Dawn Chorus is most compelling when the production does the bulk of the talking.

He has every right to experiment and try on sounds as he sees fit. Hit-Boy attempts to balance this out by heading in the opposite direction so fully that it occasionally overwhelms Benny’s personality. ... Burden of Proof is undoubtedly the next step in Benny’s evolution, even if the music doesn’t always match the vision.

Gumbo, along with his entire body of work, is evidence that there’s still new ground to be tread and fresh sounds to explore within rap itself. The blend of spices might be Nudy’s own, but the flavor of Gumbo is unmistakably hip-hop.

It’s a collage of striking songs from a band that may have shied away from making some tough calls about what to cut and what to lean into during the long process of self-recording.

His latest album, a collaboration with the saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and the violinist Ros Stephen, is again evasive, seeming at once defiantly old-fashioned and defiantly quirky.

Like Elaenia, Nothing Is Still invites the listener recalibrate their expectations of the artist behind it. Vynehall is more than a producer with a great ear for texture and a nostalgic streak--he’s a storyteller, one who demands and merits our full attention.

His candor can sometimes obscure this essential fact, but his forthrightness underscores the emotional clarity of Reunions.

On the more diaristic songs, the narratives aren’t as vivid, the rapping isn’t as nimble, and the songs lack momentum.

Without sacrificing her ear for detail, she’s engineered an album that sparks a bodily pleasure alongside her music’s continued cerebral delights.

My biggest complaint is that De-Loused in the Comatorium just isn't fun.

Blank Realm is still bent on mixing the diamonds with the rough, and on Grassed Inn that particular swirl is at its most intoxicating.

Now we have Father of the Bride—a looser, broader album than Modern Vampires, the great sigh after a long holding of breath. There are still moments of conflict, but in general, you get the sense the band is just relieved to have run the gauntlet of their existential doubts and come out relatively unscathed, grateful to be here.

The fans who'll get the most from it emotionally will be those who are already invested in its singer and his honesty.

Minekawa reveals herself as yet another artist helping to forge the path for interesting and exciting musical landscapes.

Those expecting the dense, powerful, and insistently upbeat onslaught of Mass Romantic will no doubt react to Electric Version with some degree of initial disappointment. Repeated listens, however, reveal that Electric Version not only displays Carl Newman's brilliant and unique pop sensibility, but allows it enough space to reveal previously obstructed layers of emotional depth.

The cleverness, technical mastery and ping-pong stereo effects are all there in spades, but this time they're all much more mellow than you'd think. Listen right and you'll hardly notice them, because you'll be wrapped up by the thing I initially completely missed-- some of these tracks are just plain lovely as songs.

It's all extremely pretty, and without seeming completely manipulative or cloying. Black Box Recorder, however, are still a bit dopey when it comes to lyrics.

Secret South is a characteristically strong showing, but ultimately, it pales in comparison to its predecessors. The self-produced album retains the band's unique sound, but fails to measure up to the perfect match they found in guitarist John Parish for Low Estate's crisply rustic atmosphere. Even without any of the droning squeezebox ballads that accounted for Low Estate's few weak spots, it somehow lacks the momentum and fury that made that album such an engaging listen.

On Doomsdayer's Holiday, the haze is even thicker, and the album represents a sort of endpoint to their journey: taking place in utter blackness, it is their most alluring and impenetrable trip yet.

It's not that these 40 minutes are too extreme or overly dependent on too many ideas; it's that Dragged into Sunlight haven't found out how to synthesize their best impulses and broad ambitions into a whole.

Listening as Prass struggles through the muck, what’s clear is that The Future and the Past is really about the present--about finding ways to push through each day without giving over to despondency. This ship may be going down, but these songs are another set of buoys fighting to keep it afloat.

This tune-up album, at the very least, restores the underlying feeling of his signature stuff. But there, too, lies its flaw: it’s a hollow effort lacking in any real distinguishing characteristics. The album never becomes more than the sum of its sounds.

