There's a lot of room for your ear to roam on Mines, and it reveals itself over the course of a few listens as a very satisfying album worth exploring and revisiting.

Wild Beasts have remained an act with no intention of blending in. Smother, their third full-length, is just as the above quote promises: completely uncompromising. And that's why it succeeds.

The number of actually transcendent live records--whether recorded at a radio station or in an arena--is almost laughably small considering how many exist. This one's a gift, the second LCD's given us this year.

We know that that the DFA can do dynamic mutation as well as anyone, but Chapter Two reveals that it's their quest to become pioneers of the hypnotic groove that is the more seductive.

The Dark Horse shares [the debut's] deliberate sense of pacing, precious attention to detail and hermetic sound-world atmosphere; the difference here is that almost every song builds to a crucial moment where the Besnards bravely step out of the shadows, and in the process, transform from being a merely good band to a great one.

Ambition can just as easily manifest itself as a desire to create a relentlessly catchy, "classic indie" album in your own dorm room, and if that's what Surfer Blood set out to do, Astro Coast succeeds wildly.

While there are a few selection missteps overall, the first disc in particular makes for a great initiation to the Radio Dept.'s previous work. And that there is the opportunity to re-introduce this long undervalued band is something to cheer in itself.

The chain reaction these nine songs generate together produces enough fog and smoke to keep the spell going strong—and to keep whatever secret she’s trying to tell us just on the other side of the speakers.

Unlike Oldham's best work, The Letting Go doesn't pull you into its own emotional world; it doesn't ask much, and you're free to take as much from it as you'd like.

Where Saba’s previous music dwelled at length on emotions and scenes, these songs whisk past like a montage. No ID’s liquid production drives that fluidity. Backed by Saba and Pivot Gang members like Daoud and daedaePIVOT, he layers in drums, keys, and vocal loops that interlock and split apart like twisting gears.

Even if Diamond Rings' rapidly evolving aesthetic has already moved beyond Special Affections' bedsit R&B, the album still stands as an exemplary model of how one can live out blinged-out fantasies on a cubic zirconia budget.

The one negative of this project is its inaccessibility. Rhino only manufactured 1,969 box sets; each one retails at $799.98, and there are no plans to make the 38-disc version available on streaming services. For those with smaller budgets, the 10xCD version is still worthwhile. ... What the 38-disc box set succeeds at is not just righting the record, or presenting a mammoth set of live songs, but in creating an environment that effectively transports the listener to that muddy pasture in upstate New York.

Practically nothing on the album feels strained, and even less seems compromised.

They manage to string a staggering number of tightly packed nuggets of melody and texture into 46 minutes.

Now, this is a pretty straightforward album, so the possibilities do exhaust themselves somewhat by the end; there's only so much that can be done with this sort of visceral, no-frills rock.

Like a Ribbon is lush and engrossing, the rare Big Indie debut that outstrips its own hype.

Taylor’s graceful accountability and invigorating songcraft makes him an anomaly. His own dose of perspective arrives at the end of the plainly gorgeous Heart Like a Levee.

Throwing Muses are the counterpart-- or maybe the antidote-- to the driven, enraptured solitude of [Hersh's] solo material; they deliver a release and an excitement that's been missing from her work for years.

As sharp, urgent, and exploratory as they’ve ever been, The Dusk in Us is quintessential Converge, given the grand new purpose of salvation.

Crucially, with his beats less busy, it has left James more room to focus on spine-tinglingly rich tunings and timbres. And that’s where Cheetah really stands out: To sink into it, preferably on good headphones or better speakers, is to be immersed in woozy, viscous frequencies far more vivid than you’ll find almost anywhere else.

Forfolks, however, never feels showy or vain; it’s joyous, Parker delighting in the ideas he unearths as he plays along with the sound of himself. The results often feel dazzlingly complicated, as though these songs were built through some greater studio sorcery, like cobbling together various takes or recording the layers one at a time.

