In the sure hands of Pinhas and his comrades, Reverse is big enough to contain emotional multitudes.

Yuck are worth hearing not so much because of who they sound like, but what they've done with those sounds.

Further Out does successfully sound genreless despite being referential of a half dozen genres at once and is presented as a continuous listening experience.

For all of the uneven and uncertain moments of Cascades, it ends on a very high note, and “Landscape” is one of the most unequivocally gorgeous covers imaginable.

It’s clear Molina has grand ambitions here. But by confining them to a flyer-sized canvas, Kill the Lights becomes his first record that will have you not just marveling at everything Molina can pack into a 60-second song, but also lamenting what he might be leaving out.

That Campbell gets away with this broad palette is thanks to her empathetic arrangements and clever songwriting—the pocket chorus of “Ant Life” has the kind of understatement that only experienced writers would dare. She has a knack for making everything sound utterly effortless, as if the songs came to her during an afternoon nap.

The first Savage Mode didn’t become an ATL classic because of celebrity cameos or Billboard numbers; it was because Metro and 21 were at the peak of their powers, and only the producer is close here. 21 Savage is just along for the ride.

We can only hope that, as we enter the 2010s, Embryonic portends yet another new phase for the Flaming Lips--one that's equally as improbable and rewarding as the ones that have preceded it.

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

Pusha’s released a fair amount of music since joining Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music army three years ago, but My Name Is My Name is really the first release that delivers on the excitement initially engendered by the pairing.

The love in his music is as terrible as it is beautiful, a wrenching act of spiritual determination. Swans make this sound effortless, though, in a fitting end to a remarkable chapter of their career.

The album deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk, using found sound and his own sonorous, humming voice to tease out the complicated harmony of love and power at the heart of Kincaid’s short story.

There’s something special about Agora in how it integrates the immediate pleasure of his pop influences with the patience of his extended works.

On this album, every time it feels as if he’s close to breaking out—and the album’s best songs are replete with moments in which Bridges seems a hair’s breadth away from true passion—he recedes into the background and lets the technical expertise of his studio players, or that timeless-seeming studio itself, take over.

More than just chart her progression as a singer and songwriter, CYRK also sees Le Bon and her four-piece band developing into a crack psych-rock outfit that consistently leads the songs into unexpected places.

With one part arched eyebrows and droll wit, and one part melancholia and sharp social observation, the Sisters' debut is bursting with golden moments.

There are minor moments when Demo's slight r&b hooks miss and when Sway deviates too far from his good-natured strengths, but the lion's share is ace-- thoughtful but not pedantic, funny but not stupid, sincere but not treacly, realistic but not boring.

These songs sound full and finished even in their austerity.

It's clear that he's arranged them with an ear for future extended mixes in which the pop songs fall away, leaving only the shuddering metallic chassis underneath. Maybe, in retrospect, it's his judicious sense of balance that holds him back: a few more extremes, and his next work might really sing.

Williamson has evolved subtly over her two records, and Heart Song lifts her finally and definitely out of the world of “folk” into something deeper, more uncanny, and out-of-time.

On Dissolvi, Hauschildt breathes new life into the subgenre by taking it off the dancefloor--and reveals an unexpected facet of his artistry.

Hypersonic Missiles on its own is unsatisfying, and the overconfident presentation risks stifling his voice before he’s found it.

Darnielle finds equal grains of humanity and empathy in people crouched in the darkest corners and blinded by the brightest spotlights. It's not spirituality, escapism, or even optimism, exactly, that he's espousing--all you know is it's some kind of light.

Given the history he's forged with them and Ponytail, Wong likely won't sit still for long, and even the most rigid parts of Infinite Love suggest he's got a lot more ideas to draw on.

Oh Me Oh My manages to be Holley’s most approachable and most ambitious album all at once.

Even when their pendulum is swinging at a steadier pace, Thee Oh Sees still have the power to hypnotize--but from its twitchy jams to its blown-out power ballads, A Weird Exits’ most intriguing moments come when they break the trance.

