Burnt Offering has its own kind of subtlety, and most of it is in the interplay between meter, genre, and mood.

Represents two artists pulling each other closer to dangerous, interesting edges. Their brand of amelodic pandemonium has the same risky yet satisfying quality of watching acid burn through steel.

In some ways, this feels like a segue, a hint that adult contemporary is the center to which Lovato will ultimately return. But it doesn’t undermine the album’s essential spirit. Planning for forever when every day is a fight—that’s defiance.

If, like me, you're one of the admirers, then there's plenty to like here. If not, well, give it a shot anyway-- who knows, you might find something you like.

The best ones spit in the face of death; this album instead finds aging men trying to reclaim their youth.

This foggy unease and blankness communicates itself everywhere on Sleeper, a frustratingly imperfect record that nonetheless holds onto the essential mystery that sparked my curiosity.

It's arguably his best of the calendar year, thanks to strong songs as well as the band’s sensitive accompaniment. Rather than evoke the romanticism of the road (as Sun Kil Moon did on 2003’s Ghosts of Great Highway) or the emotional detachment of touring life (as Kozelek does on every live album), Desertshore pry open his brain and soundtrack his thoughts.

Clocking in at 76 minutes, The Colour in Anything is Blake’s wonderfully messy dive into maximalism.

Despite the album’s dark, damp, sepulchral title, light manifests numerous times on Tomb. In the dizzying chime of his careful fingerpicking and high-pitched howls, De Augustine captures love’s bright blaze.

They’ve still got it: Murdoch’s droll reflections on youthful bliss are heightened by a flitting violin and a heavenly little bridge that flies high with a trumpet and Sarah Martin’s topline vocals.

Interplay does just about enough to keep everyone happy: Shoegaze fans get a sonic-cathedral finale, while Ride follow their creative whims. Without many truly great songs, though, Ride might have been wise to play to their strengths, rather than coveting someone else’s.

COLD 2 THE TOUCH honors Angel Du$t’s tradition of fast songs and feisty spirit, but it also affirms that they’ll never settle for retreading ground they’ve already stomped on.

It's an impeccably polished and careful record. But like a shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck, sophistication can wear a guy out.

The story of a young female songwriter pushing back against the sexist songwriters on her major label and modern pop’s oppressive beauty standards is an impressive one. The cautious Sucker Punch could do with more of that insurrectionist spirit.

A fine follow-up, Gentle Stream captures its namesake in soft, skilled hands.

Jackmaster lets his choices breathe and doesn’t hurry from cut to cut for the sake of covering more ground, even as tracks pool together and reform anew.

In Another Life is visionary in both content and form: The first half is filled by the 24-minute title track, while the flipside offers three versions of the same basic song, but with different singers, lyrics, and moods. Both sides are slow and pleasingly repetitious, quiet rebukes of the mania of modern life.

While the textures of shoegaze are everywhere, the closest thing to a shoegaze song is “Rose With Smoke,” a spare, guitar-only instrumental that acts as an intermission. Everywhere else, the band sounds locked in and linked together—if you want to catch the sense of play, just focus on Zimmerman’s giddy basslines—and the result is the kind of slow-release euphoria you get from an afternoon catching up with old friends.

The Stimulus Package would work better as an album if Free had a little more help directing his skills, or if he just decided to rap hard on every song instead of tying himself to concepts. But even the goofiest songs here are still fun listens, and a few tracks come close to capturing his old brilliance.

New Build's arrangements are impressive and uncomplicated throughout.

Even at six tracks, it’s stunning how much life (and death) Wareham spreads over these tracks, and makes these tiny whispers of songs feel like the biggest secret anyone’s ever told you.

Free Humans is a passionate rebuke to both fatalism and futurism. It’s the sound of four cosmic souls resolutely staying put—not wanderers but wonderers, still in love with their own bizarre planet, and baffled by the senselessness of leaving it behind.

Unsurprisingly, the rarities on The Fine Print could make a good album, but the oddities are often distracting.

It's hard to miss the pressure the band was under to deliver here--it's nearly palpable in their overfed production and search for direction, and as a result, Odd Blood is a bit too much of not enough.

