Where earlier albums achieved this feeling through lyrics alone, Snapshot of a Beginner incorporates songwriting into a wider vision, one that feels truer to the band’s intentions.

Spiel is heavy but nimble, more direct in its arrangements and sentiments, but also moodier, more melancholy; it sounds like shoulders shrugged against a cold wind.

Folky and pastoral, with recorder solos and mandolin excursions and proggy journeys-in-song, Forever Howlong is as ambitious as anything this band has done.

Though much of Driving a Million rides along on a similar, slightly heavy new wave pop groove like "Neon Tom," it's the subtle lapses into more diverse sounds that are perhaps the record's most welcome aspect.

Chapter I, the stronger of the two releases, features one of Crockett’s most personal and well-executed ballads to date, “Good at Losing,” a solemn ride-along through the years he spent traveling aimlessly. The title track, “$10 Cowboy,” is another highlight.

As passionately as All of Us Flames dreams of escape, it’s bound to a dystopian reality, where even the dreamiest, most abstract songs aren’t immune from fear.

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?”

She is an artist who knows who she is, and Froot luxuriates in the confidence that we do, too, relaxing in the space and power that Diamandis has claimed.

It's not until the last few tracks that Harry finds her best collaborator--naturally, it's former Blondie bandmate and paramour Chris Stein.

Ranging from translucent psych-pop to pummeling garage-rock, they're alternately assured and vulnerable, direct and subtle, light and dark.

This is passionate music, delivered with searing honesty by a man who didn’t mind disappearing from the conversation if that’s what it took to articulate what he was trying to say.

Ultimately, Mind Spiders is tailor-made for those of us who value that four-on-the-floor reverie above all else.

With the Pavementine rumble of “Camel Swallowed Whole” and the misty, cymbal-tapped post-rock surges of “Parachute,” JEFF the Brotherhood successfully indulge their growing fetish for off-kilter sonics while producing effortlessly tuneful, emotionally resonant songs.

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.

There’s something invigorating about hearing two alt-country veterans take apart their tried-and-true sound and reassemble it slightly askew, and Scheherazade is not only their most modern-sounding record; it might be their best since Old Paint.

Obscurities itself is over in less than 40 minutes: It's understated, personal, insular, oddball, and often gorgeous, an unexpectedly coherent collection from an important band.

An exceptionally personal album from someone known for his intimate songwriting.

The Rest closes its fist around the ideas that Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus have been reaching toward—that values are more worth living than dying for, that our feelings of difference and dysfunction can be fonts of power.

awE naturalE, like Black Up, is a pleasantly surprising resurrection of the Pacific Northwest-via-Brooklyn hippie-hop that we never might have anticipated a few years ago.

It's still a potentially alienating album: unnerving when you're not on its aggro wavelength, inviting when you are, and transfixing either way, thanks to the aggregate work of Death Grips' core.

Torres has traded away some pieces of the humanity that colored his earlier work in favor of a conversation about something elemental that's still waiting to be discovered. That doesn’t make for an immediate record. It makes for one full of enigmas, of beautiful and undefinable things that promise further revelations to come.

Expect improvisation and Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974 will disappoint. Novelty, though, it’s got—Ferry sounded like no singer in rock.

Mostly, Something lives up to its everyman title by removing the truly heart-pounding moments of a BSS record and replacing them with a sense of community, easy friendship, and a kickass guitar pedal collection.

He sounds damn good over trashy, flashy electro that manages to keep pace with cadences as hyperactive as his own, and, above all, he's way more fun than he's often given credit for.

This is joyful music with a spirit of self-preservation at its core.

It’s utterly maddening, and to get lost within it feels like the past calendar year: undifferentiated, infinite, and delirious.

It’s a reminder that King Gizzard usually peak when wandering far beyond a clear-cut path. The coming of their most concise and carefree release truly could not have been better timed.

Mythopoetics advances Half Waif’s tendency toward plurality of voice.

