It's more of a disappointment than a failure--at the very least, it might serve as someone's introduction to These New Puritans.

Though Dej's talent is walking both sides of that divide, she's a strong enough singer and rapper that it's great hearing her not stuck on instrumentals that straddle the genre fence.

An M-80 blown up in an empty clearing--explosive, fun as hell, but lacking a clear target to give it meaning.

K.R.I.T. Iz Here captures K.R.I.T. the same as he always is: perfectly likable, admirably sincere, predictably dependable and dependably predictable.

In almost sequential fashion, the 12 tracks here capture a band trying to wiggle out of an aesthetic straitjacket one buckle at a time, evolving from a band you think you’ve heard a million times before into one you feel like you’re just getting to know.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Being is most compelling as a pop album when it’s not trying to hook you; the rest is promising, but perhaps could do with a little more dementedness.

Man on the Moon II, the sequel, is still a bumpy listen, but it tweaks his formula enough to at least hint at the massive promise Kanye sees in him.

The meat of the album is generally good, with strong vocals and decent songs, but there's enough gristle on this record that it ultimately obscures some of the pleasures of listening to it.

The album helps prove he’s a lot more than just Drake’s patois advisor. Clothes that don’t quite fit his boss feel effortlessly tailored to Brathwaite.

If a girl group’s main job is to supply harmonies for days and kick out songs that roll around your head like marble, their debut album, Access All Areas, achieves it all with a decidedly R&B edge.

In the absence of a less effable genius, there's always elbow grease. Painting With feels, more than anything, like a kind of construction project: Each sound meticulously built and only faintly familiar, each second crammed with doodads, as though the band was worried either they or their audience might get bored.

This isn't a revolutionary album for Tobin but it's a lot of fun, and works surprisingly well on its own, given the stringent requirements it had to meet.

The Spirit still play hard-to-get, which helps to avoid any ridiculous moments on this polished sophomore effort, but they're often too stand-offish to even challenge the listener, let alone push the envelope that their influences have so neatly prepared for them.

certainly have the energy to go a little crazy musically; no one can say Monotonix lack physical effort on Not Yet. But to get people to care as much about listening to them as witnessing their live shows, it's time to work on the muscles of their imagination.

It's music you might hear in a CB2 furniture store-- languorous and luxurious in tempos and tone, but without any sort of sentiment outside of the swooning used to implant the idea in your brain that you might have sex or do drugs on that reasonably priced but fashionable couch.

Particularly hoisted onto such dense production, the hooks are so big, blunt, and persistent that even my four-year-old niece counts Foster the People as her favorite band. But on Torches that plays as a crutch as well as a strength.

Frustratingly, Trust Now doesn't advance on the better ideas from Shadow Temple, particularly the elements of dance music that occasionally surfaced.

When the recycled smoke clears, Little Barrie could use more songwriting help from their patrons (Moz, [Edwyn] Collins) and less hu-huh inspiration from Ocean Colour Scene's lobotomy-trad bong.

Perceived loss of self is a risk Desveaux herself takes in making music so largely bereft of easy cultural or regional signifiers, yet the keenness of her songcraft makes these hard-won, universal sentiments far more rewarding than most lazy splashes of local color.

What makes Sun Bronzed Greek Gods work is the band's innate understanding of the power of a killer hook, and their ability to turn them out effortlessly on each of the EP's seven tracks. Sincere, sharp, catchy, funny--maybe these songs are all you need to know about Dom after all.

Everything is fast-moving, breezily entertaining, and patently ridiculous.

A lot of what's here doesn't really demonstrate what they can do to Philip Glass, but what Philip Glass has already done to them.

10 tracks of the kind of fierce, instrumental, no-bullshit techno that was as left-field popular in 1988 as 1998 as 2008. It's often witty, with a kind of robots-running-amok charm, and always attention-grabbing, at least in small doses. But friendly it ain't.

This is not by any stretch a turn toward the accessible, though there are a few great pop moments.