X 100PRE reveals an artist both proud of and unafraid to tell the truth about where he comes from.

[The songs] are peculiarly absorbing, and they only grow more so with repeated listening.

Rainforest feels like an artist confidently finding his niche.

This is functional music that highlights the simple pleasure of artfully arranged sound, the kind of gorgeous and evocative record that fills up the room and shifts your perception for 37 minutes and then brings you gently back to the surface.

Beneath all of this nihilism is some real skilled songwriting that includes complex rhyme schemes, swaggering rhythms, and stunning harmonies.

A riveting debut from two artists whose music pokes you in the side as often as it makes you move.

As for his lyrics, it's wrong to call them stream-of-consciousness, since that implies Wolf is a poor self-editor; nothing about Alopecia is lazy. It's more like 5 a.m. journal entries cut up and turned to collage.

DeMarco writes about life--both the heavy moments and the mundane ones--with economy and newfound grace.

Group Sounds is nonstop, straight-ahead rock for the most part, more reminiscent of Scream, Dracula, Scream!, but with enough flourishes to keep things from sounding too monochromatic.... Right through to the end, every song on Group Sounds is solid, pure, high-octane Rocket fuel.

They're more interested in following intuition than patterns, and II is way more physical than mental. Its density, pace, and exuberance are, for anyone that likes to get lost in sound, basically a sonic amusement park.

For a band spooked by their status as role models, Touché Amoré still can’t help but lead by example.

Red Moon in Venus luxuriates in the most sublime sounds of Uchis’ career. It’s a fantastical record, illustrating lush, lovesick vignettes and high-femme escapism without relinquishing control.

To make mood music out of already gloomy materials is easy; on Wonderland, Demdike Stare spin the most unexpected stuff into music for haunted dancehalls, and the results are wickedly compelling.

If this is your first exposure to Clogs, you've picked a fantastic time to become acquainted.

It's his most focused album, with every song's tone easily flowing into the next, and it's also one of his best.

It's true that destruction can be an act of creation, but the same goes the other way around: In building, Villalobos, with his big ideas and cheerful disposition, tears down.

NakedSelf once again finds Matt Johnson in his element, tackling issues of alienation, global corruption, and urban squalor and decay with potent, more succinct lyrics and some of his most affecting melodies in ages.

Holopaw's cover art and Depression-era script logo might be indie-folk standard issue, but the music contained within is a refreshing, effective new use of the boundaries: a wood-paneled Powerbook.

He’s strip-mined one thing he loves in order to drive another. In doing so, he’s found a wonderful, unexpected kind of combustion.

Although its best moments don't reach quite the altitudes of his prior releases, Skyscraper National Park, as a whole, is the most complete and coherent album in Hayden's catalog, a delightful listen from track one through track eleven.

By remembering the pop elements of the source material he uses to construct his tracks, and incorporating that FM-dial ear for melody into even his most adventurous collage projects, Forrest takes the mashup form beyond gimmickry into an entirely new, refreshingly listenable, excitingly shameless realm.

Taken as a whole, the songs on Bobby Jameson play with a startling intimacy. These are among Pink’s simplest, sharpest compositions, sprawling with an intuitive charm.

The word "Hypnotic"'s overused, but the band's spatial know-how and rigorously muted flourishes are more than deserving of the accolade. It's well-deep, blossoming ambiance.

The Antlers won't hold your hand through Burst Apart, which will inevitably make it more of a grower, but stick around -- it's all the more affecting for how it allows you to pick your own stumbling, lonely path.

Opens with a six-track attack that's rare for any genre, especially contemporary R&B.

It's a welcome reminder of this band's current status, because one hopes that Do Whatever You Want All the Time isn't an end, but another new beginning.

What gives this record its internal order, and makes it stand out over previous laptop explorations of immense record collections, is the simplicity of the other genres that he dabbles and draws upon to flesh out the beat.

