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.

Sculptor postures as a manifesto of independent thought, without saying anything specific or of substance.

For contemporary metal fans, Lights Out might sound more like Wolfmother--or a supercharged version of the Black Crowes--than an actual metal record.

Although the scattered nature of some of the songs keeps any single narrative from taking shape, the album is a significant improvement for a band that’s still coming into its own, still, in other words, in its youth.

Soft, warm, but still interestingly distant.

Between Goias and Fancy's remarkable drop-rolling bass science and the girls' bratty-Brooklynite rhyming, the better singles on here wind up sounding like something unprecedented: a booty-bass record for small children.

Not only is it the most acoustically enthralling album they've released, it's also without a doubt the most playful, dynamic, and anthemic post-rock album that has been released to date.

While alternating between derivative and rudimentary, On!Air!Library! is nevertheless well executed in its obviousness.

The loose, scatterbrain album operates much like the early solo endeavors of Paul McCartney, with 80% developed gems flowing effortlessly from the damp, rustic English countryside.... Piano, strings, harps, and wurlitzer attach insect wings to the lovely songs. They'll swarm and pester your head for days.

Unfortunately, A Long Hot Summer starts slowly. In fact, when you cop this album, do yourself a favor and skip the first five tracks.

If the listener isn't eventually caught in swoons, at the least he will respect the degree of Lerche's refined artifice.

Carousel Waltz drives a pretty flat road, without the peaks and valleys of their previous work, but that suits the grounded emotions and realizations they're addressing, skirting the line between the unaffected and mundane.

The album starts strong, but is uneven, dragging toward the end.

Rainsbury, Bailey, and Law showed long ago that they could draw a crowd with a bold gesture, but Seabed's appeal after multiple listens is in its details.

The Heart Is a Monster contains no less than six ambient interludes. A whole separate album in that style would've been nice, but even in truncated form the interludes cast Philip Glass-ian shades onto the other songs and suggest that Failure's creativity is far from exhausted.

Judged on its own merits, A New Wave of Violence is a fine hardcore record, one that manages to balance chaotic intensity with a workmanlike precision that few punk bands can muster.

Dissolution Wave crystallizes Cloakroom’s strengths while refuting the idea that concept albums are always bloated and pretentious.

VII pursues no radical new directions for Maserati, but even though you sort of already know these songs, they still have enough engaging motion and kinetic force that if you ever loved them in the first place, you'll love them all over again here.

Witch is a solid record throughout, but it is one of those records that feels like a collection of songs--good songs!--rather than an actu

Tremors is actually kinda intriguing in a “canary in the coalmine” sort of way.

Release is not Cave’s strongest record, but it’s not a bad entry point. An odds and ends compilation, it provides a clear picture of the group's evolution from free-form psych-noodling toward its more sublime and trance-inducing current incarnation.

Kweli’s flow can feel rushed and sticky, as though he can’t articulate his thoughts as neatly as he can conjure them up. But his fans are loyal. Radio Silence will comfortably shore up the base.

As much as it can sound like it stands alone, Bish Bosch is part of a tradition of music that tried to find new ways to articulate that same old misery.

It's an album with its feet on the ground and its head in the clouds, and listening to it is a lot like waiting contentedly in a kind of musical purgatory, happy to be there but still wondering what comes next.

Ultimately, Wyatt has made a sadly triumphant album that questions how our minds remember what they remember.

How to Dance is most invigorating when it sweeps the band’s easy-rolling tunes off of the front porch and drops them at the roadhouse.

It's one of the least distinctive things he's put his name on, a step backward into Southern-rap exercises that point you away from K.R.I.T.'s music and toward his heroes.

Evolution takes time, and Mastodon continue to publicly work out their growing pains as they determine which traits best represent the unified sound they’ve been chasing this decade.

While Ambivalence Avenue is an excellent album by any measure, Bibio deserves extra credit for venturing outside of his established comfort zone.

Calexico have made records that sound like this one before, but they’ve never made one with quite this much fight in it.

Ultimately, Terrestrials works as a likable listen, a liminal play concerning the push and pull between dusk and dawn. But it serves as a mere footnote or, at beast, an appealing redundancy for Sunn O))) and Ulver.

Ones and Sixes is all at once beautiful, ugly, tense, warm, inviting and repellent.

For the first time in the group's decade of existence, they've made an album that doesn't entirely live up to their reputation.

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.

Without fail, whenever a song on Emperor of Sand feels like it’s about to go overboard on the polish, the band takes it in a more jagged direction. Conversely, whenever a song runs close to rehashing Mastodon’s familiar bag of tricks, the band steps up its tastefulness and songcraft. The timing is so uncanny that you might not even notice.

