Dabke lives or dies by its ability to make people move, and although Souleyman is no-frills, and borderline gruff compared to other dabke performers, there’s something in his stentorian singing that’s irresistible.

For as much ground as he covers on It's Album Time, the music feels effortless, gliding from Henry Mancini-esque detective jazz to bouncy, Stevie Wonder funk like breeze blowing through the waffle weave of a leisure suit. Conventional wisdom bears out: The looser the grip, the tighter the hold.

The band is, if anything, more confident than ever, but the sound's grandiosity too easily verges on melodrama, a too-bold-to-be-believable misery.

The bicoastal milieu of Out of the Shadow is apparent: It reflects both a lush, sunny "California Dreamin'" temperament, and Gotham's grimy, melancholic disposition.

Most of all, it's Díaz-Reixa's intuitive feel for rhythm that marks out Alegranza! as such an unusual and enticing listening experience.

With Aesop Rock on production, Felt becomes a triangulation that canvasses almost the entirety of U.S. undie rap in terms of geography and affiliation. So why is this thing kind of a bummer?

When moments like the funereal horn lines on “Vostok” break into the open after several tracks of frigid drones, the contrast is absolutely heart-rending. But these transcendent moments are few, and No. 2 could still use a little more of that drama.

Dissed and Dismissed ends just before it starts to feel formulaic.

Mutoid Man may not be the resurrection of Cave In’s on-again-off-again majesty, but it savagely boils down Brodsky’s brainy ambition to a primal scream.

There's a wealth of both visceral adventure and reflective emotion in hs pieces. At best, these songs are thrill rides, mood swingers, and thought provokers, all at once.

It is perfectly sequenced, mysterious and moody. For a debut album, the fully-formed nature of their songwriting, sublime pacing and monolithically tasteful atmosphere is remarkable.

Mordechai doesn’t quite commit to delivering fleshed-out songs, or to synthesizing Khruangbin’s influences into something new. It’s too busy to settle fully into your subconscious like the intercontinental ambience of Khruangbin’s 2018 breakout Con Todo El Mundo, but not substantial enough to satisfy more active listening.

It would be simple for Day Wilson to cut an album of Stax-style soul tunes or smooth jazz standards and call it a day. The immaculately mixed Alpha is instead built on weighty writing and daring arrangements in which Day Wilson stays front and center, never allowing the production to overshadow her presence.

Inviting guests into the fold is a huge step for a longtime solo artist who has previously distanced himself from the world; alongside his sharper songwriting and unrestrained performances, it’s a sign that he’s ready to welcome others into his healing process. By opening up the pit, he’s opening his heart, too.

On her latest LP, No Need to Be Lonely, she reconnects with the punchy hooks and confidence of her previous work while taking bigger creative risks.

The Ship is a great, unexpected record.

While Why There Are Mountains reminded me of what those records [Perfect From Now On or The Moon and Antarctica] sounded like, Lenses Alien does something more difficult by reminding what it felt like once they were over and you were left to wonder if you just stumbled upon a cosmic, philosophical treatise disguised as an indie rock record.

At times, Nelson’s nonchalance makes some of the more topical concerns on God’s Problem Child feel a tad hackneyed. ... That leaves plenty of space for the other veteran songwriters to slip Nelson their own meditations on aging.

Long Island probably isn't going to win any new fans for Endless Boogie, but their strengths are on display regardless.

His songs have always felt close to home, charcoal-smeared with London dusk and the nocturnal cadence of London jazz. On Space Heavy, for the first time, the great London singer-songwriter’s ambitions feel accordingly local, too.

Unfortunately, In Advance isn't an EP, and things falter a bit past the halfway mark.

If space-rock as a whole is a role-playing game, one in which its players imagine having front-row seats for the heat-death of the universe, then Deep Trip is the one of most advanced vehicles yet designed to take them there.

Beyond, the band's first record as the selfsame trio since 1988's Bug, benefits enormously-- more so even than fellow MA-veterans Mission of Burma or latter-day Sonic Youth-- from the years, experiences, successes, and disappointments elapsed between then and now.

Near to the Wild Heart of Life ultimately lacks the urgency of the band’s best music. The tower hasn’t collapsed, but it’s starting to wobble.

