The good news is that the band's official debut (following the 2007 collection "Wind And The Swell") is still a solid art-pop album at its core, and importantly, more "American Gangster" than "The Crane Wife."

Here Ambarchi shows how sharp about-turns and starkly dissimilar contrasts can be equally potent.

At first, Ibeyi’s bright rhythms can feel deceptively stable, their harmonies uninhibited as they dip into dissonance, but they are deliberate in revealing the depth of their sadness.

Some who fondly remember Kill My Landlord or Steal This Album might initially wince at the less-abrasive sonics, but just as Riley's rhymebook includes more of himself than ever, so have his rhythms become more intimate and seductive.

Five Roses reveals Van Pelt as a talented producer who knows his way around summery pop songs.

It's their best release yet, but it it takes some time to sink in.

There isn’t much romantic love, just the romanticization of young lust and teen angst. Those are part of the same continuum, though and when II taps into its eternal power, the cries from Milner’s bedroom nothing short of universal.

Amidon reportedly regards his new, self-titled album as the fullest realization of his vision, and indeed, it’s a digestible nine-song omnibus of his modes and moods.

While Some Echoes starts out as a good album, by the end it reveals itself as the best thing they've ever done.

[O'Brien's] portentous lyrics, falsetto-prone quaver, and Simon & Garfunkel tunefulness are essential to the album's appeal.

Some can't be saved, which happens when you keep expanding..... More often than not, though, the center holds, and it makes Ultraviolet look like a scratchpad for what they ended up doing here: radically shaking up their formula--from the inside out--and come back with compelling results.

The production is as inventive and immersive as ever, but what separates this album from the last is that Dear mostly sticks with one theme all the way through.

If you've ever been intrigued by the sound of the sun imploding, this should be your cup of hemlock.

Just as his thematic concerns have become richer, so has the music backing them up.

Interscope’s trust in TDE saves the album from the awkward test tube collaborations that bog down many of its peers, but Oxymoron’s doubling down on a reliable formula makes for a relatively risk-averse listen.

Haymaker! is a typically witty, rambunctious album that shuffles up the band members like a deck of cards.

While Wasting Light features a host of worthy set-openers, few prove to be as sticky or memorable as any number of their previous singles.

There's a sharp contrast between the twin peaks of Coracle and the rest of its material, especially when they try to pointlessly channel Spacemen 3 circa "Honey" and shackle that sound to some perfunctory beats on "Ecstatic Truth".

For the most part, the analog warmth of live instrumentation is employed thoughtfully, reminiscent, in some places, of some of the best tracks on Oddisee's fantastic Rock Creek Park.

Most of the textural differences from song to song on Né So are slight, so they tend to bleed into one another.

The 19 tracks that make up this confectioner's array sit in neatly ordered rows, most of them sweet, light, and pleasant, with novel ingredients often cropping in the middle or even near the end of tracks.

Where The Best Day proffered a somewhat uneven mix of extended odysseys and rough-hewn sketches, Rock n Roll Consciousness is much more cohesive and smoothly sequenced.

The result is a kind of precise imprecision, as if the band had captured the abandon of their early recordings and then pored over the detail with manic industriousness—tweaking rather than polishing, the better to accentuate the unevenness. Shades is lightning captured in a meticulously painted bottle, and a hell of a good time, to boot.

The sentiments are never cryptic or coded; the duo simply express what’s top of mind. That face-value approach to lyrics is well-suited for a subject as universal as a global pandemic. There’s comfort in hearing somebody sing what we’re all thinking, and comfort has always been what Damon & Naomi do best.

This World Is Going to Ruin You cannot simply be pegged as a lateral move or a leveling up: It explodes Vein.fm’s sound into seemingly dozens of different directions.

They click best as a mass of finely tuned parts. And in the latter three tracks... it really comes to the forefront, sounding so second-nature that you take the complex interplay in the underlying grooves for granted.

What’s remarkable here is how Fennesz dissolves into the bleak landscape, his signature sound rendered indistinct, a loss of identity that mirrors the album's main theme.

MartyrLoserKing doesn’t necessarily rise or fall on Williams’ ability to clarify his thoughts into a clear, memorable hook.

That sense of the ludicrousness of life runs throughout Tragicomedies. It's what gives it its spark and forgives its slip-ups.

Sometimes the songwriting relies too heavily on swelling harmonies and crescendos, and occasional lyrical clichés grate.

It may have taken them too long to get here, but on To Drink From the Night Itself, they recapture their heyday while leaving their imitators in the rearview.

It’s a solid study of a genius after he’d peaked creatively, but it doesn’t transcend that mission. There are some gems, yes, but we already knew about those. Too few are the diamonds in the rough.

At Mount Zoomer is fractured and spastic, and at times, the band's ambition eclipses its strengths. Still, there's something about Wolf Parade's fragility that's profoundly relatable, and the sense that the entire operation could fall apart at any second--that we're all tottering on the brink of total dissolution--is as thrilling as it terrifying.

Marigolden fares best when it loses the florid similes and addresses character and story.