Truth be told, Pythons seem to feel pretty conflicted about itself: hooky, Weezer-ish guitar pop offset by desperate, discomfiting lyrics, fleeting hopes of reconciliation quickly dashed by heavy-hearted resignation.

I'm not entirely convinced that this is the best way to present these songs; the live-sounding recordings don't always bring out the full force of the material, and create a sense of continuity that is only undercut by the album's sequencing.

There's a proficiency at work on Feel Good that's undeniably impressive--it's an album full of musicians who can play and they approach this stuff with an endearing alacrity and a willingness to let Syd do more this time around that will pay dividends on future records. She's still got room to improve where lyrics are concerned.

They've finally happened on a formula that goes down smoothly for the length of a whole album, [yet] you may still find yourself missing the slick tricks and rough edges, all that dance-as-rock oomph and crap rapping, that once made them so endearing.

For the most part, though, Old Growth is exactly what this band has always done.

Carnell captures his negotiation with vulnerability in the process of its unfolding, and his relationship with his sonic language feels in-process as well--a generative path, to be sure, if sometimes an uneven one.

As generous as Guilt Mirrors might seem, it puts an oppressive onus on the listener to find it.

The title of this album is a challenge as well, as How to Dress Well’s modern masterpiece is conducted with the most eternal transparency--Krell asks “what is this heart” and lets you look right into his own.

Playboi Carti feels like a break from life, the soundtrack to a mindless good time.

More focused on offering Banhart's international and oddball bona fides than crafting songs that feel at all like home, What Will We Be finds Banhart in need of direction and editing.

This is a much leaner record that feels skillfully edited, with less use for indulgence and circular routes that don't lead anywhere.

The personalities on this album are so blank the songs may as well be performed by apps, and sung by Siri.

It’s hard to imagine the wild-maned early incarnation of Kings of Leon even wanting to listen to a band like this, let alone play in one. In truth, their current iteration doesn’t sound all that thrilled about it, either.

Slightly-too-frequent derivative moments can be mostly forgiven thanks to heaping helpings of youthful earnestness.

In a way, the album simply highlights many of the reasons why Orbital have been so beloved for the past decade-and-a-half.

Everyone on the album sounds engaged and happy to be in the room.

Barring a few notable exceptions, World Music Radio is so beholden to its premise—so enfeebled by Batiste’s insistence on universality—that it offers up few opportunities to get to know Batiste himself: his stories, his struggles, his euphoric victories and devastating losses. That absence leaves the record feeling hollow, like a pretty house where no one lives.

It makes sense that, at almost an hour, it wants to make good on fulfilling its feature-length ambitions, though even the most devout midnight movie synth-pop fans will still find it a bit much.

Nothing is left to chance here and both listener and artist are now free to imagine a 90 minute shot of perfection, where every transition is smooth and every dance step is executed with ease. We could all use those moments to dream of a unsullied world, if only for small stretches before getting back to the otherwise messy reality we’re in.

It sounds nice, but for a lot of its runtime, it also sounds like DeMarco is exhausted, like he’s ready to move on and try something new but is trapped in a creative holding pattern.

Electrified's rife with cardboard power chord progressions that should've been buried with all the other Nirvana aftermath opportunists.

Here, with one exception, they sound as though they're in soundtrack mode.

It's good for what it is--better than it needs to be, in fact--yet what it is is only a fraction of what it could be, if only Earle would stop trying to tidy up his inspirations.

Fantastic Playroom puts the emphasis on the content, not the trend, and in so doing makes a damn good case for post-punk's matriculation.

The second disc is ultimately little more than a curiosity for most-- and will no doubt be complete anathema for some-- but given that the entire package retails for a single-disc price, that's hardly a reason for a die-hard to opt out.

Beach House the EP succeeds where the mixtape Beach House 2 didn’t, further commercializing Ty’s sound without sacrificing the meat and potatoes of it, the foul-mouthed, sex-positivity of Ty’s quixotic bedroom capers and the production’s precarious balance between slight, house-informed ratchet music, trap and densely arranged traditional R&B sounds.