Meadow picks up where his 2004 Merge bow Dents and Shells left off.

Hayter continues to traverse a biblical, deeply American landscape, surveying both its fire and brimstone and its transformative music. Saved! understands both of these qualities—consequently, rage, wonder, and beauty all churn just under its surface.

Because Staples has lost little expressiveness with age, We Get By sounds surprisingly raucous and admirably rough around the edges, especially on the percolating “Anytime.” But these songs are more about the small, quiet spaces where Staples can catch her breath and steel her nerves.

The Gamble sounds like the peek into a group of friends' private rituals that it is--as charmingly patched together and messy as it is well-paced and dynamic.

Roving at will across other genres, Cross is able to wholly remake the horn in his own image.

If you, like Webster, feel most at home in the warm glow of a band in the pocket of a groove, Underdressed at the Symphony delivers just under 40 minutes of gentle melodies and extended jams, a soft landing pad after the end of a romance.

Throughout Cracks, Giske appears to be striving for an alien, private vocabulary with an instrument saddled with 175 years of tradition and tropes. Against great odds, he succeeds.

This earnest, well-crafted jumble couldn’t be a more appropriate marker of the irrepressible project’s evolution, nor a more fitting testament to Liars’ legacy.

Their willingness to expand the subtleties of their sound makes Million Dollars to Kill Me an enthralling listen, even at its lowest points.

Klaxons' lyrical pretensions, alas, can be a reminder why the best house and trance music often emphasizes atmosphere over meaning.

It’s a fairly conventional set of club bangers done right: This is an alluring, nonchalant flex between albums that’s weird enough to drop in the hyperpop Discord, but satisfying enough to play at your next birthday party.

The moments where things sound like they’re spilling over, bleeding outside of the track's imaginary lines, are when LP is most thrilling.

It's nice to see that a band can organically develop its sound while still maintaining a home-grown sensibility.

An echoey mix sometimes makes Shires and the players sound as if they’re performing at the bottom of a well—a drier mix would’ve drawn these tales of lust and abandon in sharper colors. But as producer Rothman has the correct instincts: They foreground Shires’ big voice.

It’s not merely a return to their old ways, nor does their long-teased reunion feel like a cynical, nostalgia-fueled cash grab. Instead, the record is a series of reminders of what Mclusky are still capable of—whether that’s melting faces in under a minute with “juan party-system” or the razor’s-edge guitar hammering driving “the digger you deep.”

So Revolutions Per Minute isn't as momentous a revival as it might seem-- it's just, well, another good Talib Kweli album with more solid Hi-Tek beats, an example of good chemistry between two artists who happen to have good chemistry with lots of other collaborators.

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.

The album burns brightest on a pair of songs in which Marea recognizes the limits of his grace in the face of emotionally unavailable lovers.

Though it goes a long way to reinstating Blonde Redhead’s singular mystique and impressionistic aura, Sit Down for Dinner is distinguished by an easygoing melodicism that, even in its darkest lyrical depths, makes it the warmest and most welcoming record in the band’s catalog.

Whether a calculated retreat or just a natural maturation, the Horrors have found a sound more content with background and atmosphere, and it suits them nicely.

The dueling approaches of the two recording sessions enrich each other, providing Hey Clockface with its yin and yang. Alone, either style might have seemed like predictable genre play for Costello at this stage in its career, but together, they make for an album that’s energetic and consistently surprising.

Floating Points keeps the mood consistent. Few selections move faster than a resting heartbeat, but they nevertheless feel dramatic.

And Then Life Was Beautiful expands her musical range while deepening its emotional impact.

This affectionate tribute reveals an artist who managed--amazingly enough--to remake rock'n'roll in his own image.

While the band have reined in some of the volatility that made those introductory singles so exhilarating, there’s a cool consistency and newfound accessibility to Absolutely Free that makes it an easy, enchanting front-to-back listen, the songs locking together to form a smoothly contoured album arc.