Despite some murky production by Josh Kaufman of the Fruit Bats and Bonny Light Horseman, the Hold Steady turn these songs into weird, vivid snapshots.

The extras dug up for the Tug of War reissue (the Super Deluxe Edition of each also contain DVDs of era-appropriate ephemera) make for some interesting listening—demo versions of "Wanderlust" and "The Pound Is Sinking", and a version of "Ebony" with just McCartney on electric piano. But those pale in comparison to the veritable alternate LP included in Pipes of Peace.

Vertigo is a minor Necks record, destined to stand forever in the shadow of the 2013 opus Open. But, after a quarter century, the trio’s explorations still sound as ecstatic as they do limitless. That, at least, is another minor miracle.

In addition finding new ways to snarl in their music, the lyrics go beyond mere cleverness into sharp, thoughtful introspection, making Travels a document of a creatively restless band out to prove something to themselves, and not just the fans they’ve picked up along the way.

While they revel in disorientation, Mod Prog Sic marks the trio’s most direct appeal to the pleasure center.

If Krüller is warmed by a nostalgic human past, it also bears the chill of a posthuman future where the machines grind on without us, an intimation that seeps from his music like a corrosive fluid and lends these songs a bitter, heroic weight.

The writing, at least, is often remarkable. ... The accompaniment for these curious lyrical snapshots, though, never rises to meet their idiosyncrasy—it is often bland enough to distract from them.

Like all of her best work, it finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up.

In Spades clocks in at just 10 songs in 36 minutes, but feels as expansive and substantial as a double-album statement.

The sometimes drifting song structures, frequent tonal shifts, odd lyrics, and interludes presented a stuffed canvas full of interesting sounds that didn't seem to have a focal point, didn't seem to have a place where you were supposed to enter the composition. Eventually, however, everything fell into place.

Close attention reveals an album of highly varied moods and textures.

With the futurist sound of Brill Bruisers, the whole band embraces a more electric version of itself—bulked-up in chrome-plated armor, firing on all cylinders, and ready to steamroll anything in its path.

Here, as on Mutations, he confuses lyrical simplicity and standard-tuning, key-of-C songwriting with the unpretentious directness of his idols.

Though all the elements that make their music great are still present, never do they crystallize and come together quite like they have in the past.

Built on Squares is the fun and catchy work of talented pop musicians, writing terribly interesting songs without compromising pop's essential, visceral lure.

While The Grey Album is truly one of the more interesting pirate mashups ever done, it ultimately fails at the hands of perfectionism with several pieces sounding rushed to beat some other knucklehead to his clever idea.

Revisiting Come on Feel the Lemonheads can be revelatory in spite of its unevenness. .... As with the reissues of Lovey and It’s a Shame About Ray, the deluxe version offers demos and outtakes that justify a physical reissue in 2023 and not much else.

At its best, Pressing Onward amplifies that magic with powerful choral harmonies, carving out new space in contemporary gospel and shaping it in her own image.

Lux Prima works better as a journey than a destination. It never sounds better than when going nowhere fast, its charmingly anachronistic sound at odds with the sharply engineered hustle of the modern pop world. Karen O and Danger Mouse have dreamt up a vividly imagined world, and it’s a pleasure to get lost in it. With a little more freedom, it could have been divine.

If it doesn't quite confound like "They Were Wrong" or thrill like "Drum's Not Dead," Liars still finds the band ignoring whatever you thought you wanted or needed from them, and doing what they damn well please.

Within the context of Deerhoof’s oeuvre, The Magic is a bit of a back-to-the-garage reset that doesn’t approach the heights of career apexes Friend Opportunity and Runners Four, but offers a fresh energy that rewards the converted.

This is house music at its most shiny and immaculate, a genre made from ache and escapism, high strings and numbing throbs. But Gaga’s lyrics are plainspoken, mostly free of religious metaphors and pretense. ... For all Gaga’s emphasis on Chromatica being an album meant to be heard start-to-finish with no skips, the sequencing is a bit off.

Set aside the negligible opening and closing tracks, and Sol Invictus has just eight tracks spanning 34 minutes, an underwhelming running time considering how long Faith No More have been away. Such brevity could be overlooked if Sol Invictus was accompanied by a significant shift in the band’s sound, but many of these songs feel like retreads.

