Playfully scatterbrained.

He mostly manages to boil down the macho bloat of his sources to graceful essences without underplaying the pomp.

If Turkey just misses greatness, it's because it's just too short. The whole thing is over in 18 minutes.

He's made a nice to return to form, crafting a mature album that nods to his past without being a retread.

Showtunes doesn’t rival its predecessors, but all the album really lacks is surprise. ... That’s only a minor complaint, especially considering that Showtunes has its own peculiar melancholy.

While she’s writing less about the details of her own experience, her music still speaks to life’s murky specifics.

Gist Is is full of clever turns of musical and lyrical phrase which will dispel possible accusations of self-indulgence and pretension, and somehow, within just a few listens, it becomes easy to enjoy this unusually paced album of so few easy hooks, and so many seemingly insignificant words.

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.

Her blasé delivery might seem impenetrable at first, but there is warmth and wit to her work that rewards those who are patient enough to hear its message.

The result is songs that often feel anthologized, and without interstitial dialog or music it’s not always clear how the stories they tell relate to one another as part of the narrative arc that will, presumably, someday underpin a stage show. All the same, Mann has created compelling, complex sketches of characters who are more than the cliches of mental illness that so often appear in popular culture.

proVISIONS is no exception, its array of peyote rock, twilight ballads, space cowboy soundtracks, and spooky sidetracks off the beaten path on par with the band's best work.

Imploding the Mirage has more bangers than a Killers album should 16 years after their debut and without copping to “maturity.” This band remains as absurd—marvelously so—as ever.

Ital's sense of abrasion and his notion of groove are both finely tuned, so it's all for the best when they work in parallel.

After clocks in at a solid hour--and it's an hour you'll feel, because while After boasts a stacked lineup of well-crafted songs, it's a choppy ride to make it through them all.

You get the sense of an artist whose songwriting potential hasn’t been maximized, as Callinan’s got the vocal chops to keep Embracism interesting throughout.

Collins crafts a pristine portrait of early-’70s AM radio by taking inspiration not only from the period’s definitive artists, but its discarded pop detritus, too.

Wisely, the band's sophomore effort, Pala, wastes no time submerging itself into its own indulgent environment.

Big Bad... is yet another example of his continued career elevation, signaling what is possible if you stick to your guns while caring little for what others think.

Their refusal to let the record resolve itself into something that can be easily sorted or explained makes it easy to play it on repeat, trying to find a new angle to approach it from.

Should I Remain… is lighter, looser and more concise, in the same way that you refine your story once you’ve tried telling it a few times.

Street Worms, their debut album, is a grand introduction. Viagra Boys manage to mock everyday negative qualities--boasted virility, misplaced classism, and blissful ignorance--with sincerity and ambivalence.

If there's a criticism here it's in the way these songs don't stray far from the original pieces, instead working as tasteful updates that add a dab of cohesion that was never needed in the first place. It's a treat for fans, which is really all a project like this is ever going to be. But it also highlights a continuity in their work.

Vol. 3 is at its best when Smith is at his boldest.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs spend some of Cool It Down’s sharpest moments citing and deconstructing their influences with refreshing candor. ... But every now and then, her reliable lyrical workhorse hits a brick wall.

Rather than dour, however, the album sounds concerned, perhaps even worried, which illuminates even some of its weaker or seemingly extraneous tracks. It focuses Pollard, who sounds like a man who has said so much already but still has so much left to say.

As likeable as the album is, there's no saying it won't get out-maneuvered by the next garage band that bashes out a half-hour of blue-denim melodies.

Red finds the band operating in a much cleaner, dreamier mode and mostly pulling it off.

It’s music to be escaped into, whether on dance floors or alone somewhere, filled with a little less despair.

The Messthetics is a carefree, low-stakes endeavour for its participants; recorded live off the floor in Canty’s practice room, the album captures two old pals communing with a new one, exploring the potential of their developing dynamic and sculpting ideas into song-like shapes.

GUMBO’! is an ambitious sprawl that doesn’t always work perfectly. But when it does, there’s nothing else like it.

This is heavy stuff and as fun as it can be, Cashmere is an unabashedly political record, careening from one geopolitical issue to the next the way that most rap albums treat boasts. Ultimately, though, its most impactful moments lie in the simple act of representation.

It’s ambitious, stadium-sized, and risky—the sound of Hollis wringing his newfound star power for all it’s worth. Hollis’ two brief stabs at building up star’s world through balladry feel extraneous by comparison.

