In execution, it's not too different from his previous works for the label. The music is busy and technique-intensive, but tuneful and meditative.

Even when A Head Full of Dreams hints at experimentation, it inevitably drifts back onto predictable paths.

[Anderson and O'Malley] find a middle ground of compromise that steers safely away from the frisson of conflict. At least they sound good doing it.

Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video. It’s like you drank a bunch of cough syrup and went to Live Aid: The Vatican.

Created alongside a young producer and fellow Dallas denizen named Zach Witness in just 12 days, the tape feels off-the-cuff, yet also steeped in history and wisdom.

In their own way Moore and Paterra write catchy music. That their tastes position them as soundtrack-buff outsiders at the fringes makes the cohesion, listenability, and passion of Shape Shift that much more of a triumph.

It's not even a requirement that you dive more than surface deep into a style before you borrow it. But Sold Out shows what a difference it can make when you hold yourself to a higher standard.

Ty Rex is also an album-length acknowledgment of Bolan's core strengths. Throughout, Segall plays it straight—the solos are never excessively flashy (sticking close to the originals) and the recording quality is slightly muffled... Of course, it's a Ty Segall record, so he still brings some of that fire.

Heard as individually and spaced many months apart, the best tracks here were diamond-hard realizations of very specific sonic ideas; placed on an album alongside songs that use similar ingredients but are markedly inferior, they rattle around in the can, perfect objects in search of the right container.

The EP has little textural detail; the music is not immersive, much less transcendent. It isn’t just a score to modern ennui but a work that itself feels indifferent.

Though her approach has calcified, the environments generated by her records are still singular, a gentle, untroubled, indefinite ambience that is very soothing to inhabit. It's like being embraced by the air.

The ensemble’s playing and the leader's compositions make Junun an easy stretch--though, crucially, not a condescending one--for listeners otherwise unfamiliar with the great variety of methods often obscured by "world music" market-speak.

It’s not so much that Adele’s lyrics are platitudinous (although they often are), it’s that the album’s prevailing sentiment eventually becomes wearying.... But regardless of how one might feel about the spiritual utility of pop music, Adele’s instincts as a singer remain unmatched; she is, inarguably, the greatest vocalist of her generation, an artist who instinctively understands timbre and pitch, when to let some air in.

The best Jeezy music often exploited how far he could go with memorable ad libs and punchlines, a triumphant kind of simplicity. Here that gets muted to muddied results.

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

The Incredible True Story is a pleasant voyage to Paradise orchestrated by an artist who’s earned the approval of legends from Rick Rubin to Big Daddy Kane. Logic has the tools to create music that has longevity, but has yet to unlock the characteristics that truly set him apart.

Mutant is an album of contrasts, and Ghersi has an uncanny ability to let extremes interact with each other to create something new.

Since the memorable tracks on Metalmania are so good, the tracks that don’t quite rise to the occasion feel all the more frustrating.

The most complicated forms of techno and footwork are built simply, from the ground up, and on Nothing, we hear the simplicity of each component and how it all comes together to make the music that we love.

Woon has, from the start, been his strongest when he lets his voice say everything that’s necessary. This might come across as traditionalist, but that is OK. With songs this good, little else needs to be said.

Many artists of Wreckless Eric’s era and tradition have imitators, but few of yesteryear’s outliers can catch up with their descendants, let alone best them. amERICa is that rare record.

There’s nothing wrong with a good glacial pace, but Von Hausswolff’s slowly unfurling arrangements, as well as her reliance on the organ as the primary rhythmic vehicle, occasionally make the record tough sledding.

The second half of the album is monochromatic and depressing, especially as it runs out to 20 tracks in certain versions.

Writing from the heart does not automatically imbue lyrics with depth. Never is it more apparent that the factory approach is not allowing Cara to fulfill her potential than on “Scars To Your Beautiful.”

Riot Boi delivers what its title promises--a transgression of pop cultural limitations--most clearly in the final three tracks, socially-conscious slow jams with far more overt political messages than Le1f's usual banger-obscured radicalism.

His confidence is why he flies when he swings for the fences on his new album, Free TC.

Where SS1 felt rambling and uneven, there is a clear sense of purpose to SS2, applying the cohesion of Barter 6 to SS1’s pop promise.

By the end of Animal Nature, Escort proves it’s gotten craftier and has found a bit more clarity, and they hit a nostalgic sweet spot that will never grow old.

There’s a gauzy thinness to the sound, an inescapable two-dimensionality that occasionally hinders Lynne’s mission. Still, this is a fine addition to their catalog, perhaps not as consistent as 2001’s Zoom but much better than these late-career revival albums tend to sound.

There is zero daylight between the artist and his vision, as he pounds tirelessly away at one very specific idea. It is less an album than a set of 15 variations upon a single theme. It is the Rustiest album possible, and you have to respect that kind of doggedness.

What follows is 13 tracks of sometimes great, sometimes anonymous music.

Montage of Heck is like a shaggier version of Family Tree, a voyeuristic document that attempts to plop you down in the living room of a dead hero, and it leaves you with a similar hollow feeling.

