Goddamn if he doesn't sing like a cranky Neil Diamond here...

The Book of David is a pleasure-first listening experience, and Quik deploys each of his tricks with a showman's flair.

Like Cunningham's entire oeuvre, each track unwinds into a tapestry of intense sonic detail if you just give it a little time to recline.

Cody finds a more grown-up Joyce Manor, but every track contains enough blunt expressions of existential despair to tie them to their angsty past.

While one occasionally wishes that Frankie Rose could get a few paces further out from under her own shadow, the best of Cage Tropical does something similar, taking her own retro influences and using them to leapfrog her way out of a creative rut.

Though it is certainly a darker listen, III is largely about the same concepts as its predecessor: unquenchable desire that eclipses reality, the ruthless blow of rejection, and the struggle to remain afloat even when “humanity equals misery.”

Like all agreeable ambient music, it burbles away in the background, invisible right up until the moment you notice it--a little like the ambient revival itself.

The Unseen in Between may be his most stationary album, with as many songs about being somewhere as getting somewhere.

The result is one of the most structured, deliberate releases of Frisell’s career, a diaristic set that no one will ever mistake for a genre study.

As he expands his sound beyond genre confines, he can sell a multi-part epic like “Jake’s Piano - Long Island” and a complexly orchestrated slow-burner like “Ticking.” But he doesn’t yet have the same range in his writing, lyrically or melodically.

Glitter and Doom Live is not simply a souvenir of a tour most fans didn't attend but a de facto greatest hits of Waits' fourth decade of music, during which his gnarly adventurousness didn't wane but only intensified.

The most appealing thing about this record is that this band, having created a brilliant and moving sound, returns to it again for another 38 minutes.

Monch might flounder into familiar indie territory if his music weren't so lucid and lively.

This is a lazy-Sunday-hang of a record: cozy, congenial, and only periodically exerting the energy to get off the couch.

As the band’s tightest, most approachable album, Standards feels like Into It. Over It.’s answer to Transatlanticism, a record that, while not quite a commercial crossover, feels like a trial run for one.

At its best, Every Country’s Sun is brash, gritty, unpretentious, and thrillingly claustrophobic--a work of volume and violence in tight spaces.

The Young Liars EP was as fully realized as all the critics suggested, yet now, TV on the Radio sound like a work in progress. Still, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes shows more strengths than mistakes.

If Haram was the Alchemist’s entry to Armand Hammer’s world, Mercy is a shared vision. There’s a greater understanding of what they can create together, and a willingness to add other sounds into their combined vocabulary.

His project, like the guy himself, has clearly reached, if not maturity, drinking age at the least. If Alex G keeps it up at this rate, the next round'll be on him.

Through Mitchell and Hamer, these characters, made flat by design and even more by time, spring into full dimension, ache and grieve and flirt, live and die and get born again.

As a single-disc shot, Soul Music is a truly unique and enriching experience: a collection of old sounds from one of dance music's enduring mainstays, re-assembled in a way that sounds fresher than ever.

Ultimately, though, Pressure Machine rarely escapes Flowers’ Brandon Flowers-ness: try as he might—and you do get the sense that he’s trying so, so hard—his usual wide-tipped brush can’t do justice to what should be finely detailed scenes.

The core tension between Tamborello's complex, almost impossibly dense production and Gibbard's cutting voice makes Give Up a pretty damned strong record, and one with enough transcendent moments to forgive it its few substandard tracks and some ungodly lyrical blunders.

His new album Sorry You Couldn’t Make It restores him to a more even keel, examining grief from greater distance while savoring life’s little sweetnesses. Billed as Williams’ country album, Sorry You Couldn’t Make It hits its thematic marks within funkified arrangements.

Plugs 2 maintains a smirking joie de vivre—just so long as you’re on the right side of it.

The music is abrasive, but in its most shocking moments, the band allows beauty to shine through the grime and static.