They're pop in perhaps the most literal sense of the word-- their songs POP out at you, glowing bright blue-green like a Nike tracksuit.

Florine feels bracingly intimate and original, in its hieroglyphic way.

A sprawling, complex, and fascinating document of American indie rock.

Some of the playfulness of their early days is missed on Best of 00-10, the loose analog charm of their earliest songs would have given the collection a little more lift. But these 17 songs collectively are a hell of a strong argument for why you're still reading about Ladytron now instead of, say, Miss Kittin or Fischerspooner or Peaches.

Most so-called "cinematic" records earn that distinction due to some quirk of reverb or their use of space, but the Long Blondes only have modern England's typically confined, 17-year-old-from-Doncaster guitar-dudish sound. Instead, it's the songs themselves, their narratives, and their characters that speak to the band's widescreen ambitions.

Special Moves--which pulls at least one track from all six Mogwai albums, but no more than two--strategically positions the band's latter-day material among the old warhorses to build a set list that gradually intensifies and explodes like the band's best instrumental epics.

When these scientists hit on the right formula of slow-burning anticipation, the bombast that follows has the profundity of a drug-induced epiphany. Previous Wolf Eyes records have struck that magic balance during individual songs or sides, but none have stretched it over an album's length like Human Animal.

Pulp have pulled off yet another remarkable reinvention of their sound and outlook, while simultaneously making their most organic album since their full-length debut, It, was released almost two decades ago.

Sure, 90 minutes of free-flowing instrumental workouts may seem daunting to more casual Can fans who prefer their kosmische musik spiked with more digestible doses of “Vitamin C.” But devoted heads who surrender to the tide will no doubt emerge from Live in Stuttgart 1975 with another Can maxim in mind: I want more.

Even at its most ominous, though, the album never loses its verve or vitality. It's just one quick hit after another, a succession of aural whippets that last long after the record's over.

The common thread [of the new mix] is that the guitars are cleaner, the vocals are clearer, and previously buried fills come to the surface. ... Two outtakes, both of which landed on the expanded Don’t Tell a Soul, are the best thing about the sessions by far—the countrified “Portland,” which is fantastic, and the jittery rocker “Wake Up.” ... For anyone skeptical of Don’t Tell a Soul, the most convincing argument for their vitality is the live shows from this period. ... The [live] setlist is stunning.

Their music stands now as both a crucial piece in the roiling Seattle scene and as part of a noise-rock continuum that includes like-minded outfits such as Scratch Acid and Butthole Surfers.

Even if it won't hit you on the first listen, Bazooka Tooth remains a strong outing from one of underground hip-hop's most talented, thanks to its unprecedented wealth of lyrical depth and truly individual production style.

The three best songs here—“Another Lifetime Floats Away,” “It’s Here,” and “Will You Dare”—are the most unguarded statements Eisenberg has ever made. Each one, at its core, is a paean, a devotional—a love song.

Lady Walton contains the most accomplished and varied music Clogs have recorded to date.

Never mind the retro-gazing moniker-- The Week That Was is a band you need to hear now.

While lacking the close mic’d intimacy of her early work, Out in the Storm is equally immersive, with songs that play like fiery exorcisms.

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.

A Brief History of Love is a study in the enormity of sound doing just that, each reverbed kick drum, phasers-on-stun guitar, and wastrel vocal refuting the idea that you need to talk about the passion to express it.

This one is just a little tiny bit less perfectly imperfect than [Transfiguration of Vincent], but it's still got all the warmth and gentle disorganization of its predecessor-- with a few more oomphy tracks standing in for Tranfiguration's most introspective meditations.

Do You Like Rock Music? doesn't fail miserably--which at least might have been more interesting--but disappoints gently.

Strange Keys is generally relentless and tremendous, burying its themes in kaleidoscopic distortion. It's as if the comparisons that Bower has earned in the last seven years--Merzbow, Wagner, second wave black metal--finally took magnificent hold.