Doused with sleek and slippery riffs, the album's early succession of propulsive, three-minute art-pop songs is especially strong.

The record represents a roaring comeback for the band at a moment to which their sound is particularly well-suited.

Snow Bound is the Dunedin native’s most winning album since 1990’s Submarine Bells--brash, tensile, and enormously confident.

At Saint Thomas feels drier. The virtuosically unspooling vocal runs of “Die Stunde Kommt” feel particularly embodied, like you’re watching her vocal cords come unraveled there in person.

The Heretic’s Bargain [is] their most cohesive record to date, and suggests that it will likely be bested on that count by the next one.

The intimate nature of Has God Seen My Shadow? thus illuminates those qualities that often get overlooked in Lanegan’s high-profile pairings: his grace, tenderness, and self-deprecating sense of humour.

Kool Keith trades verses with an array of guest stars, packaged with bare hooks and brisk running times. In most cases, he pulls his collaborators into his own orbit.

In its gentle violence, for you who are the wronged functions like a kind of sweet and delicate surgery. Joseph lovingly lulls you into anesthesia while prodding at your most vital pain, and then delivering you back to yourself: poison extracted, powerful, clean.

Laminated Denim gives us two linear, conventionally structured, vocal-driven songs that carve out their own lane in the Gizzard discography, somewhere between the ceaseless propulsion of their signature strobe-lit rock-outs and the blissful melodicism that defines their occasional forays into pastoral whimsy. ... The two pieces on Laminated Denim stay true to their original mission: They each make 15 minutes go by in a breeze.

Kozelek's more recent output has obviously been vulnerable, but he feels especially open here--he’s not just making fun of himself, but also deeply dissecting why he makes fun of himself, and the sadness that’s hidden within a punchline.

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

Even broken down for parts, Ellery’s vocals are still a guiding force, maintaining a lightness that balances <3UQTINVU’s harsher edges.

Power is, to say the least, hardly the collection of hard rockers that No Kill and Different Damage were. But with its lilt melodies, Davis' downplayed role, and the band's admission that, hey, a bassline here or there couldn't hurt, Power boasts a cohesion and distinct identity missing from Q & Not U's two previous albums.

It’s no doubt a conservative record, maybe even a deeply unfashionable one, but much of its strength lies in the fact that it sounds different from everyone else out there.

There's an organic, humanistic ethos operating behind her music: we are all people, and we're all moved by the same primal passions and stimuli.

Give a Glimpse does, however, stick largely to well-trod paths, with not a ton in the way of experimentation. As always, it’s Mascis’ guitar that is the main attraction here, the reason for caring.

What makes Nomad instantly compelling is the way it both reflects and celebrates the feeling of a peaceful morning walk.

CAZIMI, Rose’s long-delayed third record, makes a complete song cycle out of those entanglements, with each cut reflecting the proper amount of neon.

One clunker on an album full of gems doesn't drag everything else down, though, and Thompson deserves all our respect--he's been through the major-label wringer, found his place where he can be celebrated as he deserves among his independent fans, and is still making complicated, thoughtful, intricate, resonant music on his own terms many decades deep into his career.

It’s a more straightforward and accessible sound that might leave past admirers missing the all-out weirdness of albums past, but the evolution that Tasmania represents also speaks to the fact that the main constant in Pond’s approach is change. Even as the sea levels keep rising, they’ll doubtless find new waves to ride.

Kairos represents a bold step for Dienel and White Hinterland, a re-imagining of the music-making process and an example of musical experimentation and evolution.

The album feels about five times larger with the inclusion of “Jordan,” its first single. Whereas the rest of the record sounds homey, “Jordan” surveys alien territory.

What sets Sentielle apart amongst Fell's work is the residual synth pools that tremble like oil on water. They are sparse and alien, but they reflect light in a way their host matter can't.