I quit starts so strong. .... A brutally honest edit might have reconsidered the more stylistically anonymous or lyrically thin concepts.

Musically, this debut is lovingly and exactingly orchestrated with an array of instruments-- not just the usual piano, cello, and drums, but also flute, organ, melodica, and horns-- that subtly shade the songs' emotions. Strangely, however, Hinson entertains few possibilities and seems to rely too heavily on his acoustic guitar to shape the tracks.

Country Funk re-creates this shift smartly, compiling songs by white artists playing with black sounds and black artists playing with white sounds, all without drawing neat parallels between these musical traditions.

While Frog's vocal melodies are often simple, with nursery-rhyme lightness, tuning into their lyrics make them seem more like sugar-coated pills. They establish Smith as both an objector of the failing system and another one of its many idle subjects, free-floating in the rush of disappointment.

The most Chisel-sounding record he's released as a solo artist, returning to stripped-down arrangements and, on "The Angel's Share" and "Little Dawn", his fascination with repetition.

The same indefatigable hopefulness that sets Sexsmith apart also makes Retriever a bit tiresome.

Telling the Truth has its moments of deeply felt poignancy, but its real value lies in its highly creative and endlessly listenable assimilation of soul, pop, rock, and folk signifiers.

Mental Wounds Not Healing is a brutal, beautiful experiment--and a seamless collaboration that sounds more like the birth of a great new band.

Its few missteps are well balanced by a handful of blissful, seismic bright pockets.

Even though 4 has a greater emphasis on instrumental compositions that don't suffer much from the absence of Ejstes' vocals, it's a bit of a disappointment that they only show up in half the songs.

This lyrical simplicity shouldn't obscure the fact that these are sharply constructed songs that take unusual turns. One of Girls' specialities is their willingness to go completely over the top but somehow keep us right there with them.

Change is pleasant and breezy, a cozy place where she can explore the outer limits of her voice. Listening can feel like walking into one of those gallery shows with just three sculptures, where everyone is wearing a tweed jacket and a pair of mustard-colored slacks. It sounds cool, and you feel cool listening to it—but that’s about as much as you feel.

Sumac are at their most compelling on tracks that occupy an LP’s entire side, where disparate elements can clash at length.

If Post Pop Depression’s refined execution has you missing the more unhinged Iggy of old, rest assured, he’s not going down without a fight.

Romanticism occurs in the distance between what might happen and what does, and listening to Before the World Was Big feels like walking through this exalted liminal space.

In terms of a debut record-- and especially given the weight of expectation placed on her to deliver something special-- Alright, Still isnâ??t anything else but a fantastic success.

Cripple Crow is undoubtedly impressive, vastly singular but entirely accessible, and an inspired listening experience where Banhart again proves himself one of the more talented and charismatic forces in modern folk.

The album spends nearly its entirety trying to revive a sound prevalent in 1994.

Yannick Ilunga feels like pop music's future--borderless but deeply rooted, challenging but pleasurable--and La Vie is strong enough to have earned Ilunga the right to call his revolution whatever he wants.

Respectable as it is for both men to avoid falling back into their bag of dub tricks, a few of Man Vs. Sofa’s attempts to expand their reach fall just a bit short.

If you hate PC Music, you will continue to; if you love them, Reflections will not change that. But producer A. G. Cook’s done a lot since 2013, so inevitably, these tracks register less as individual Cook songs than as types of Cook song.

At 22 tracks, it’s a little bloated—but with most songs barely scratching the three-minute mark, it zips along at a pace reminiscent of the radio sets and stage shows that the sound incubated in almost two decades ago.

What Cooler Returns lacks in heft it makes up for with unadulterated kicks.

The voice is willing, but the musical backdrop is weak.

The precise ecstasy of the production buoys the record through its few sluggish patches.

All this pomp and pap is unfortunate, because the moments on the album where Halsey zeroes in on the concrete realities of her life, as opposed to her own ideas of how others perceive her, are some of her most interesting songs in a long while.