Save for a digital flourish or two on the pop songs that make up much of the film’s back half, there’s very little here that would’ve sounded out of place on blockbuster film soundtracks of decades past. At its peaks, the album delivers on the promise of its star-wattage with some of the most affecting and emotionally overwhelming pop songs of the year.

Deciphering the Message helps connect these dots. But it also plays like a fantasy come to life, a dream set at the Blue Note, with long-lost titans beaming in from the afterlife to sit in with the young blood, like proud parents watching their children surpass them.

The deeper Vile gets into his career, the more his creative process seems to blend with the results.

Return to Archive is the motley, riotous result, a suitably retrofuturistic collage incorporating over two dozen records ranging from Sounds of Animals to Sounds of Medicine, International Morse Code to End the Cigarette Habit Through Self Hypnosis.

Geist's contributions to electronica have always seemed fringe--label head, remix specialist, in-demand crate digger--and it's once again nice for him to have something to put his own name on. But after years of waiting, Double Night Time confirms that Geist is most valuable behind the curtain.

Greenspan's singing is the best it's ever been on It's All True, proving the band's mixing desk skills aren't the only thing that's matured over the past eight years.

Read & Burn is still Wire, and without even retreading the past.

It fits alongside the best of his career and adds another solid release to a solo catalog which will hopefully become more cherished in time.

In many ways, Some of My Best Friends Are DJs is little more than a brief comedy album, filled with strange samples of eccentric characters pontificating on their record collections and audio systems.

An above-average production of reasonable merit.

Broken by Whispers shimmers and glitters, alternating from hushed ambience to ringing guitar and synth interplay.... The songs on Broken by Whispers are resolutely catchy, simply bogged down by tried-and-true heart-on-the-sleeve sentiment.

Satanic Panic in the Attic is idiosyncratic without being hokey, and although the band has been stiffed recognition for the consistency of their previous work, this album should make the group much more difficult to ignore.

Thankfully that mixture of modesty and reticence didn't endure, because Zayna Jumma is a densely layered piece of cultural cross-pollination that consistently spills over into outright joy.

Congrats isn’t incoherent in its diversity, it just never seems to build on itself--the record lacks a definitive peak, and most of the individual tracks tend to just state their main idea fairly early on.

It’s short and cohesive, an enjoyable and uncomplicated 33 minutes of sheer exhilaration, filled with stings, itches, and cold chills. In one form or another, the collaboration comes as a surprise to all of us, arriving suddenly and carrying within the electricity and satisfaction of a good scare.

There’s a lot going on at high volume, each track barreling into the next with minimal interruption, and the longest reprieve comprises two minutes of droning strings on “Wall Facer,” just before the album ends. ... Blood Karaoke is no less exhausting an experience, albeit far less addictive, and though the sheer volume of content makes it a consistently interesting listen.

His one-man band's busy textures can't fully distract from insipid songwriting.

A quick, pithy album, with 11 songs lasting just 30 minutes. There are patches of tedium, but the best moments are both surprising and engaging.

While Campbell's contributions to the album are far from negligible, the thing reeks of Lanegan, aligning itself with the hard-bitten American roots music of his solo albums.

At once striking and enigmatic-- and artfully constructed.

Case and Newman trade lines, finish each other’s thoughts, reveal the unspoken meanings of the songs; they’re old friends who find sustenance in each other’s presence. The essential humanity at the heart of this relationship offsets the dread that flows throughout In the Morse Code of Brake Lights, and gently leads the record toward something resembling hope.

It sounds like like a lot of learning and a lot of loving went into this album, and the result is FaltyDL at his most open.

Dead Meat’s sound may be a throwback, but it’s so tunefully crafted that it charms the way it did the first time around.

If Timeless feels slighter than its predecessors, it’s no less assured, its purpose no less profound: to get you moving, even in quiet moments.

Changes in Air neatly inverts the structure of its predecessor: where A Series of Actions strewed a sparing few twinkles across a vast empty space, here Coverdale throws open the blinds and floods every nook with light.

Ambitious and complex, it's stuffed with cocooning harmonies and shimmering, sunlight-smacking-the-Pacific melodies--a languid, easy West Coast record (think Randy Newman or SMiLE), infused with classic East Coast anxiety.

Away’s scope may be personal, but its takeaways are universal. It’s a touching album about moving on, about the satisfaction of leaving the past behind before it leaves you.

But with all the excitement and decadence drained out of the music and the voice, the trite themes stand out a bit more clearly.

This is rock music that has come almost completely unstuck from the blues, with a sleek, relentless drive subbing in for swing.

The record functions as a well-executed sampler of the magnified pain and horror we've come to expect from this band.

Her most experimental album yet, a meditative foray into swirling loops and pure drone. The physical trappings of her primary instrument largely melt away.

Spirituals is peppered with clunky, too-literal lyrics that disrupt the spell cast by the music’s emotion. But by the end, we get a glimpse of the next phase of Santigold’s artistry—a project not bound by genre, form, physicality, or language.