These spry melodies and generous arrangements are the stuff of pop fantasy, while the reach of Tyler's music offers calling cards for fans of folk and more textural avant garde pieces.

Even so, it comes as a relief that the song doesn't end with a big, fiery finale. Instead, the band lets The Rise fray apart on its own, a quiet conclusion to a lyrically and musically feisty album.

An Inbuilt Fault becomes a faithful companion for anyone emerging from the trenches of an existential crisis—it’ll loom on the outer edge of your worst days.

Subtle breakbeat drumming and glistening guitar be damned, Bono will ruin a song. And so the story goes for the entire album-- one of the band's finest, if not for the tweeting and hooting of The Fly and his grating lyrics.

Nothing’s Real offers a fresh vision for pop’s new reality.

In Prism ultimately sets a new standard for them: don't just make it sound like you never left, but rather make the past seem like a mere warm-up for what's to come.

Woo is more or less an extension of--and improvement on--the ideas explored on Field-Pickering's debut, 2010's Cool Water.

Part of the success of Daze is how fully Brood Ma commits to his sonic palette without committing to a singular musical style.

So This Is Goodbye isn't just an improbable notch above 2004's Last Exit-- it's also among the best records you'll hear all year.

The soundtrack is a pungent, incoherent, occasionally haunting trifle. The feeling is of a bunch of intelligent and talented people trying on a bunch of funny-colored clothing and giggling at each other. If you're not wearing the costumes, there's a limit to just how entertained by all of it you can be.

It’s a Myth is the natural progression from Gymnastics, and so across the record, Moolchan refines her sound within these limits. Inside and outside of the music, she embraces the self-built space that she crafted for herself.

It’s neither a live album nor an album of its own, yet it’s also not a set of demos for a forthcoming record. Instead, it’s a vivid snapshot of a particular moment, preserving a time when he had yet to fritter away his good will, and capturing Townes Van Zandt when it still seemed like he was on the verge of great things.

Bridges the sepia warmth of the Laurel Canyon sound with the rooted hymns of Appalachian folk.

Ashworth melds two distinctively ’90s sound worlds. Squeeze holds Korn, Disturbed, and System of a Down in one hand; Sheryl Crow, Faith Hill, and Shania Twain in the other.

It's not exactly Sic Alps Mk. II, but there are some clear similarities. The record's eerie psychedelic pop strikes a similar balance of order and chaos, with songs that rev up only to be subverted by detours into dissonance and static.

Even if it can’t measure up to Spirit, Band of Brothers is still a showcase for what Nelson does best.

Banjo-led instrumentals that pay homage to Appalachian folk music is a hyper-specific niche, but Bowles and his band never allow their preferred sounds to hem in their experiments.

As an innovator, she's as vibrant as ever, but as a songwriter, she sounds tired.

The broader fault of Ten is that it isn't the ABBA Gold-caliber wonder that Girls Aloud deserves as a greatest hits collection.

The record is not only catchy as all hell, but it’s also sweet and openhearted and not one bit cynical.

At times it may feel cheesy, or like “naive romantic shite” as they say at one point, but in the end, it’s honestly comforting.

In the progression of addiction, we’re past the “fun with problems” stage and right into “problems.” The tuneful first half of Aftering could blur this distinction, but Thomas’ chipper melodies add insult to injury, a mocking reminder of what it felt like to get your hopes up in the first place. ... Aftering’s second half of ambient tone poems puts Thomas in direct comparison with guys he’s been tangentially evoking over the span of the trilogy: Mark Kozelek and Phil Elverum, mercurial, prolific songwriters.

At a time when some ambient music can feel like it’s drafted solely for inclusion on a “chill” playlist to anesthetize the overworked, Cantu-Ledesma’s explorations have been steering towards deeper waters. On Tracing Back the Radiance, his most profound work to date, he finds them.

Though Contact is mostly a one-man endeavor, the music generates a sense of proximity, of presence. That tension feels both like an ironic reminder of our current isolation and a gesture toward a more communal future.

The album showcases her curatorial skills—honed from years of DJ sets, streaming playlists, and recently virtual shows as Aluna’s Room—and her range. Maybe as a challenge, Renaissance neither starts nor ends with dance music.