Despite their abstraction over the last few years, Autechre aren't an altogether different beast than when they started. In fact, they're smarter, more refined.

The eight songs on New Shapes of Life clock in at a tidy half hour, and sometimes you wish he’d give himself the space to stretch things out further.

At four songs, Ringer is economical, but the diversity within its half-hour run time makes it surprisingly robust as well.

Williams refines her singular voice as a songwriter, bringing a focused, single-minded intensity to her songs without giving the impression that she’s ever repeating herself.

As an album, PITH begins to drag towards the end, closing with a track rightfully called “Flatness.” But as a series of singles, its meld of ’90s grunge and early-’00s noise is delightfully strange.

On Guy, she takes time to steady herself to her inner metronome, finding her voice with her dad’s help.

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.

There's a sweetly consistent mood throughout; it’s something you can put on and treat as ambient sound, but there’s also a clever subtlety in their process.

The album’s minimalist moments are its strongest.

This is music that proudly exists as sonic information, music that invites you to meditate on how a simple tone with a halo of white noise, pulsing along in medium tempo and working through different melodic combinations along a major scale, makes you feel.

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.

Cooper and Hoare's deceptively simple interplay slowly worms into your synapses, as their seemingly anonymous melodies gain personality.

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

Despite their detailed imagery and alluring melodies, the songs on Roach are ultimately less complex than Folick’s earlier work.

In contrast [to 'Donuts'], The Shining is more of a general audience record, by virtue of its song-length tracks and pervasive vocals from Dilla and his crew. As such, it presents challenges that Donuts didn't.

As strange and surprising as anything Whitehead has ever made, these 10 songs bristle with an exploratory energy that has long been his best (if rather inconsistent) asset.

The Two Worlds finds ways to communicate between these modes [fantasy and emotional urgency], interior and exterior, resulting in a portrait that feels full and honest.

The album probably doesn’t need to be 100 minutes long. Its length might have worked better if he had more neatly divided its 18 tracks into a right-brain and left-brain side, rather than breaking up its flow by zigzagging between satin-finish soul and misted minimal house. But the few surprises scattered along the way that make its unpredictable course feel worthwhile.

Though Contact is mostly a one-man endeavor, the music generates a sense of proximity, of presence. That tension feels both like an ironic reminder of our current isolation and a gesture toward a more communal future.

Craggy and hard as hell, you'll wish Chance of Rain forged a few more such moments [like the title track], but its consistent, nagging ability to knock you off balance is worth wrestling with.

A deep, abiding melancholy runs beneath the record’s house-party vibe. Bear’s cool sigh frequently sounds like the aural approximation of bedhead, his vowels tousled, his consonants shying away from the light.

With Chill, dummy, P.O.S avoids retreating into the program of Never Better, while also one-upping his prior outing.

Nothing sounds belabored, nothing overthought. Sheff even allows himself to understate like never before..

The record isn't the home run Boosie probably needs. It could stand to be trimmed a bit.

Recorded far from home, these tracks document a band made restless by history, the blur caught in a distant mirror. ... The breadth of R.E.M. at the BBC does become a little absurd; as much as I love “Losing My Religion,” I’ve never wanted to compare six slightly different versions.

No one aspect of Ali's personality really dominates. The Truth Is Here is all the stronger for it, and that can only be considered a good sign.

Even removed from the context of the live performance, Tissues remains charged with resonant beauty and keen-eyed focus, despite the pervasive air of disquietude. Its duality never strives to pull itself apart.

Lambert balances her high-spirited romps with more contemplative numbers, cooling off long enough to reflect without flagging Wildcard’s momentum.

Young God's version is rattled and haunted, with guitars and voices that sound damaged and weary.

While deeply impressionistic, Lamp Lit Prose inverts its predecessor’s emotional black hole, largely thanks to its revival of airy Bitte Orca-style compositions and a pick’n’mix guest list.

While there's nothing revelatory production-wise if you've heard Lootpack's Soundpieces: Da Antidote, there's a little workshopper's insight in these protoypes for The Unseen-caliber bluntedness.

Now a bandleader of a live ensemble rather than a solitary synth programmer, he has opened the door to an entirely different sort of career for himself, one where concerns for the dancefloor shrink away to nothing, and the possibilities of repetition are infinite.