All 11 tracks are paced somewhere between 120 and 125 beats per minute; all of them follow pitter-patter house beats; all of them use the same palette of cool jazz samples and Chicago house basslines and warm, watery keys. But if you're a fan of this kind of thing, A Minor Thought proves that sometimes variety isn't the most important quality in an album.

The first disc is fine, containing most of the band's singles and a few key album tracks. The second is messier.

This album still stands out among his recent work, not so much for the leap of faith he took collaborating with Auerbach but because it turned out so damn well.

While the Good, the Bad & the Queen are skilled at providing a wide breadth of styles here--from the woozy, carnivalesque organ of “The Last Man to Leave” to “The Truce of Twilight”’s militaristic chants--they especially succeed at conveying a crumbling and isolated Britain.

With its handsome hard-cover packaging, clear-plastic paper-stock photo galleries, candid liner-note interviews (conducted in early 2007), and ridiculously detailed Pete Frame-drawn family tree poster, the set provides a handy opportunity for newbies to play catch-up on the band's history-- and for anyone who first came into contact with the Mary Chain via the closing credits to "Lost in Translation," only to be scared off by "Psychocandy's" torrential noise.

This is an inspired collection of songs, even if you do get the feeling Hopkins prefers to spend his late nights alone.

Perhaps some lo-fi charm has been lost along the way, but these are proper songs, and Trappes has centered herself in the narrative while solidifying a sound that was already spellbinding to begin with.

Songs like "Vesuvius"-- not to mention "Rambunctious Cloud" and "Gnats"-- have depth, a cagey charm, and an elusive mystery that demand not just repeated but aggressive listening. Chesnutt and his collaborators don't make that level of attention easy, but they do make it worthwhile.

Instead of a symbolic death, The Slip feels much more like a possible rebirth.

Rather than sounding as if they’ve been optimized by a digital studio, his beats tend to impart the illusion of different objects crashing to the ground at varying distances. They’re loose, anxious assemblages that leave plenty of space for the ear to play in.

Throughout Ripe 4 Luv you can sense that it’s taking every ounce of discipline Cook has to play these pop songs as straight as he does, so he can be forgiven for indulging a little kitsch at the finish line.

Remember Me keeps its mood light and its stakes low, and in the process delivers a much needed breezy counterpoint to all the knotty, fatalistic shit coming out of HBK’s downstate peers that’s every bit as true to Cali as the gangsters and the thinkers.

CHAI generously extend their wonder-filled perspective to anyone who will listen. In turn, they ask us to find our own joy, wherever and whenever we can.

The way she’s able to inject these quietly pretty, happy styles of music with an underlying weariness and a clever touch is what makes No Fool Like an Old Fool stand out among the many musicians currently borrowing similar sets of sounds.

Instead of a love letter to consuming blazes, Hoop's and Beam's collection appeals to our individual internal pilot lights: those softly smoldering flames that illuminate moments of beauty in ourselves, in each other, and beyond.

Different Talking doesn’t stray from Frankie Cosmos’ predilection for short songs—only two tracks of its 17 pass the two-and-a-half-minute mark—but Kline and the band make each feel like a universe in miniature.

Telas is not a culmination for Jaar, even if it brings his ambient strains closer than ever to the more crowd-pleasing facets of his work.

More than a simple clash of teen-angst noise and old-soul poise, Mourn’s debut album is a reminder that a big impetus for the former is the frustration of wishing you were old enough to savor the latter.

Until now, Okay Kaya records have often felt like a compelling viewpoint in search of a sound, but on SAP, Wilkins’ arrangements have finally caught up to her free-roaming mind.

Produced by Rancid's Tim Armstrong, the music here is predominantly a pitch-perfect versioning of 1970s reggae.

Here, her cut-up vocals ground both the album’s tighter tracks and looser moments—the same timbre that seduces on one song is, elsewhere, exasperated or desperate.

It is a strange and sometimes brilliant album—one that only Linda Thompson could have made, whether or not you can hear her singing.