Tomorrow remains compelling through 'Static Object,' the record's closest thing to a Joy Division moment, but then limps out over its last third, mired in a tone/tempo bog that reveals the group's soft spots and least-appealing features.

PC Music is escapism whose primary effect is to remind us of what we’re trying to escape. We can’t trade body for avatar; we can’t displace longing forever. But for the space of an album--the sheer forcefulness of this intention smashed into a dizzy half-hour span--the sincerity within our most fundamentally artificial impulses comes calling.

Over the course of its thirteen tracks, Labyrinth loosely chronicles growing anxiety and its dissolution, peaking at “Mino” before settling into a level of serenity at “Bunny.” Kanda is most successful when he interrupts the album’s emotional arc.

The band's seemingly desperate to reinvigorate their cultural cachet, but Absolute Garbage's latter half emphasizes the depths they've fallen.

Lacking compelling hooks, a unifying mood, or a clear narrative, his debut is oddly inflexible and over-calculated.

These guys don't showcase a similarly thorough ear for songwriting, but as far as rock'n'roll feats of strength go, GB City, their debut, registers quickly.

Remember Me keeps its mood light and its stakes low, and in the process delivers a much needed breezy counterpoint to all the knotty, fatalistic shit coming out of HBK’s downstate peers that’s every bit as true to Cali as the gangsters and the thinkers.

His last record boasted that he was the Trouble Man, but with a clear mind and fewer visible burdens, Clifford Harris has produced his most thoughtful and substantive record in years.

Platinum Tips + Ice Cream presents a most curious contradiction: it’s a greatest-hits album designed for die-hards.

Two years after WOMB, the graves EP is firmly rooted in the same subtle reconfiguration that comes with each new Purity Ring release. Some songs even sound outright regressive, which isn’t always bad.

Forget Rockin' the Suburbs; the new Folds can barely rock an infant to sleep, though at one point he tries.

Whether you feel Photographing Snowflakes is a true return to form will depend on your reception of its six-minute title track centerpiece, on which Gough drowsily monotones his way through 10 increasingly whimsical verses with no chorus in sight; you'll either find its slow-motion, pedal-steeled sway charmingly wistful or tediously self-satisfied.

A Wonderful Beast shows again how Johnson’s voice adds layers of meaning to his music--and how he’s kept that skill fresh by finding new ways to deploy it, and new people to help.

Even though the tempo barely tops 100 bpm, all the far-flung fusions of Asian pop, Nigerian reggae, and Korean boogie leave Khruangbin’s set feeling a little like a busy touring schedule on the international festival circuit: both awe-inspiring and exhausting.

It might seem like faint praise to call Flesh & Machine Lanois’ best and most realized solo album, but it’s also one of the best ambient records of 2014--an endlessly inventive collection of songs built on odd, often lurid sounds and textures, somehow rough and gentle at the same time.

The problem is, he’s not a compelling enough presence to hold his own. Seven years into a career spent flipping familiar references into crowd-pleasing shapes, it’s still not clear who Alexander really is, beyond the sum of his influences.

As big as the heart-swelling hooks get, though, Fields are more memorable when they let their early-1970s folk ghosts creep into the corners of their songs like dusty cobwebs.

It’s too bad the rest of the record can’t match its ["Madonna"] energy. Still, even as a series of sketches and fragments, Ricky Music captures the essence of a breakup album.

It's the most solid Wu album in years.

While Ecstasy is essentially a concept album about the fantasies and realities of love and family, it includes as much sex, drugs, and rock n' roll culture as any of Reed's earlier work.

Closing In is a classic guitar-driven heavy metal record. It's a throwback to early 80s thrash, the era before speed often became a substitute for creative ideas.

While the taste level occasionally falters, this is a fine and detail-oriented album that should be taken with a grain of salt by fans for whom music must always, at some level, be a site of iconoclasm.

The album's best songs ("Tough Towns," "Fame II the Wreckoning," "Treat Em Right") temper the stream-of-consciousness and ramp up the atmosphere instead. When they resist the urge to troll (tell me a sardonic chorus that goes "Just like a tactical maniac/ I WANNA SHOOT YOUU" isn't trolling), Nevermen possess a deadly grace befitting Doseone's beloved hydra metaphor; for now, those necks are tangled.