So perhaps it's about time that we stop calling Cex a wunderkind: He may be barely 25 but with the introspective yet exuberant Maryland Mansions, he's officially grown up, establishing himself as a performer to be taken-- yikes!-- seriously.

YOB’s latest record stands as one of their densest, so it's good that the band's greatest asset, their impeccable pacing, remains intact.

Love Letter is mostly poised, polished, and lush beyond belief.

One of its most charged and inspired records in years.

Consistently excellent and deserves to be heard by fans of 70's glam and shoegazer alike.

A pristine dream magic seems to inform Apologues--the fluid serenity of the music projects a lulling, murmured unreality that suggests that the album is a figment of the listener’s imagination even while it is in play.

Dead Deer is druggy and sexy and arty and pretty, but never pretentious.

What Press Color does is distill our collective excitement and unceasing wonder at a scene that’s almost four decades old.

In a year where the likes of Kanye and Trent Reznor have reached deep into the dark circuitry of the Wax Trax back catalog to revive the corpse of industrial music, Factory Floor’s relentlessness suits the present moment.

Home, Like NoPlace Is There is emotionally relentless, but a relentlessly catchy record as well.

Live Forever argues that life is not some march toward a peak, but a closed loop—one that’s tighter if you’re Black. The brilliance of Bartees’ debut is in how it carves out an expansive space within that loop.

The new album trades in queasy atmospherics for a more robust rhythmic attack, with Tagaq feeding off the band’s energy as much as vice versa.

It’s a complex portrait of a man in transition. The album is an evolution for an artist who still may have his best in store.

Scuba's music has always sounded wonderful--warm, rich, enveloping, ultra-vivid--but Claustrophobia feels like a major step up; the sonics are simply dazzling.

This flow between music and message animates the record and complicates its plainspoken lyrics.

Born Again Revisited is a deeply rewarding record and a worthy entry in a pretty stellar catalog.

This cerebral/visceral friction is one of the most satisfying elements of Black Hippy, and Ab-Soul arguably carries it the furthest of the group.

Good emo music makes you feel their feelings; great emo music makes you see the world through their eyes. MacDonald’s lyrics render images like chewing on bread that’s turned to flesh, peeling a drunk driver off the asphalt like roadkill, feeding nickels and dimes to ducks in a pond.

A Morrissey record you can dig into without caring much about the man's lyrics.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs still create great, compelling pop-rock, largely because of the way the songs themselves are organized, with conventional verse-chorus structures repeatedly eschewed in favor of detours, miniature grooves, and lengthy asides that produce the sensation of a band and a singer impulsively following their own emotional whims.

The tracks, and the arid stare their grooves perpetuate, are like crop circles drawn into the UK hardcore continuum: functionally new, eerily primeval.

Throughout, Sport is crude, queasy, sometimes shockingly ugly, and often quite funny, in a madcap, slightly threatening way. It thrills and it mystifies in equal measure.

It includes some of the most striking writing of Ka’s career—the knottier verses and the blunter ones, too—and is utterly immersive, whole lifetimes of fear and pain and death and regeneration condensed into 33 minutes.

More than simply an expression of her music, Time (The Revelator) is a glimpse into the artist's personality.

I doubt Low fans who've held on this long will rebel against these new textures, more the way they're employed-- the band has added an almost disconcerting levity, and subtracted the gentleness.

Manners is deceptively consistent even beyond its singles--if you like one Passion Pit song, you'll probably like them all.

One of the year’s best and most urgent metal records, Head Cage is a fitting counterpart to another essential bit of 2018 heaviness, Thou’s Magus.

There are times where DIIV threaten to become too in love with their own sound, particularly toward the middle. But beyond lending Is the Is Are a necessary heft to back Smith’s claims, these songs are convincing portrayals of checked-out living.