The EP moves deliberately from chaos to catharsis, with tighter performances than we’ve heard from A Place to Bury Strangers in a long time.

It can feel staged at times, even a little stiff. Still, it’s a powerful showcase for his guitar work, his singing, and his ministry.

The collision between acoustic instrumentation and crackerjack production makes for a lush and widescreen experience.

My Heart was Shoman’s breakout moment as a songwriter, and A Swollen River is foremost a triumph for Tenci, the band.

On Sorry I Haven’t Called, which was co-produced by Rostam, Tamko changes shape once more, resulting in bright and dewy electro-pop songs with more rhythmic dimension.

Alligator Bites makes Doechii’s stance clear: Nobody puts Doechii in a corner. But if this is the sound of Doechii pushing against constraints, a little friction might not be the worst thing.

It ["Heat Sink"] feels both longer and shorter than its 14 minutes, a trick that Palladino and Mills pull off on every track on the album; each lyrical passage is an instruction manual for experiencing nonlinear time. That Wasn’t a Dream is music as quantum theory, using the expanse between speakers to pass through dimensions.

When it works, it’s revelatory in the way peaking in a big rolling crowd at the club can be, or in the way of a little hand on your shoulder. .... Idehen is onto something here. And listen, maybe you’ve heard it before. But maybe we all need to hear it again.

The Hope Six Demolition Project is her most exhilarating rock album in years, yoking the siren-like catchiness of her last great America-influenced album, Stories From the City… to the swamp-tarnished filth of her classic first three records, Dry, Rid of Me, and To Bring You My Love. It’s leering, brash, and dissonant, but also not without its warmth.

Runner shakes out as one of this band's most subtly varied albums, and it can be an immersive listening experience if you give yourself over to it.

The pace is unhurried, and Gibson offers a cathartic tale of loss and redemption, set against a gorgeous sonic backdrop. She sounds newly confident, invigorated, and free.

The duo’s mutual respect, selfless skills, and tender chemistry have delivered an album that is among both artists’ best.

Hold Time is an enjoyable, well-constructed album, and as good a place as any for newcomers to start--it just doesn't hold many surprises.

Liturgy have always brought a proggy, sprawling ambition to their music, but rarely have all the pieces locked into place so elegantly. 93696 can be pulverizing, but it’s also gentle, and amid the brutality lie some of Hunt-Hendrix’s prettiest and most ornate songs yet.

Mew has succeeded in developing a good sound from some of the least hip ingredients imaginable, and No More Stories... feels like a consolidation of every stride they've made to date.

Murray's Revenge is one of the better gang-unrelated and Dre-unaffiliated records to come from the West Coast since Murs' last one.

While Jepsen makes B-sides markedly better than other artists’ A-sides, she can still falter; some points feel like kissing a crush for the first time and missing the spark.

You have to sit still a while and let the trio’s sonic images wash over you before their musical zombies rise from the dead to terrorize the stereo space. But give this album a fraction of the patience and attention that Wolf Eyes have put into it--effort on a par with their excellent previous effort, No Answer: Lower Floors--and you’ll be glad you stayed up late enough to see how it ends.

Woods' greatest strength has always been songwriting, and sharpening the focus and cleaning up the production has only enhanced the band's welcoming melodies.

MIKE’s rhythmic passion manifests in a firm self-awareness absent from his earlier work. He hasn’t exactly outrun his demons, but his place in the vanguard of New York’s underground rap scene has invigorated him.

More than a continuation of that trajectory, Three Futures feels like a quantum leap. There are more voices, more perspectives.

While Long only uses a steady beat and some deeply resonant chords to convey this revelation, he nevertheless moves like a poet to unearth that heartening sense of truth here.

A Beautiful Life is her best album as a vocalist, as she finds new ways to bend her voice to different styles and sounds.

The wall of sound is strangely, stultifyingly uniform, a thick slab of piano-led clangour--like the din of a bustling room overwhelming a lounge singer’s best efforts.

Their singing is stripped of its former bite, and while they still ramp up the fuzz, it's a much cleaner-sounding album made at Dan Auerbach's Nashville studio. And as a whole, it's very inconsistent.

A testament to the influences of their youth; echoes of Lennon and McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel, Nick Drake, and Fairport Convention glide through the album before tiptoeing into a corner and reappearing a few tracks later.