On Wahre Liebe Roedelius is able to conjure many different moods without deviating from the round, bell-like tones of the Farfisa, an instrument he returns to after years of primarily working with acoustic piano and digital processing.

ALPHABETLAND is a return to the X of the early 1980s.

Rose’s voice is as pure and light as ever, but the most inspired part of This Ain’t the Way is how the album repositions that quiet register as silent rage.

Despite its density (they fit worlds into just nine songs), the album remains exciting and accessible, albeit highly sobering.

That tension between conception and execution makes all the good energy of Sunshine Rock feel hard-earned and genuine; scars and all, it’s the sound of somebody who has weathered battles and worked to survive.

As always, that mystery resides in the sounds he manipulates. No one else sounds like Phil Elverum.

To Whom This May Concern might feel scattered to those wanting her more characteristic, sensuous R&B. But the album does a good job of flaring in different directions while keeping close to Scott’s artistic core.

The songs on Hadreas' full-length debut are eviscerating and naked, with heartbreaking sentiments and bruised characterizations delivered in a voice that ranges from an ethereal croon to a slightly cracked warble.

Overgrown is not as wall-to-wall great as his debut, but fans of the first LP will still find much to admire.

The album cuts through a world of chatter and distraction because it practices what it preaches, transmitting its message directly through the primal, bone-rattling force of its songs.

Despite a culminating victory lap in which riffs from the group’s past albums come back for a curtain call, the album doesn’t feel like a nostalgia trip. Instead, it’s a consolidation of the strengths that this band has been amassing over its long life.

That ecstatic sense of possibility—of being many things at once, of following your impulses in all directions, all the time—is the animating force of Virgin.

Musically, Nicolay's in his comfort zone, making the sort of album he'd been more or less heading towards since "Connected," an album that, while certainly rooted in hip-hop, knocked like a pillow fight.

These tracks... show an entirely new side of Wolf: one that finally puts impeccable pop songcraft ahead of lachrymose keening.

It sounds different from the old version of the band, but not that different.

Past Life Martyred Saints is a fiercely individual record, made by a musician with a fearless and courageous approach to her art. Crucially, the desire to let such raw emotion out in song never feels forced.

Less an exhumation than a celebration, The Seeger Sessions is the best proof we've got that America's folksongs are also our finest artifacts.

The raincloud hung heavy over her past four records; on Engine of Hell, it breaks open. The personal tragedies that come pouring out are scarier than any of the grisly apparitions she used to conjure.

You can trace a path from the band’s beginning to this point, but that fact doesn’t make this latest step any less impressive; even longtime fans might be tempted to do a double take in admiration, as if to ask, “Wait, this is the same band from back then?”

In the absence of a rare-cuts windfall, Vol. 2’s most novel attraction is a series of one-on-one interviews conducted with each individual band member over the course of 1965-66, a good year removed from their most breakneck period.

Lindstrom knows all the right moves to give his own brand of spacey disco an air of transcendence, but the result feels so effortless that his facsimile and the "real thing" become indistinguishable--a fake so real it's beyond fake.

Massed vocals and backing harmonies are two of the few things the National have added to their sound since their last album, and though Alligator is satisfying and engaging, it's not quite as bracing as their stellar sophomore outing, 2003's Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers.

The Two Worlds finds ways to communicate between these modes [fantasy and emotional urgency], interior and exterior, resulting in a portrait that feels full and honest.

Like Ball, Davisson seems like a humble man attuned to something far beyond his station, and they share with Bowles and MacKay a belief that a homespun melody or a gently plucked theme or even just two instruments ringing out together might give anyone in earshot a glimpse of God. That’s an awful lot for any album to hold, and at times the music bows under such weight, but Keys never sacrifices its life-size scale nor its humility.

As captivating as Cain’s mood-setting can be, Preacher’s Daughter is such a slow burn you periodically wonder if the flame is even still lit.

Given the album’s length and density, it resists close reading; if there is an organizing logic here, it is not readily apparent, although brushed drums and choppy vocal effects provide thematic through lines, and the occasional recurring motif lends a sense of narrative cohesion. But the music often unspools with natural ease.