If English Tapas at times veers towards formula, it’s at least Sleaford Mods’ own formula, and one that continues to serve them well.

Thirstier is exuberant and unguarded—the kind of music you make when you’re no longer testing out a new skin and instead reveling in the fervent joy that it brings you. At their best, these songs ride the contact high of a love so consuming that it shifts your worldview and makes you write songs loaded with screamable choruses and conventional hooks.

While the sounds of these bands will certainly be familiar to fans of Konono, there is a remarkable amount of variety on the disc.

Rather than lurching between styles, they mostly stick to whirlpooling guitars and a newfound supply of silvery electronics—sometimes pulsing, sometimes throbbing, sometimes seemingly on the brink of short-circuiting.

Here, the band comes into their own by applying their own inspiringly distinctive, bleakly appealing sensibility to whatever ideas happen to move them.

Barnes’ work is less concerned with trends or scenes than experiences and memories that everyone has had, regardless of what music they’ve listened to before. On that count, Engravings is a broad success.

Rather than protest the state of the world, Staples is toasting human endurance-- hers as well as ours.

In the end, the ambitious misfires and pre-coffee drowsiness of A Ghost Is Born don't ruin the album entirely-- they only serve as distractions that make it much more difficult to excavate the band's strengths from the surrounding detritus.

Crack-Up contains his most compelling writing to date because it’s so damn relatable in 2017--reacting and retreating inwards as people and institutions fail to meet the standards set in one’s head.

Roberts' voice sounds in fine fettle as well, and his reedy, keening brogue is the type of immediately distinctive instrument that is virtually impossible to imagine any listener accidentally mistaking for someone else's.

As long as McMahon is singing, Amen Dunes will never sound quite like anyone else--and on Love, he sings better and more ambitiously than ever.

Much of Try to Be Hopeful is spent digging into the complexities of self and society with a lens that is simultaneously critical, sensitive, and goofy.

Packs is a record by, of, and for New York City, espousing the romantic notion it will never change, no matter how much the world does.

It’s the impossible sweep and grandeur of the music that tells the real story, of how a rush of sound can take us somewhere we can’t explain.

We witness a more holistic and honest McGee, but it often comes at the expense of his gallows humor and it renders his narratives a bit tepid.

While The Dots is awash in dimensional, multicolored compositions, ALASKALASKA are able to pare things back when necessary.

Personal-feeling moments are the album’s strongest, and Superstar could use more of them. By clinging to the never-ending blank page of the bit, Rose winds up in shallower waters.

As Colourgrade highlights, love, family, intimacy are central to her everyday. Luckily, she allows us to partake in these familial affairs, and the outcome is spellbinding.

The mix-friendly extended intros and lengthy instrumental passages that dominate many dance albums are replaced here by songs that make their mark in four glorious minutes, then leave triumphantly. This relentless buoyancy ends up a little overwhelming, occasionally spilling into blandness over the album’s 12 songs. But this is easily overlooked among the spell of familiarity that TSHA has spun.

Eno’s written statement and the gravity of the subject indicate a grand departure, but FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE feels nonetheless like a continuation of his work since the mid to late 2000s.

Svengali feels like a milestone he’s been working toward for years—a smooth balance of anxiety and aggression, love and lust, confidence and vulnerability. Whether he’s pleading for love or manipulating it in the shadows, Cakes’s decisive presence ties it all together.

It’s an ambitious, uncanny, joyously unpredictable album that invites you to get lost within its house-of-mirrors design.

The music on HAGEN isn’t impenetrable, though it is gargantuan.

Although the album is the band’s biggest yet, with a cast of dozens including 13 violinists alone, it rarely feels bulky. Only the too-Arcade-Fire-for-comfort “Where Is Her Head” succumbs to grandiosity, prioritizing spectacle over purpose.