Howard's Brainfeeder debut shatters expectations, offering an always shifting balance of alien and familiar. [But] It's not perfect.

In Camera is an impressive debut for both band and label.

They don't sound like a mélange of other bands anymore; they sound like Early Graves, and that's a damn good band to sound like in 2012.

Keeping solidly in line with the Brainfeeder tradition, Nostalchic is a forward-looking album, warm and comfortable but never obvious.

Like most of Kilgour's solo work, it has a relaxed and quietly accomplished air.

One of Speedy Ortiz’s strengths is that beneath all the instrumental layers, there’s a narrative puzzle to unpack. Sad13’s Slugger solves its puzzle for you, but in the hope that you will be able to go at it alone in the future.

Main Attrakionz, who are sharper and more consistent than ever here, even if the high points don’t quite match those of 808s II.

Streten explores his sonic palette with varying degrees of success on Flume.

I'd say Fading Trails is the best Magnolia's done, unless you count the nominally Songs:Ohia-made Magnolia Electric Co., which I do, and which is still the best Molina product out.

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.

If the results aren't necessarily the kind of up-front and accessible electro that would appeal to their "Hustler"-adoring base, it's definitely an interesting shot at regrouping and concocting a few rapidly refined ideas.

Tragic Magic grows more involving with each track. When two artists this distinctive and identifiable come together, you want to hear them make a third thing that wouldn’t exist without the collaboration, and the progression of the record finds them steadily feeling out that place.

There’s a moment in virtually every song where a single loose strand seems to break free and float skyward and it’s there, in the languid sway, where Snow truly takes hold.

On tracks like “Olden Days” and “Rainbow of Colors,” Young’s basic folk melodies are rendered grittier and heavier by the band, if no less tender.

His new one, a solo rap record called FEVER, confirms he’s still a serviceable emcee prospering as a session leader with a sense of purpose.

It’s complicated. There are no punchlines. In these songs of existential despair, a change in perspective is its own kind of revelation, as is Barnett finding the few good words to describe it.

So naturally the big question now is if the rest of Get Color lives up to the promise of 'Die Slow.' The answer is that it does... kind of.

No knowledge of his long, shadowy history is needed for Dance of Love to work its charms: Its understated joy and gratitude are palpable.

While it's no Manifest Decimation, Retrash is still one of the year's most notable mutations of thrash, and Oozing Wound show a lot of promise to get even weirder.

Toying with sound and rhythm, noise and melody, Square is less minimalist than Hope, more fractured than Second.

Traditional Synthesizer Music feels not so much traditional as a refresh: a suite of music that is crafted and ferociously complex, but at its root a pure and primal thing, high on its own chaos.

Rough Carpenters sounds vibrant and enveloping, an old-time feat for these mercurial times.

The gifts of Precious Art are more apparent when comedy shades the melody instead of overshadowing it.

Even with the apparent shifts and changes, all four of Swedish's songs would have fit snugly on Heartland. But Pallett is hardly running in place, either. In fact, he's created such a comparison-resistant framework for his unique sensibilities that no matter where he takes his sound, he'll sound like no one other than himself.

A slippery, engrossingly genreless take on the old theme of desolation in the city.

In truth Who Killed Amanda Palmer spans a decade of songwriting, and by 'Leeds United' the disc has revealed itself as a broad collection of rich character studies born of Palmer's lyrical acuity, likely laced with personal touches that nudge some of the material toward the at least loosely autobiographical.

Although the sensitive side it reveals is less developed than their established one, it's just as intriguing.

While Maps & Atlases are milder and less daring than either of those bands, Perch Patchwork is eclectic and consistent enough that each detour offers its own small reward.

If Favourite Worst Nightmare is notably lacking something, it's another song like the debut's standout, "A Certain Romance".

By only gently nudging the musical formula on It's a Bit Complicated, Art Brut have succeeded in crafting a satisfying half-mature sequel, but may have only delayed, rather than thwarted, the sophomore jinx.

Blue Raspberry proves that Kirby is particularly dialed in on these vicissitudes of intimacy. With a little fine-tuning, she could transcend.

This production is ultimately what makes Paradise such a standout; there are plenty of young industrial and noise-rock bands running hard on all cylinders, as Pop. 1280 did on their prior efforts. The extra gears and moving parts in their sound feel like necessary moves to avoid quick and certain burnout.

While the amount of raw material here may be daunting for some, there are plenty of surprising melodic moments to indulge in.