Disappeared rewires many of Deerhunter’s aural hallmarks. The band has often sounded either gently sprawling, as on Fading Frontier and Halcyon Digest, or aggressive and claustrophobic, as on Monomania. Here, they manage to hit both moods at once.

Casey, having already plumbed the depths of sorrow, still has room to go deeper as Protomartyr’s sound continues to become much richer and more rewarding.

Ada Lea vacillates between timidity and aggression, are what make what we say in private so exciting. But it’s Levy’s willingness to wrestle with her own vulnerability that leads the album to its highest peaks.

What Cave World lacks in bite, it tends to make up for in groove. The production is cleaner than Viagra Boys’ first two albums, bringing their ever-present drive to the fore.

Mostly, though, the shock of Funeral Mariachi is that it's the friendliest record in their catalogue. It doesn't have the twitching intensity of a lot of their other work--that's both an asset and a deficit--but they couldn't have made a sweeter farewell.

A compact reminder of the overwhelming force carried by Antony's best music.

Even if Hate stands as their most visionary statement, Universal Audio has a subtler strength.

II Trill is a solid and occasionally great record, an album more directed toward car-stereo utility than bedroom contemplation.

La Forêt... backs off dramatically from the pop side of Fabulous Muscles to expand upon its quiet, murky dimension.

The tracks currently being dusted off in his archive, however, have so far been dependably strong, despite being mostly unfinished tracks of incredible musical variety.

Impossible Spaces isn't simply the most accessible and immediately rewarding album to bear Sandro Perri's name, it also serves as a handy musical roadmap to its maker's sinuous creative course.

by focusing on the range of music inspired by this movement, Listen, Whitey! allows so much of the confusion, outrage, anger, emotion, humor, and even optimism of this music to resonate anew.

Ultimately, Necrocracy is one more in a long line of killer albums, and thanks to its dynamic range, clever riffs, and newfound melodic focus, is likely to ensnare the youth of today the same way its spiritual predecessor lured in the young heshers of old.

Da Mind Of Traxman Vol. 2, for the most part, is a stellar collection of songs--playful, ballsy, informed by the past but living very much in the present--but they’re songs that relate more as cousins than as siblings.

A frequently gorgeous, sometimes roiling set that stands out in each artist’s catalog.

He delves deeper into his personal life more but he is just as sharp as been across his last handful of releases. It isn’t so much that these songs are better; they simply render a more complete picture of him, one he’s been working toward.

Marcielago serves as a capstone for Marci’s decade, a mix of evocative soul samples and stripped-down loops paired with his trademark gnomic flow.

This is a readymade soundtrack for humidity-choked summer nights spent getting up to no good and going crazy from the heat.

Halvorson is an inventive and generous arranger, organizing Amaryllis in such a way that it never feels like a mere vehicle for dazzling solos, though there are plenty of those. She has a painterly approach to sonority, attuned to all the rich colors at the ensemble’s disposal.

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.

The result is a meticulously crafted homage to the strobe-lit, chart-topping dance music of the 1990s and 2000s—though, at times, it misses some of the tension that made Romy’s songwriting with the xx so vital.

Lenderman and his band elevate his dreamlike narratives into something joyous, collective, and free.

Recorded with Gilla Band bassist Daniel Fox, Who Let the Dogs Out wisely leans on nosier elements when the subject matter gets earnest.

Despite its nonchronological sequencing and song-cherrypicking, it never really comes together as an album; it's more like "the many moods of Fucked Up," or, rather, their many variations on one mood.

Wakin on a Pretty Daze breezes past like a Klonopin dream, and radiates an easy confidence that is as rewarding to return to as a melody.

Williams revels in the comfort of rock’n’roll, encouraging her band to play loud even when they’re playing slow. .... There’s a casual, authoritative swing to their [the band's] performance that belies the stylistic range on the record; the songs touch upon different traditions, yet all sound of a piece.