Something Worth Waiting For is the sound of a band not tripping into place but clawing its way to the heights of its potential.

His beats are generally chunky sample flips and simple loops, but he also has an ear for a good sound. But if you’re listening to a Royce album it’s because you want to hear the guy rap. To his credit, Royce has the rare effect of a rapper’s extreme technical ability making him seem limber instead of rigid.

If the intellect on Hellfire is feverish, the emotional temperature often dips to morgue levels; their music is better equipped to comment on emotion than to feel it, or express it. They continue to get over, as they always do, on pure conviction, riding the knife’s edge between clinical precision and crazed abandon.

Virtually the whole record settles into the same formula the band's been dutifully churning out since the dawn of the millennium.

Divest the Smashing Pumpkins or Hum of their singers, give the bands room to jam, and this album might have ensued. Without vocals, it feels slightly empty.

More than Illmatic, it represents the real Nas-- not the ideal-- the MC with all the skill, all the rhymes, and all the insight who sabotaged himself with bad decisions.

Regardless of what kind of audience it ultimately finds, though, In Ghost Colours earns its smiles with a combination of ingenuity and easiness that you don't often come by, and for that, even in April, it already feels like a triumph.

Like most records that lack a central stylistic thrust, Take Me to the Land of Hell often resembles a great collection of tracks instead of a coherent overall work.

Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place. Instead it moves, and moves others with it.

Repetition is key to this music, but after several cycles, tracks begin to plod, broken up only by Khan's vocal work. The Sexwitch interpretations lose vital elements from the originals like horns, organs, and bells.

New Start proves that the prowess of footwork’s first family is intact, and Taso might just be the glue that holds it all together.

Come Over Pt. 2 lacks a single, a glittering pop-punk exclamation point like “Awful Things” or “The Brightside” to break up the album’s long drift. But that’s OK, really. The album is a valentine offered to Peep and to his fans, and it is built for immersion, not for persuasion.

The rich orchestral compositions on The Caretaker sound effortless and fluid like cursive. In crafting such complex, accessible songs, Rose reveals just how ordinary it is to feel at war with yourself, to not know what you want or how to get it.

When Smoke Rises deftly translates Ahmed’s poetry to melody without blunting the truth of the narratives at its core. ... But the choice to build it around folk music’s tropes is an innovative way of avoiding the “conscious” stereotype, notorious in hip-hop for a moralizing impulse that tends to hollow out its messages.

Duckart’s second album, Death in the Business of Whaling, further develops his creative identity by adding a little mystery, opting for abstract, free-associative musings over straightforwardly confessional songwriting.

Even if Schmilco isn’t Wilco’s most exciting album, it’s among their most consistent and immediately gratifying.

The riskier these covers get, the better they demonstrate what made Frightened Rabbit’s music compelling.

The non-R&B covers—the songs that make her and her band push themselves—are more daring and perhaps more satisfying.

Kooshanejad works by breaking down samples into unrecognizable blips of sound, and then layering them up into thickets of melody and rhythm. There is the sense that any individual noise could be one locus on a larger waveform, any melodic line or rhythmic figure a patchwork of them.

In 30 minutes, Painted Shrines sashay through a dozen modest but endearing tunes about love, hardship, hope, and the prelapsarian joy of sharing riffs with friends. Though this record has been in the works for at least three years, it is happily nonchalant, more concerned with a sense of warmth than perfection; that effortless allure makes Heaven and Holy addictive.

The record has a calculated fishbowl quality, chronicling the group’s rise and accelerated decline through the lens of a mercurial Svengali. It’s a victory lap with a slightly bitter aftertaste, like champagne left uncorked in a trashed hotel suite.

For the majority of the record, she sings alone, accompanied only by her acoustic guitar. This elemental soundscape pushes Diaz’s finely crafted melodies and brutal lyrical observations to the forefront more bluntly than ever.

From an artist whose mind and appetites have always ranged so freely, such a cohesive, uncluttered document is doubly revealing.