Rainbow is inevitably heavy with subtext and a need to prove something, especially on “Praying.” ... The title track, a collaboration with Ben Folds that blooms into a string arrangement, is an improvement, but still sedate. Thankfully, the rest of Rainbow lets Kesha be her usual OTT self.

His voice remains unmistakable, a walnut burl with cracks in the grain. The stentorian register that Cale used to wield with authority is absent. ... Cale’s here, once again and for now, still not making things easy on anyone.

At times New View can seem like a concept record detailing Friedberger's ambivalence about her main gift: spinning fragile memories and feelings into accessible songs.

You will find no comfort here. But it’s the job of an artist to capture something of the tenor of the age they live in, and Pastoral fits the bill: a mad jig along a cliff edge.

You've really got to fight to make your way into You're Better Than This, to carve out a little room amidst its unstable rhythms, its twining guitars, and Maguire's screams-of-consciousness. But that's precisely what inspires such devotion in Pile's growing cohort.

These two Ghosts volumes feel much more concrete and ambitious than the original quartet. Each has its own clear-cut identity, too: Volume five (Together) has a more hopeful sound. ... Maybe it’s because the tone better matches the animating spirit of the project, or maybe it’s simply because the pair have better ideas in a major key at the moment, but Ghosts V: Together is solidly the stronger of the two.

Like much of Sweetener, the song is musically sparse but encompasses a kaleidoscope of vocal tones. It is here, four albums in, that the true multitudes of her voice, and by extension herself, blossom.

This is probably the most uplifting album of his career... Exhilarating.

Like those first-wave rave producers, Arbez wants to have it all: to make listeners smile, shake their shit, and still walk away a little shaken by the music's intensity. Flashmob pulls off this near-impossible combo with more skill than even Vitalic's fans may have expected.

In its weaker moments, My Boy can feel like a collection of signifiers in search of meaning. ... Williams is at his best when he’s being gestural, as opposed to literal.

Her lyrics mostly return to subjects she has revisited so many times that, on Jellywish, she also reflects on her weariness of talking about them: grief, death, and mortality. Here, though, even these topics are part of the record’s life-affirming warmth.

If Mm..Food? feels merely good or somewhat inconsequential, it's because it is that way by design.

Villains isn’t always so smooth and several sections fall flat, like the staccato-spiked funk that surfaces midway through “The Evil Has Landed” or the melodically static refrains on “Fortress.” Nevertheless, the stalled moments don’t detract from the fun of the ride.

It's not fair to Forster, of course, who rose to the occasion with his warmest and most welcoming solo album. But even beyond the imherant emotional baggage, songs such as 'Did She Overtake You' or the slightly bombastic 'Don't Touch Anything' still sound like they could have used a pass through someone else's filter.

Victim of Love is ultimately a less successful record than No Time for Dreaming. For one, Bradley seems less connected with this set.

Digital Resistance might be older and wiser, a transmission from a lifer, but that not a quest out of which they’ve aged.

Albini’s live-off-the-floor, overdub-resistant recordings really bring a visceral punch to III’s jammier passages, ensuring that the moments where Moothart peels off for a solo are just as much a showcase for the rhythm section rumbling underneath.

Lif has managed to transcend the gimmicks and wankery that generally mar this kind of grand opus, and emerge with his strongest offering yet.

By simply playing by the rock 'n' roll rulebook-- whose article 17, section 4 strictly dictates that ego, excess and publicity stunts are to take complete precedence over, you know, songs-- Penance Soiree is one of the better straight-up records you're bound to hear from the genre all year.

A shockingly insightful and resonant look at the workings of a musician generally more given to hiding behind absurdly twisted turns of musical phrase than letting us in on the inner-workings of his mind.

The beats are just fine, but they lack the risk or innovation that could potentially make them truly engaging.

Its six songs shine just as bright as those on Talk Tight, but they cast longer, darker shadows.