Camila shines when it’s light and breezy, giving Cabello the space she needs to cook.

The resulting album incorporates considerably more atmospheric depth, including orchestral and keyboard overdubs. Pile are not growing soft, but they are growing.

Musically and emotionally, Lost in the Country is a decisive step forward.

Strange Burden is meticulous and crackling—a concise, gripping record that sparks and sizzles like a kinked spike of lightning.

Although Doja clearly envisions Vie as her poppiest album, with ’80s pop as her aesthetic of choice, the record is most interesting when she’s ignoring such distinctions rather than embracing them.

Though Band of Horses aren't likely to be heralded as trailblazers, they do sound quietly innovative and genuinely refreshing over the course of these 10 sweeping, heart-on-sleeve anthems.

The economy of Ethan Johns' and Steve Lillywhite's production helps, as do the straightforward arrangements and, most important of all, Finn's most commercial and least quirky set of songs since 1991's "Woodface," or even the group's self-titled 1986 debut.

The tracks themselves are, per Reznor and Ross's pedigrees, immaculately pieced together, richly detailed and suitably moody. Maandig, however, continues to stick out of this mix.... She still hits all the right notes, but brings a generic prettiness to her delivery that doesn't gel with the moody futurism going on around her.

Cooley’s superlative performance on English Oceans would be more worthy of celebration if it wasn’t negated by Hood’s most non-committal songwriting to date.

Little Dragon have clearly mastered their style on this album; hopefully next time around they will deliver more songs worthy of their sound.

So much of Bem-Vinda Vontade sounds so nice, with guitar and drum textures as lovely as anything the band has attempted. But the singing seems tacked on and the music suffers, resulting in Mice Parade's least consistent album.

Thought has clearly been put into the sequencing of Mediation of Ecstatic Energy.

As if to stabilize its weighty subject matter, Let the Dancers Inherit the Party is a remarkably steady album, at times to a fault.

Special Moves--which pulls at least one track from all six Mogwai albums, but no more than two--strategically positions the band's latter-day material among the old warhorses to build a set list that gradually intensifies and explodes like the band's best instrumental epics.

The album is less concerned with asserting a specific worldview than examining the difficulties of keeping one’s moral compass steady in a society that’s becoming ever-more indifferent to the things you value--and how one must remain all the more resolute once kids enter the picture.

The thrill of Monarch Season is in how she collapses these roles, offering her music as something both thoughtful and unfinished. The result is an inventive and subtly visceral record.

No single instrument dominates, nor do they act as strict counterpoints to one another. Sounds from opposite ends of the spectrum—felted resonances and sharp twangs—move in the same direction, drifting in parallel. While she rides these contrasts, Cogan sings with a smoky steadiness.

Musically, Strong Feelings reiterates Constant Companion, which is fine, because it’s a good formula and Paisley’s songs are stronger this time.

Is Is may be their most instantly accessible release, which is not a critical dig but just a way of saying it finds a good balance between alienating and inviting, between song and performance.

Sure, there's no avoiding the fact that some of these songs are appearing for the third time. The nagging "what now?" question isn't going away. But it can be filed away for later.

If you’ve been fascinated by any of Stallones’ work, Belomancie will get you stoked about not only what he’s done, but how much more he can do.

The Waterfall stalls the most during the usually incendiary guitar workouts. But this is Jim James accepting where he and My Morning Jacket are at the moment: a bit older, a bit broken, more skeptical but very much among the living.

Individual moments shine throughout FORGET: a stunning chorus here, a stirring lick of pitched percussion there. But the album’s strangest attribute is the way it can lull you into a state of absentmindedness regarding those same charms.

Tana Talk 4 never feels languid or dull, but it lacks the freshness of Tana Talk 3 and the sense of forward motion that propelled The Plugs I Met 2.

In a lot of ways, Country Sleep delivers while still making you feel like it's playing on your vulnerability.

ArtScience is the Robert Glasper Experiment’s most realized effort, mainly because they’ve stopped relying on outside talent to get their point across. They’ve created their own vibe, one that needed their own voices to truly resonate.

You & Me isn't as hard or immediate as the band's earlier records, but that's not a complaint; Its sound is coy, and invites you to spend time with it.

The album sounds ridiculously heavy, with many songs-- including the gurgling "I'm Slowly Turning Into You" and the Dusty Springfield cover "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself"-- easily trumping their studio counterparts.

There's a lot to like here but only a few tracks to love, and for every two songs that sound delightfully out of time, there's one that just sounds out of time.