Plenty of artists put their every fiber of being into a record, but there’s rarely the overt drive to exceed one’s greatness that’s so insistent, it threatens to earn indie rock's most unintentionally revealing slight: try-hard. For most bands, it's an epithet. On Nearer My God, Foxing flaunt it like an Olympic gold medal.

Segall makes quite an impression in half an hour's time, and Melted's the best foot he's put forward yet. It still seems like his best records are ahead of him, like he's still got a couple of things to nail, but as it stands, Melted could charm the sweat out of anybody.

It's a strange combination-- big, lush beats and stories about small victories-- but it turns songs that are celebratory of simple things (a girl sending sexy cell-phone pictures, visiting Paris for the first time) or full of thoughtful sentiments (supporting family, helping community) into something epic.

Panorama skillfully and subtly creeps towards resonance rather than catharsis, an approach that can make even their own colleagues sound like they’re trying to cheat towards the big release. Even when La Dispute rock, they do so like they’re trying to tiptoe on a frozen pond.

The introductory duo of “I Don’t Know How I Survive” and “Roman Candles” position Asphalt Meadows as a clean break from the slick competence of Kintsugi and Thank You for Today. ... A record that mostly satisfies through course correction.

Chin Up Buttercup is certainly an evolutionary leap for Austra, but it’s not a total departure.

The tinkering of the trim Spoon attitude has become the most engaging part of their latter-day career. For a band that seems built on a reliable formula, they remain full of possibilities.

Film of Life doesn’t quite break new ground for Allen, but it does offer a pretty solid and succinct demonstration of Afrobeat’s adaptability to changing times.

Even as it draws on new and old songs, 50 presents a startlingly current and nearly apocalyptic vision of America; it’s album full of brimstone and brine, perhaps more perfect for this moment in history than we’d like to admit.

Inferno shimmies with the vigor of a man who can keep this up so long as the tunes, one a year if necessary, keep coming. Just don’t press him. As “One Bird in the Sky” reminds listeners, “I eat only when I eat.”

Whether he's channeling the energies of John Fahey or Tom Petty or even Bob Seger, Smoke Ring makes clear that the end result is his alone.

If The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone fails to find the Apples branching into James Brown territory, it's still the band's most diverse outing, and debatably their finest. Wisely jettisoning the noodly experiments that made Her Wallpaper Reverie seem much longer than it actually was, the Apples turn their focus squarely back on the catchy song, with a more pronounced feel for instrumental variety.

The album crawls from the speakers like a stabbing victim and gives up a great moan; it's a difficult listen, but the rewards are great.

Murray Street is Sonic Youth's first successful convergence of envelope-pushing guitarwork and accessible songery since 1988.

While the band has a very developed sense of texture and sound, though, they rather desperately need to work on changing things up a bit more with regard to the songs themselves.

Neither the melody nor the ambience overwhelms the other. It's easy to hear the silky, billowy tones through the dying-battery distortion, but hard to picture what they'd sound like without it.

More often than not, they make the whole big mess work, even if they can’t make you care whether or not that damn boy even makes it out of the well.

Despite radiating a gentle, unassuming tranquility, Weft rarely bores.

All the Time is sincere so it doesn’t have to be deep—merely an invitation to look beneath the surface.

The album has a telepathic quality to it, like Sandy Denny working with Richard Thompson and John Wood on The North Star Grassman and the Raven, or Elliott Smith mind-melding with Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock for Either/Or. Lay’s lyrics find depth and meaning in everyday moments.

Sea When Absent has the quality of one of those spectacularly bright summer days when they color in everything seems a little over-saturated, and it induces the same dizzy, woozy feeling you get after staring directly at the sun.

Instead of following his darker impulses or fantastically out-there indulgences, Coombes plays it safe.

Strummer’s career was a testament for open borders and open hearts. While such compassion may have fallen out of fashion, Strummer’s messy, impassioned music now sounds even more urgent and necessary.

Herndon and her ensemble displace the human voice from its usual setting just enough that it startles the ear. But that displacement allows you to hear voices as if for the very first time, listening ravenously for proof that out there in the unknown, someone besides yourself exists and is singing.