There's definitely a lot to like throughout this disc; the band has boatloads of talent, and the eclectic spread gels much better than you'd expect.

It's a long glorious exhalation of energies not actually dissipated, as it seemed for a while, but only multiplying in force under suppression.

The Omnichord Real Book is no less assertive, yet feels energized by grace and understanding.

Bolstered by Jones’ increased visibility and a newly varied instrumental palette, We’re Not Talking stands as proof that speak-singing still has some life left in it for a new generation of indie rockers.

Even if it doesn’t have the same cultivated mystery or incapacitating demands of Agaetis Byrjun or ( ), Kveikur is every bit a return to form, tapping into its predecessors’ bottomless emotional wellspring for a Sigur Rós album that can be listened to casually or intensely.

Though repetitive, the record is consistently engaging, with plenty of distinct highlights.

Caprisongs is the sound of twigs in the driver’s seat as she traverses her own curiosities and instincts; there is no man looming over the music, no weighty public narrative dictating its terrain. It is intrepid and light, the image of a woman attuned to planetary alignments but casting her own fate.

The result is some of the sharpest, most clear-eyed songwriting to date. Despite the Day-Glo exterior, Pure Music largely operates in a lyrical mode born out of the group’s time as a more conventional guitar-driven project.

The album radiates a deep appreciation for the communities and history behind the global rise of dance music—and, as WITH A VENGEANCE’s title implies, a successful campaign to enshrine SHERELLE in its ranks.

Tranquilizer is the most immediately pleasurable Oneohtrix Point Never album in some time.

She has a lot going on up there, and she seems to feel a responsibility to sort through it all. An impatient conversationalist might prod her to just spit it out. On her most direct and brash album yet, Twelve Nudes, Furman does exactly that, and spits in a few faces along the way.

An astonishingly good late-period record from Of Montreal that's as uncomfortably savage in its depiction of breakup psychology as it is relentlessly catchy.

Nothing about Devotion feels like a burden. Instead, it’s so personable and candid that it feels like a privilege to spend a few minutes hearing what Tirzah has to say, imperfections and all.

While Womack does his best to step up to his alien surroundings, he can't help but sound like an out-of-place guest on his own album.

As important questions about music's worth in the age of free continue to swirl around him, Sufjan's still combating instant-gratification culture the best way he knows how.

For all its disjointedness, the album never wanders more than a few inches away from the sublime. It’s a document of a band knocking loudly on the door of greatness.

True Hallucinations is ultimately a triumph of focus and discipline.

That the songs can sound enormous while maintaining this kind of person-to-person intimacy is Jepsen’s particular talent.

On Vibras, he’s poised to take his place on the global stage—mi gente in tow.

Most of the set’s first disc comprises recordings made during sessions for 1983’s Star People, my pick for Miles’ best comeback-era record. However, all the studio tracks presented here are previously unreleased, so fans have plenty of incentive to investigate. ... Disc three contains a July 1983 live show that occurred during a break in the Decoy sessions and is the highlight of the collection. ... The alternate mixes and full studio session versions on this set are solid, if not particularly revealing.

Anderson finds flashes of beauty even when she seems to be casting about for something to say; were she a less graceful guitarist, this stretch might derail Still, Here’s momentum entirely.

It all amounts to a constructed world that sounds outré at first but winds up being a startlingly astute reflection of our own as you settle into it.

This is music that digs deeper and burrows beneath the level of shared associations to discover the sparkling emotional potential of carefully arranged vibrations moving through the air.

The soundscapes he's constructed on his third LP, Howl, are spiky and imposing, too solid to sink into. The music is always shifting, so it's impossible to lose track of time while listening.

Music has always been just one aspect of the Poppy multimedia experience, but Flux makes it finally feel like the most important one.

These songs feel personal. They tug at important moments. It's a quietly masterful, emotionally rich work. Of all their records, it's ultimately the one that sounds the most like the image their band name evokes.