Curren$y may not do "new," but he is very good at what he does: riffing on cars, money, women, weed, and obscure moments from television shows.

This is Nielson's most accomplished album, though it's not his most direct, or brash, or explosive.

Many of the songs ("Embody," "On the Lips," "Too Dark" and "Sleep Song") on the album have appeared in acoustic permutations in past work, and they make the leap seamlessly. Each are marvelously well-wrought trains of thought, cramming existential questions into the banality of everyday moments and finding something beatific even in the plainest of things.

Produced and almost entirely performed by VanGaalen, Light Information demonstrates he still has an uncanny knack for off-kilter songcraft, while also gently questioning the societal pressures that might lead us to miss the point of creating and appreciating art in the first place.

It's still a heartily ramshackle affair, with pots and pans for percussion, rudimentary banjo picking, and what sound like first take on every track. The album's clattery rawness is its chief appeal.

To be clear, Metz haven’t turned into a pop band. They’ve actually done the opposite, incorporating harmony without going soft. The fact that so few heavy bands have been able to pull that off attests to how difficult it is. With Strange Peace, Metz make it sound easy.

His best songs put his ruminations on spirituality, family, loneliness, and humanity at the center, but here he sounds like the only thing he’s surrendered is his spotlight.

Constant Future doesn't much build on previous albums, stylistically or qualitatively, but it displays a group of now-veteran dudes who know their strengths and who never stop playing to them.

Sometimes, the result is as frail and lovely as worn lace; sometimes it's just threadbare.

Noise interference is ramped up, as are counterintuitive rhythms and ugly chords, only to tie them all together into an unexpected sort of cohesion.

Taken as a full-length by two groups that treat the format with some suspicion, You, Whom I Have Always Hated is a remarkably cohesive and singular album. Though it shows signs of both responsible parties, it also proves their inherent restlessness.

Coffman doesn’t necessarily transcend the cornerstones she’s sampling on City of No Reply, but she’s not aiming to.

Each song on Fast Food, her second LP, feels offered up and expertly framed, a series of rock songs given the lighting and treatment of museum objects.

A perfect party. A perfect soundtrack to your perfect party. You'll sleep like a baby, and inevitably wake to realize that Change Is Coming doesn't play so well by the light of day.

Though lyrically ponderous and humorless, Titles and Idols is far from being an unpleasant listen.

I'm Staying Out compensates for its lack of spectacular innovation by showcasing its players' technical prowess and busting out a handful of intensely sincere performances.

Now, this is a pretty straightforward album, so the possibilities do exhaust themselves somewhat by the end; there's only so much that can be done with this sort of visceral, no-frills rock.

Each of the dozen laments on Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers balance catchy choruses, exquisite instrumental interludes, and the complex words of a man's grieving.

Feminist Sweepstakes wants to be a terrifically fun album, yet with no deviation from the ceaseless politics and endless drum machine beats, things go stale.

Anderson's baffling work rate seems to have adorned his songs with a wide variety of skins. From a curatorial standpoint, what's been arranged and sequenced here goes deep in the name of diversity.

The element that makes Family of Love sound like the work of an almost entirely different band is the massive leap in production value.

Thanks to Jónsi's impeccable vocals, a rare falsetto that loses none of its power in a live setting, everything remains indubitably the work of Sigur Rós.

Flourish is a purposefully alien and repetitive album, and at the outset, it works.... But in the second half, the iterance becomes tedious; footholds are few amidst the long stretches of vast electronic tundra and the Perish side B can feel like a sheer drop towards revelatory closer “In Kind".

The majority of the record is a classic ride-or-die Motörhead proposition, punctuated with just the right amount of breathing room.

When Reich's music quietly departs from its source material, the piece achieves lift off, as the form fades and the piece settles into a seething, anxious rhythm of its own.

Oozing Wound have matured without losing sight of the frayed ends that make their music interesting.

We’ve got some Black Metal Muzak here, competent musically but too timid to go into the depths, emotional, musical or otherwise, that black metal should strive for.

He skillfully synthesizes his influences, hitting sweet spots that feel purely of his own creation.

Lyrically and musically, this album is built to pursue the felicity of spirit that can come with following an expertly manicured path, which is another way of saying it goes where it wants without worrying about the weight of other peoples’ expectations. You can travel so much farther when you pack light.

On We Are Him--Gira's sixth and arguably most engaging album as Angels of Light--he lands some of the best of those complete releases.

While More Fish is far from worthless, it's still a diluted product.

It's an uneven but captivating album that sounds like an artist still looking for his stride and trying to balance between two extremes.

The album dips in and out of tempos, themes, and varying degrees of intensity without losing any of its urgency.