New York, New York is a significant artifact. The music and photographs capture the formative moments of punk and new wave, before those genres had been thoroughly defined.

Thug's best songs are carefully structured, even if they appear effortlessly thrown together, and the most effective moments tend to be subtle, sidling up to the listener.... But the album's true highlights don't arrive until its close, with the one-two punch of "Draw Down" and "Wood Would".

This might be a data dump of studio experiments, not a cohesive Donuts-like experience that casual listeners might crave. But admirers of this brilliantly inventive musician will find much to rhyme over, get inspired by, or simply bounce to on Dillatronic.

Where the group excels at assembling all the bones of a good pop song, One's lyrical content is broad even by those same standards.

The album feels just pop enough in intention that its pleasures seem noticeably absent; with a few strong exceptions, the album could be a folder of songs waiting for someone else to bring them to life.

Seems Unfair is full of characters who seem to struggle with everyday minutiae, but Jones throws a magnifying glass on what may seem to more worldly observers like small stakes.... Sometimes his plainspoken quality is too much.

What's most exciting within Art Angels is the sheer will and fearlessness of Boucher's fight to be heard and seen on her own terms.

Vertigo is a minor Necks record, destined to stand forever in the shadow of the 2013 opus Open. But, after a quarter century, the trio’s explorations still sound as ecstatic as they do limitless. That, at least, is another minor miracle.

It is more songful than anything Lopatin has done.

A lot of these songs didn't have hooks, per se, to start with. They expanded and contracted with a kind of cosmic swarm, the percussion providing a delicate skeleton. Loose as it was, without that punctuation, Vulnicura Strings can feel a little formless.

One of the best things about the AMY documentary is that its pacing feels so natural--invisibly punishing, just like life. The effect of this soundtrack is exactly the opposite. The power of her voice is undercut by the regular intrusion of the film score, which doesn't reference her musically in palette or instrumentation. As a result, the album feels like a powerful hand clasping a limp one.

The Albatross darted fitfully and stretched out in all directions, while Dealer pulls all of Foxing's influences inward. Inverting his typical role of making burly post-rock bands sound delicate, producer Matt Bayles (Isis, Caspian) boosts Foxing's fragility.

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.

While these songs can sometimes evoke other major players in her genre, she makes Max Martin’s signatures feel personal, making a mature pop record that feels like a natural progression.

The Cutting Edge is music of the present, but not the '60s present, an eternal present; the songs are about observation and they exist in a place where it's always now, in sound and word.

Each track of Under the Same Sky will undoubtedly find a home in a record bag or set list somewhere, and rightly so, as there's really nothing fundamentally wrong with any of them. As an album, though, Under the Same Sky leaves you wanting more of a moody, immersive experience, and less of its clean surfaces and precise negative spaces.

Even considering all the high points and raw power, II falters under the weight of the band's ambition.

Bad Neighbor whizzes by in a blunted haze, which might be an insult to another project, but it works well here, when the stakes are low and the mood is most important.

You have to sit still a while and let the trio’s sonic images wash over you before their musical zombies rise from the dead to terrorize the stereo space. But give this album a fraction of the patience and attention that Wolf Eyes have put into it--effort on a par with their excellent previous effort, No Answer: Lower Floors--and you’ll be glad you stayed up late enough to see how it ends.

It's a record best heard loud, because the quiet parts can be very quiet, and its spirit lies less in melodies or even moods than in tiny details.

While there's nothing here that suggests Berninger and Knopf are truly incompatible, there's equally little evidence that Knopf's spirited arrangements are suited to Berninger's spotlight-gargling word soup.

It’s Great to be Alive! is the sound of a veteran band in complete command of its back-catalog.

Dream All Over recalls the most crucial lesson of all underground rock music: become your own sound, and create a universe for it to exist in.

The Evermore journey is an engaging one, but it would have slid into a new age torpor if not for the spate of ugliness near the album’s end.

The new recordings retain their rough edge, but there's luminescence in the production--the percussion is crisper, the guitars are brighter, and Toledo's singing is a lot more pronounced.

Communion plays out like a kind of fever dream, a delirium of cold sweat and disturbing visions in which there are only brief moments of daylight before you're plunged back into the maelstrom once more.

The album is best when it’s at its broadest.

Angels & Ghosts isn't a bad record, but it's frustratingly tepid.

Liberman is excellent on its own. Carlton's voice is the key attraction on songs that register between low-key pop, rock, and folk.

Many Moons works as a remarkably cohesive album, meandering its way across themes of past and present to a state of aching clarity that's modest, but no less genuine for

Strip the clever vocal snippets away from Vibert's productions and you're left with those choice drums and goofy melodies, but there's little beyond that to mind.

Leave it to VHÖL to find another dimension to the ever-bountiful combination of hardcore and metal, where the cerebral and the primal stomp heads next to one another.

The soundscapes he's constructed on his third LP, Howl, are spiky and imposing, too solid to sink into. The music is always shifting, so it's impossible to lose track of time while listening.

It’s as unhinged as it is straightforward; as it acquires mass in the choruses it seems to list off the ground into some new, uncertain gravity. For all the blur and motion of their music, this hint of deeper chaos might be the album's most exciting moment.

