At times his vocals sound too distant in the mix and overpowered by guitars (No Device), but singing any more forcefully would undermine the peculiar comfort that most of the record maintains.

Each song has bite, but every sound on Soul Power is kept fairly mellow.

Despite Rae Sremmurd's rep for hyped-up celebration songs, the album's best moment comes when Lee and Jimmy eschew cranking up for something closer to cutesy romance.

As Stuart Murdoch sings with literary precision about illness, isolation and striving for human connections, their digressions into club music and klezmer feel as restorative as they do celebratory.

The 10 songs are tense and commanding, loaded with nervy post-punk charge, ricocheting rhythms and electric guitars both zippy and busy and wild and bucking.

Absent Fathers doesn't offer much in the way of answers--it's more a snapshot of a process.

The songcraft is high, balancing repetitive groove with dynamic surprises. There's so much variety here, from icy Joy Divisionesque excursions (Silhouettes) to Guided by Voices-through-an-echo-chamber mood (Continental Shelf) to melodic hooks (Bunker Buster) to howling post-punk fury (Death). It lends huge excitement to the project.

Where the album falters is in his overly ambitious and affected vocals, which fall on the waifish end of 80s new wave.

Mangan's emotive voice is as assured as ever, and his socially conscious lyrics penetrate. Add in a stark, disillusioned tone and sluggish tempos and it makes for an overly serious listen.

On first listen, the album as a whole seems repetitious--there aren't any 12-minute odysseys like on breakout album Person Pitch--but its diversity reveals itself with multiple listens.

While some songs veer too far into slick pop territory, most are balanced.

This festive album of mostly original songs has something for everyone.

Consistent, yes, but not the king yet.

Had The Pinkprint included 12 songs rather than the extended version's 22, it could have been a classic.

Once again, he brilliantly distills years spent studying the arrangements and analog recording techniques of that music into a personal style that carves out its own space between rhythm and melody.

Finally, a top 40 album that attempts to capture the restless energy of recent times and spit it out in a way that doesn't just feel good, but honest, too.

They certainly keep up appearances on their 15th album, their troubles not for a second interfering with these 11 songs, the longest of which lasts three minutes and 41 seconds.

That free-form fury is a critique of the tendency to look for precise meaning in music, thereby devaluing the visceral and the emotional. But the most menacing part is the words uttered at the beginning.

It's easily one of the most beautiful, subdued folk records of the year.

It's a cool premise, but despite the ambition and guest musicians on each song, Sonic Highways sounds like every other Foo Fighters record.

When they let their experimental impulses coexist with their pop instincts, the results are strong enough to overshadow the occasional misstep.

Still their strongest effort since The W, but Wu-Tang Clan exhaust their fans' good will and nostalgia without a classic to show for it.

Even though the songs are full of warm analog synths, a strong sense of cold melancholy and anxiety permeates even the most upbeat electro-pop moments.

Each performance bursts with unadulterated emotionalism as Hegarty's voice swoops and swells around the impeccable-sounding band.

Altogether, it offers a glimpse of what Parquet Courts could turn into. The future looks promising.

The quieter moments that give his voice less to compete with are more interesting.

The deeply personal and overtly political are indivisible on Give My Love To London, an album that is harrowing in its bluntness and beautiful in its subtleties.

Building on the connections between slow hip-hop rhythms and double-time footwork beats, Archives is a further exploration of some of its predecessor’s roughly sketched-out ideas.