These are love songs to a community and a lineage that taught Paul how to survive.

Whiteout Conditions packs the most blanket pep of the power-pop group’s seven albums, dense with that particular new wave brand of electronic two-for-one.

Arab Strap's music is still fractured, Smog-like, and woefully beautiful. The group's pitted, narky ambience fuses Irvine Welsh with Brian Eno's Another Green World-- Elephant Shoe is ambient for the Tamazipan massive.... Arab Strap's depression is as addictive as their expression of it is alluring.

Ghost have emerged as one of the most formidable (and important) rock bands I know. And Hypnotic Underworld is their rollicking masterwork.

Revelatory, if somehow pompous.

The results sound just fine-- if somewhat familiar to fans of Tortoise, To Rococo Rot, Pan American, or Radian's previous work.

Stellastarr's bold, cinematic sprawl demands a certain kind of tolerance, and might require a few listens before you're able to fully adjust to its dramatics, but Christensen is, in the end, an oddly convincing leader, and, if nothing else, you'll at least be stuck to your headphones trying to guess his next move.

TID might be Bejar's most pompous, profane, and pastoral record, but it's also his least "intelligent," rational, or linearly clever.

Had Fol Chen made good on those early impulses to really boost The New December's kinky eccentricities, it wouldn't have been much of a surprise to find it making serious inroads with new listeners. Though it ultimately only warrants selective revisiting.

Often, the band feels like they’re deliberately avoiding their old tricks, finding new ways to arrive at the same destination. Generally, the proceedings have a light touch, a gentleness that is readily apparent on the opening shuffle “Love Earth” but also on the thicker rock’n’roll of “The World (Is in Trouble Now).”

Nobody’s Girl deals mainly in ballads—sometimes gauzy, sometimes earthy, often mournful—but that form grows stale even while it suits the personal upheaval she writes her way through. When she breaks the pattern on the surprisingly psychedelic “Lose It for a While” and the driving “Strange Dreams,” where her voice skitters with nervous energy, there’s a flash of what her emotional candor paired with more compelling arrangements could achieve.

Too urgent to ignore, too pretentious to easily love, The Seduction of Kansas winds up feeling both high-concept and kind of hollow, whether inherently or in natural reflection of its subject matter.

Curious, constantly in motion, full of puzzle-like counterpoints and arresting chord changes, it's a joy to listen to, and one of the brightest, most invigorating records I've heard all year.

With this album, Butler has thrown caution to the wind and his soul-searching has created some of his best dancefloor experimentation in years.

Too much of Going Grey seems oddly unwilling to risk offense--the concepts of “Far Drive,” “Everyone But You,” and “Grand Finale,” songs about various lovelorn states, could be the work of any pop-punker with a passing AP English grade, feeling as perfunctory and indistinct as the hyper-compressed, airless music surrounding them. Stella’s still got his tics, but by this point, they can feel like shtick.

The album is full of these little tweaks and stamps and glitches, and they seldom feel gimmicky. “Domino” is Mercurial World at its most thrilling: the best hooks of the album paced like a video game rollercoaster, maximalist glitter rush followed by sinuous soprano descant. It’s genuinely evocative.

At times his extremely online subject matter takes the bloom off his writing. But his innate ability to shift between breakneck flows amid chaotic production buoys the album.

Edge of the Sun sounds newly invigorated and inspired as Calexico reconsider their own past and find new music to explore.

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

Ring is electic, beat-heavy, and easy to like. A sneakily confident debut that should please listeners at almost every turn.

Some of the playfulness of their early days is missed on Best of 00-10, the loose analog charm of their earliest songs would have given the collection a little more lift. But these 17 songs collectively are a hell of a strong argument for why you're still reading about Ladytron now instead of, say, Miss Kittin or Fischerspooner or Peaches.

C.A.R. is an excellent, devastating record, a chronicle of the amiable pessimism and occasional nihilism of a rapping Bukowski who can't seem to find a way out of the condition in which he finds himself.

Unhinged as it is, it’s a cathartic expression of the way the world is: messy, ugly, and real.