At a relatively brief nine tracks, the record is a perfectly paced blast of dark pop that deftly reflects Fortune’s growing prowess as a songwriter.

As If leans a little too heavily on the groove in the middle, with moments like "Funk (I Got This)" fading into the background, but it's reinvigorated towards the end by the riveting "Lucy Mongoosey", which uses another singalong chorus as an anchor, an introspective pause among all the dancing.

Give Life some time and you might find it infecting your synapses, too.

It’s 46 songs of verbose, intricately delivered raps, spun from a story with enough character to have already made it a New York Times best-seller. There’s a lot of ground to cover regardless of medium.

This tension between plain old songs and structures and an interest in omitting details and accessorizing sounds enlivens Over and Even from start to finish.

Greatest-hits compilations in general are something of an endangered species, given that streaming-service playlists can now generate them for you, but there's still something to be said for getting a band's own take on what they deem essential.

Unless you approach Electronica 1 as a collection of unrelated songs designed to be cherry-picked for playlists--and given the generic title, maybe that's the point--there's little to hold it together.

Divers is not a puzzle to crack, but a dialog that generously articulates the intimate chasm of loss, the way it's both irrational and very real.

Thank You is still undeniably a Beach House album, a familiar mix of warm tones and chilly sentiments. With the imprint still fading on Depression, Thank You’s impact is undeniably dulled, causing a strange "too much of a good thing" problem.

Future is YACHT's would-be critique of our pre-dystopian, post-Internet culture, but it rarely comes off as more than a charismatic cover band singing us yesterday's news.

With an album replete with Spanish guitar jams, wide-eyed hip-hop, and psychedelic rock k-holes, there isn't much ground left for Raury to cover. Now, he must figure out how to do it all just a little bit better.

Alone is less stripped-down than Impersonator, but it feels less confrontational, too.

The production values are higher, and there’s even more of Palomo's queasy pitch-shifting, 16-bit synths, and disembodied samples--more of everything.

The Documentary 2 solidifies him a grade-grubbing student of hip-hop, one with far more resources and drive than natural talent, but a student all the same.

Repetition is key to this music, but after several cycles, tracks begin to plod, broken up only by Khan's vocal work. The Sexwitch interpretations lose vital elements from the originals like horns, organs, and bells.

She expresses no hesitation here, and for that, her band has never sounded better. Sure, you can come for the twin guitars and the loaded rhythm section, but at last, Cottrell has made it clear you’re staying for her.

The result sounds like something that's already been comp'ed to death by Putumayo.

Diaphanous of texture but heavy of spirit, Safe revolves upon this tension, the pressure point of a soul under strain.

No No asks a lot of listeners, that we unpack all of these fun inferences even as we're being assaulted by the 143 different sounds Co La casted into the vestige of a snare drum. No No, on balance, is worth the effort.

A pristine dream magic seems to inform Apologues--the fluid serenity of the music projects a lulling, murmured unreality that suggests that the album is a figment of the listener’s imagination even while it is in play.

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.

Clutch work best when they keep the pulley of punchlines and pummeling riffs running at max speed, and as a result, Psychic Warfare proves a tad too meandering to eclipse Earth Rocker or Blast Tyrant

If there isn't a Deerhunter sound, there's a Deerhunter perspective that runs through their work, best summed up in "All the Same"—"take your handicaps/ Channel them and feed them back/ Until they become your strengths." The weird era continues.

Nothing about Timeline is bad. It's a pretty strong release for a brand new imprint to build on. But if the same record were released from, say, Stones Throw, we might sigh, and chalk it up to another good-but-not-great album from a label that still hasn't quite figured out a unified new direction.

Dilly Dally always sound like they're being crushed throughout Sore, in a good way: They inhabit the dank space beneath dead weight, the place where the good stuff festers.

A good listen to the album today reveals some ways it was ahead of its time.

We might not learn a lot of specifics about him, but there’s a lot of honesty in his music if you look for it.

The question, going into this album, was whether he could give them purpose and meaning--whether he could put his technical mastery into the service of music at once experimental and lyrical. Where All Is Fled answers resoundingly in the affirmative.

Complicated arrangements and gorgeous melodies reveal themselves to you as rewards for your patience. Over time, even the alien voices begin to sound natural, even inviting.

The mechanics of dance music might inspire feelings in listeners, but within the genre, overrun with the egos and opinions of "bro-teurs," her emotions are revolutionary.

The extras dug up for the Tug of War reissue (the Super Deluxe Edition of each also contain DVDs of era-appropriate ephemera) make for some interesting listening—demo versions of "Wanderlust" and "The Pound Is Sinking", and a version of "Ebony" with just McCartney on electric piano. But those pale in comparison to the veritable alternate LP included in Pipes of Peace.

It's generally a meditative set, and only on the album's final track, "Exit the Acropolis", does Dozzy return to the sound with which he's most closely affiliated: Tapping out clicks like 808 hi-hats, and weaving three or four layers of mouth harp into enveloping contrapuntal pulses, it's the perfect approximation of Berghain-styled techno.