Clinic play with a renewed sense of the same eerie raucousness that drew people to them in the first place; this would be an easy second-album recommendation for a new fan after they've initially discovered and absorbed "Internal Wrangler."

Mark Kozelek is a thoroughly modern album, one doesn’t separate the art from the artist but collapses the two completely.

RiotUSA, who’s produced most of Spice’s music since her 2021 debut, saves the lethargic midpoints with skittering tracks that sound like true collaborations as opposed to premade beats. In just six songs, the duo experiments with the past, present, and future of drill.

A goofy, sloppy mini-album, cramming familiar Weezer fuzz, stoned piano ballads, playful analogue synths, and misguided Bad Company references into a little more than half an hour.

By staying the course after their risky pivot rather than retrenching, they’ve done their heroes one better.

The occasional clumsiness of ACR Loco is easy to forgive in light of the album’s musical pleasures. After a deep dive into their back pages, A Certain Ratio found a powerful formula: paying heed to where they came from while keeping the door open for more all night parties in their future.

The negatives far outweigh the positives... sounds entirely manufactured.

You get the sense of an artist whose songwriting potential hasn’t been maximized, as Callinan’s got the vocal chops to keep Embracism interesting throughout.

Overstuffed and vaguely monotonous, the album could be easily whittled down to a single sequence of impressive songs; Instead, it's a meandering, occasionally moving series of mid-tempo laments, some more memorable than others.

It's tempting to write Stephens off as self-obsessed (which, in all fairness, places him in a long line of beloved singer-songwriters, from Bob Dylan on), but nonetheless, there are some compelling melodies here and more than enough commitment.

She spends so much time rambling about her pain that she never bothers even to try to make us feel it.

Where those newcomers privilege the nostalgic, indefinite, and noncommittal, the vets in SVIIB make a confident gesture towards the future.

Hurricane Bar has diluted the two things that made Mando Diao's first album distinct: immediacy and a sense of fun.

Mice Parade still finds Pierce working in a distinctive space, less jazzy than fellow post-rock vets the Sea & Cake but more atmospherically nuanced than typical acoustic singer/songwriters, but it's hardly the most appropriate release to bear the Mice Parade name.

There's a strong sense of someone not reaching particularly hard to get beyond their influences, but even that takes on an appropriate hue as the album progresses.

As the tempos stagnate towards the album’s back end, though, the affective force of her vocals loses potency—particularly on the pedestrian ballad "One Day"--and all the runs in the world can't distract from the sameness.

His latest album I Never Liked You—the title sounds like a breakup note passed in the back of a middle-school classroom—has the ingredients of a really good Future album but lacks the depth of one. It plays it safe by continuing to lean too hard on the schtick.

Romantic Music is at its best when its core sound inches into the ’90s and decks itself out in greyscale paisley, as if the Cure revisited their Faith-era gloom while trying to reckon with the melon-twisting rhythms of Madchester.

They have to be heard as part of a larger experiment, an inquiry into what happens when you reject the careerism at the heart of the pop machine and decide to go a quieter, less goal-oriented way.

At their best, Sweet Apple sound like they're trying to emulate the lovable-loserdom perfected by one of Petkovic's unsung Cleveland rock peers, Prisonshake. At their worst, such as "Goodnight", Petkovic goes on and on about him and his hard-luck honey while the group tediously grinds away in the background.

The problem with Untogether is that that Blue Hawaii occasionally get carried away with emphasizing and embracing disjointedness.

Plants and Animals have created something beautiful, even if it's not wholly original.

The whole record is a smart little left-turn for everyone involved. And if it's not quite an unalloyed triumph, I would totally play a video game with this soundtrack.

Though it is easy to grasp the broad appeal of Aiko’s music, it’s harder to decipher whether the songs are more appealing than the mere atmosphere they create.

Flimsy replicas of rock history.