Samia’s voice alternates between plainspoken and liltingly melodic, occasionally suggesting doubt and ambivalence. But an edge often enlivens her bittersweet, uneasy lyrics.

Their identity isn’t as sharply defined here, but the hooks and surprises on S.W.A.G. are strong enough to fuel their soul-searching.

While there's variety from track to track, the group continues to mine the common ground between Silkworm's tasteful classic-rock inclinations and the pastoral majesty of Seam.

What hits quickest yet lasts longest are his more wistful, sentimental tunes.

Most songs are stuffed with diverging melodies and dense instrumentation. But Dupuis is such an adept songwriter and accomplished singer that the excesses are part of the appeal.

Beabadoobee is well-suited to imaginary worlds: Her lyrics are often more form than function, her words merely vessels for sounds.

Many tracks from these shows have been released before, but on this box you can listen to them bootleg-style, with all the repeated songs, tuning breaks, and banter with the audience.

Honeymoon just synthesizes ideas she's been vamping on from the beginning into a unified work. She figured where she was going long before she got there; with Honeymoon she has finally arrived.

Another solid (if not necessarily great) record.

They’re more interested in making a lovable rock’n’roll record than a pointed political statement, even though at its best Endless Rooms happens to be both.

Produced in spurts of Dropbox exchanges and playdates over the span of two years, but working on a strict deadline, LP2 stresses proficiency and immediacy.

The results were massive--the myriad "best show ever" kudos deserved.

His style has finally caught up with his intellect, and while his beats are passable but unexceptional, his voice locks onto and scans over them so ferociously they're almost obliterated.

Night Music's rawness--Jaumet even manages to make a saxophone, that treacly emblem of kitschy synth-pop cocktail bar culture--sound visceral and disturbing on "At the Crack of Dawn"--is what separates the album from the glut of 80s jackers.

Breakers effectively conjures a space unto itself, but it's one that lacks an easy entry point.

Sister is shorter than its predecessor The World. The Flesh. The Devil, but suffers from the same fate: the disappointing, overlong ending.

All that touring and woodshedding has apparently taught them not to waste a note, because the first side of No News from Home has a determined cohesion, sequenced to evoke the choppy rhythms of the road. Almost inevitably they lose some of that focus on side two, whose songs don’t have quite the same sense of purpose or that same sense of movement.

Untitled is, crucially, not nihilistic. WALL point out the state of reality and attempt to exist within the never-ending nightmare. Together, the songs on Untitled paint a picture of a city in a time of uncertainty.

The Storm Sessions’ improvisation has the spirit of adventure, but the album winds up feeling stuck at home.

The pirate-radio conceit simultaneously buoys and constrains an album bursting with ideas. Its themes help rapid-fire changes in direction cohere, but fully fleshed-out tracks sit awkwardly within a headlong spin across the radio dial.

Whether experienced alongside the film or on its own, Halo’s Midnight Zone is an object of bleak, almost terrifying beauty: a snapshot of a forbidden world, and perhaps a warning that some treasures are best left buried.

It’s frequently a difficult listen, and not for the reasons Garbus intended.

Come Feel Me Tremble suffers for its lack of cohesion.

Muhly has talent and an eager curiosity; the problem is, this inquisitive intelligence often finds more meaningful expression in his interviews (or on his gabby, regularly updated blog) than in his music.

"Bloom" is also what these 10 songs do, each one starting with the sizzle of a lit fuse and at some fine moment exploding like a firework in slow motion.

Years in the making, a little death is rousay’s most polished and straightforward work, one that seeks to take her from collagist to capital-C Composer.

It's hard to know what Sufjan fanatics, who have been waiting four years now for a proper full-length follow-up to Illinois, will make of this one-off, but Run Rabbit Run serves as a welcome reminder that his curious, try-anything spirit is part of what got our attention in the first place.

Almost all of the songs on The English Riviera sound great, yet few of them really emotionally or physically involve the listener, and there's little to take away besides an appreciation of that effortlessly attractive sheen.