This album is less obvious in its social critique and more traditional in its instrumentation—for every nitrous oxide canister or cheese grater, there are several more gongs, steel tongue drums, cymbals, glockenspiels, and tubular bells.

Nextdoorland finds the band's old chemistry in full effect, and Hitchcock's songwriting seems re-energized by the presence of his old mates.

After the initial bustle of a few extremely strong tracks, Optometry wanders blindly for far too long.

The problem lies with the songs themselves, which simply lack outstanding or memorable hooks: Most are content to meander behind a curtain of big rock guitars and bigger rock cliches, infinitely repeating themselves or, in some cases, never saying much of anything at all.

Whatever excitement this album lends is, for the most part, borrowed by its pre-existing audience, and it's clear the Kadanes aren't going to challenge us.

The monotonous stretches of this concert package make it difficult to feel anything about him at all. The proceedings lack a transporting element; if this disc is playing while one is stuck in traffic, one will feel very much stuck in traffic.

The band's best release since 1996's whoopass and splashy Firewater, though it just sounds like uninviting racket the first time you hear it, and it continues Firewater's preoccupation with alcohol.

Distortion isn't a return to form so much as a return to content.

White Denim's inherent restlessness means that all the band's releases feel transitional to a degree, but D's measured restraint points toward the best possible direction for them.

Despite all the collaborations on So Much Fun, the album is about Young Thug. He might not mystify as he did in the early stages of his career, when he was stumbling into new flows and deliveries at an inhuman pace, but now he’s able to wield the madness with ease, satisfying in many modes.

Walking Like We Do has moments of thoughtless escapism—and a couple of earnest bum notes—but it comes into its own when it blends humor with darkness, suffusing everything with gentle, sarcastic nihilism.

Von Schleicher doesn’t necessarily need to be transparent; more often than not, teasing out the hidden messages that lie beneath her impressionistic songwriting is genuinely enjoyable. Calling one’s pain by name can be terrifying, and she has a great talent for subtlety. Still, Consummation is at its most transfixing when it is at its most legible.

So while Violence Unimagined ranks as a top tier late-era Cannibal Corpse record, its triumphs are somewhat understated. It features plenty of impressive turns from drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz and some particularly inspired songs from guitarist Rob Barrett (“Murderous Rampage,” “Inhumane Harvest”). It is also at least their third studio album that feels like a conscious restart.

Connection is the first time that Ceramic Dog has made dissent sound like just a collection of recordings, instead of a prickly, teeming world of its own.

As good as it often is, Mowed Sound reinforces what, in retrospect, has been Nance’s conundrum all along: He remains the clerk across the record store counter, gushing about all the things he loves without being able to tell you the one he likes best, the one he would forever commit to calling his own.

If the concept-album aspect of Maraqopa was a stretch, it’s undeniable this time around.

clipping. never present themselves as resurrectors of horrorcore, and Visions’ songs are livelier than those on TEEATB, but the way the group embraces the style feels archaeological.

On Restarter, that precept again takes the lead, and Torche have made their most compelling record since Meanderthal.

As an album, Tim Melina Theo Bobby is maybe even less concerned than usual with coherence, which tends to create the atmosphere of a singles collection. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s about time and boundaries, the things that separate concepts like then and now or you and me. Musically, this can sound like a walk through Joan of Arc’s tangly, overgrown garden.

The best songs on Pain to Power capture that electric, instantaneous energy, where everything collides in delightful chaos. Maruja only lose that alchemic touch when they overthink the process.

Hecker’s music is not easy, but it is worthwhile.

However exquisitely rendered they may be, and however strange their circumstances may seem, these are breakup songs. ... Doiron’s presence, though, is a welcome balm, warming these cold realizations and offering Elverum a steadying hand for some of the most difficult moments.

Belle and Sebastian have always been focused on connection, and on Late Developers, they’re unpretentious about sharing that bond and generous in reinforcing it.