively accomplished album, but a more striking, perhaps even outright essential one.

Any band that can turn over vocal duties as often as they hold onto them and somehow make all the music sound like their own is a band worth watching, and despite its inconsistency and even its lack of imagination, there are a lot of thrills to be had in this hour.

This is an album of average to good songs, with only a few highlights.

...Like Clockwork is easily the best release from the band since Songs for the Deaf.

Though it’s tough to get a sense of what exactly it is that’s causing all of this suffering, the details don’t seem so important in the end, as Drifters / Love Is the Devil is the sound of pure isolation and dread wrapped in one bleary, beautiful package.

There are two primary things that make Once I Was An Eagle take flight: Lyrics and progression, which together make the album intelligent, confident, and, perhaps most importantly, recursive.

The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here is up there with the best Alice in Chains albums, with each track a conquest of structure and composition.

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

Campbell’s resplendent tone delights with the plaintive cry of classic torch singers; instead or feeling pity or sympathy, we’re now in the presence of a commanding performer who doesn’t have to sacrifice an inch of naiveté to make an impression.

Overall, One Kiss Ends It All is a little uneven but still an enjoyable piece of cosmic pop, and once you get past the occasional stutter, there is a lot to take from this one. If only every day could be Saturday.

What starts out as inviting, quickly becomes a bit irritating and ends up overwhelmingly draining and drab if tackled all at once.

As it is, Big Black Delta offers more than its fair share of thrills, but there’s the sense it could be so much better if Bates didn’t feel the need to draw the line quite so clearly between his various projects.

The album is stacked with jaw-dropping moments, underpinned by seismic emotional shifts.

The third chapter in She & Him’s discography won’t convert those who dislike the genre and it won’t alienate fans of it either.

Melodies swoop and soar, vocals are sweet and clear and some of the choruses are truly fantastic. However, its lasting impression is as an omnishambles of poor choices and awful skits and is, simply put, an absolute mess of an album.

This mind-expanding record will inspire a more inexpressible connection: you will carve your own niche within its deep and absorbing textures, and you will find new things upon every listen.

Slow Summits presents The Pastels at their most amiable, bearing the quiet, understated splendor of a picnic with friends on a warm Sunday morning.

This is The National’s 4th or 5th comfortably strong album in a row, another slight variation on a tried-and-true theme.

By utilizing a synth-based soundtrack just as organic, emotional, and unadulterated as Welsh’s voice and lyrics, Impersonator successfully matches man with machine and gives each an equally powerful, equally human voice.

With the amount of care and attention to detail found in tracks like Begin to Remember and Into Distance, it’s a shame that their more atmosphere-oriented tracks feel the least realized, coming off as throwaways in an otherwise structurally sound record.

What Daft Punk have done on Random Access Memories could be seen as a methodically curated, musical museum of the future, rather than a conservatory for experimental collaboration.

Boats has made something beautiful and invigorating at moments, while puzzling and slightly alienating at others.

Overall, its their most accessible, one whose highs are much more pronounced than its lows.

There’s a melancholic elegance in Amidon’s pieces that express nuanced forms of sadness, and as demonstrated in songs like Short Life and Pharaoh, sublime chamber arrangements spruce up those feelings of sorrow.

Silence Yourself is more than just this year’s best debut record so far and even more than one of the best records of any kind this year. It could be the closest post-punk has come to full-bodied artistry since Interpol took their own post-punk influences and gave us Turn On The Bright Lights all those years ago.