With Best Troubador, Oldham reflects the format’s most expressive tendencies—to filter an artist’s work through the lens of your fandom. Through these songs, Oldham’s appreciation for Haggard seems to stem less from his innovation within the genre than for his patient evolution and longevity.

As with Cheap Queen, Hold On Baby doesn’t achieve any great innovations, but thanks to their stylistic and structural instincts, and their innate star power, Straus still manages to thrill.

Why There Are Mountains ends up being like any great result of wanderlust--here, the journey is the end not the means; fortunately, that gives Why There Are Mountains astounding replay value.

This one finds them starting to pull all those ideas into something a little more focused, something easier to digest.

Luckily, by the time we get to lead single “Sunday Love” The Bride has hit its stride, the track’s shuffling drum loop and plucked strings transporting listeners directly into the mania of the Bride’s pure heartbreak. From there, what began as a slightly unbalanced collection begins to take shape.

By sticking so closely to the script laid out by their debut, II is the one thing punk rock should never be: careful.

Every element on Springtime-- the relaxed tempos, fluid arrangements, dark moods, unobtrusive instrumentation-- is deployed in service to Holland's decidedly eccentric voice.

Hit to Hit’s final quarter, which the band recorded as an ensemble, takes a more grounded approach. But after a record of instant gratification, these gentler tracks have a tendency to melt together.

Several Shades of Why gives us that softer, gentler J Mascis. But it's not kids' stuff -- these are lullabies for adults, offered up with a compassion that doesn't come easy.

So while they've long segued from fin-de-siecle Brooklyn to edge-of-the-continent Silver Lake, losing more than they’ve gained along the way, TV on the Radio are still capable of conquering big stages and broad sonic territory with the kind of precision and power for which their increasingly desperate older contemporaries need to rely on expensive stunts.

None of Smith's previous records-- and in fact, very few indie releases this year-- have flat-out rocked like this one, with blaring trumpets signaling snares to exact their force beneath sweeping multitracked vocal choruses that simply won't stop crescendoing.

Time to Go Home is a beautifully composed record about confronting your fuck-ups, but it’s also a record about feeling numb to them.

Heavy on ballads and low on energy, Banhart sometimes comes in danger of scrubbing away any remnants of his once-magnetic personality. Occasionally, though, Ape approaches sparse brilliance.

Get Yr Blood Sucked Out is confident, psychedelic, hard-hitting, and the best noise they've made yet.

Rise Above will drop plenty of jaws, and, like Deerhoof, Dirty Projectors are restructuring rock on a compositional level rather than a sonic one.

Here's to Taking It Easy is a great record, but I feel like Houck's best is still in him-- the one where the deep roots of tradition will finally be inextricably fused with his own weird, shambling soul.

There are great stand-alone songs here, like the 1960s-at-78-rpm sugar rush of "Eyes", but Apollo Sunshine is best listened to in a full dose and appreciated in all its messy glory.

No particular melodies, images, or moods really stick out from the vast, dreamy atmosphere that washes over you while you're listening.

One thing he is remarkably good at across his body of work is letting in disarming moments of vulnerability, where he pulls you in to spectate upon the wreck of his life. On Phantom Radio there are just a few too many times when it's all dressed up in unnecessary complication.

Some of the rougher edges and raw(er) emotion that got the twins noticed in the first place get ironed out a bit. And one side effect is that a few of the album's final tracks sound somewhat similar in tonality, tempo, and their vibe. But Ibeyi still find subtle ways to create shape.

His openness to creative inspiration in far-flung cities has paid off. If this is what he came up with in a fortnight, running on what couldn’t have been much sleep, the wait for what he does next should be worth it.

Rocky consistently entertains without delivering any one-liners, and the album is sequenced to mask some of the lesser members’ weaknesses. Cozy Tapes stays true to its name.

Jake Shears is a breeze, with members of My Morning Jacket and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band gathering to lay down the tracks in single takes. The result is pretty irresistible, as long as you’re not looking for authenticity, and if you don’t mind vocals that sound like a honky-tonk take on jazz hands deployed in the service of lyrics like “Cuz baby I love you/More than the trash can.”