Too often its soundtrack atmosphere is too thick, its arrangements as obvious as a painted backdrop.

Twelve Reasons is generous comfort food for Ghost's fanbase, a group slowly being whittled away by time and creeping indifference.

Fabric 69's most impressive quality--especially given the tough stuff involved in its composition--is how luxuriously listenable it is.

Chapter and Verse takes a relatively safe route, but it’s a beautiful ride: one where everyone in the car feels united and hellbent on making it out alive.

It’s a proudly ugly Frankenstein, an LP that clambers along at a fitful pace, stopping for the occasional smoke break.

Love in Shadow is a testament to perseverance in the face of uncertainty from a bandleader who has lived, worked, and loved by that ideal.

The only lull is around halfway through, when a stretch of minimal house and techno tracks threatens to pull the set’s pleasantly eccentric mood down to stone-faced seriousness. Still, it’s a slight moment among an otherwise vibrant mix that offers an enlightening peek into Lanza’s singular world.

With Demolished Thoughts, Thurston Moore solo albums have become more than fields of noise throwaways spiked with the occasional gem, more than Sonic Youth stopgaps.

Compared to the rest of their catalogue, Sympathy for Life feels broadly accessible.

It’s the most passionate batch of love songs you’re liable to hear in 2015, and they’re all about a specifically anthemic form of punk rock.

As a front-to-back experience, but album doesn't exactly stay with you.

It walks the line between naive and savvy, between earnest and winking, confessional and oversharing, bratty and bold, experimental and inexperienced.

It sounds less like a young producer enjoying the fruits of quick success than a restless experimenter figuring out what to do next. Lucky for us, the woodshed is destination enough.

Dionysus is an album of radical ambition, a work of scholarly pursuit and musical depth that explores European folk traditions, the boundaries of language, and Latin American bird calls.

Amid slashes of industrial noise and chilling silences, the two artists take turns offering similar surreal speeches about gazing up at a black airplane, a pitch-black sky, vomit, and a bird of paradise--sinister appeals to the unknown, to the unavoidable end times. These interstitials give Isa a dimensionality that seems to break a fourth wall of the record.

It’s thrashy if not entirely thrash, it’s dirty and smeared at the edges, and they remain sick of your shit, with their definition of “your shit” an exponentially expanding, spiteful blob. Even without changing much, they’re still the freaks underground metal needs.

While the final result is less cohesive, and could benefit from trimming two or three songs, there’s no denying Gibbs’ versatility.

They may have slightly diluted their sound this time around, but at least they’re struggling on their own terms. The highlights suggest there is an arena-friendly Hinds out there, still waiting to emerge in full.

For all its craft, Getting Into Knives is too casual of a collection to sit alongside The Mountain Goats’ statement albums. But while these may not be Darnielle’s meatiest songs, the rich instrumentation turns them into one of his most welcoming records.

It sags in the fourth section, where Taylor perhaps overcompensates for the brevity of K.T.S.E. with one too many ballads. Still, for an album that lives mostly in the slow- and mid-tempo, it frisks and frolics.

Marnia isn't the single touch that shatters, it's the long, steady stare that gives way to embrace.

It’s essentially a recreation of past glories that never quite hits those heights. As a piece of the Tangerine Dream continuum, however, Raum satisfies: Its unashamed drift and scale pay a tribute to a world where music is huge, omnipresent, and never ending.

Too many songs proceed from point A to B with little variation or depth. Those tracks seem to equivocate between the collagist Fog and the pop Fog, reconciling their tensions instead of exploiting them.

Watching such an undeniably talented artist blindly follow such an errant muse can be endlessly compelling, and the failure of these two albums to capture his visions and ambitions with any adequacy possesses the pull of true tragedy.

So yes, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers is just another Califone album, but it's also a reminder of just what a special thing that is.

Ultimately, this is the type of record this band is suited to making, and it richly rewards repeat listening--details and melodies that seem buried or understated eventually come to fore, slowly revealed in a mixture of organic warmth, welcome variety, and subtle complexity.

Even if Cease to Begin is a little creaky and uneven and even if it never finds the resting spot the album title promises, Band of Horses do guitar-based indie very well--well enough, at least, that the next generation of American indie bands may bear comparisons to them.

After an iffy start, Toward the Low Sun thankfully picks up a head full of steam in its closing stretch--hopefully, this momentum won't dissipate over another seven-year layoff.

The difference, as between fellow Merge band the Rosebuds' debut and sophomore albums, is a greater engagement with the prevailing indiepop aesthetic rather than long-dead flower-cliché epochs, though without quite the songwriting chops of Bell and guitarist Jeff Baron's other band, Ladybug Transistor.

Slow, sugary, and perhaps a little too safe, this is not quite the return that Cinematic fans will want it to be.

Some Cold Rock Stuf makes more sense as a collection of scattered concept pieces than a unified statement.

Staying on just this side of a Corona beer commercial, it sounds like a continuation of Bergsman's realizations carried over from East of Eden, in that a change in latitude brings about a change in attitude.