Versions, presented now as a complete overhaul and re-imagining of Cellar Door, nudges their Balearic soft rock tendencies back toward their dubby fundamentals, offering drastically warped takes on that underwhelming album.

These ninety-second-ish ditties are too gaunt and echo-ridden to stand alone as memorable singles, but within the tempestuous framework of the album, their vulnerability hits like a late-summer thunderstorm.

No No No may sound ineffectual after a cursory listen, but it reveals some subtle pleasures if you keep it in rotation.

The specter of mortality haunts the proceedings. Despite all of this, it's a testament to Chinx's still-growing pop smarts that Welcome to JFK is sometimes a lot of fun.

Leaves Turn Inside You, out of print on vinyl for over a decade, is Empire’s main event, the career high this entire box set series has been leading up to. But despite its low standing in the band’s discography, Challenge for a Civilized Society is worth revisiting, too.

For the most part, Me is a requiem for a doomed romance, and the greatest measure of Rodriguez's confidence is just how candid and vulnerable she allows herself to be here.

Faith in the Future is a character-driven record, even if it doesn’t restore Finn to the heights of his mid-2000s heyday.

There's no romance in the songs where the duo confront their demons (Barât has also struggled with addiction and depression), but they're still full of fight.

What's most remarkable about this album is, despite the high gravitas of the subject manner, it still manages to capture the yearning and imagination of youth, and never loses touch with the redemptive qualities of interpersonal connectedness.

Though it’s clear the band is refining their songwriting and getting more personal in the process, the record feels wilted instrumentally compared to their previous releases.

The five songs on the Crosswords EP sound like tracks that come easily to him, songs he knows how to make without stretching himself.

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

Dead Petz is the definition of a vanity project, an indulgent collection of experiments that exist for no other reason than because they can.

The album's six songs work within the limits of hardcore and industrial to create a monolithic record that slyly undermines its central thrust.

On Poison Season, you can occasionally detect the dismaying sound of indie rock's greatest intellect second-guessing itself.

The Meth Lab is a posse record in practice, very much in the lineage of Theodore Unit's 718, Polluted Water, or the ultimate in Wu-Tang marginalia, Ugodz-illa Presents the Hillside Scramblers.

Remember the Life Is Beautiful isn't a triumph simply because it so elegantly captures the Balearic style; it's that it so elegantly captures its spirit.

There are superficial differences in aggression—slightly more electronic buzzing, harsher vocals, gristly guitars. It’s Foals’ raw record, but it’s still filet mignon tartare.... What Went Down is their most consistent, steady-handed work yet.

In the end, enjoying the Weeknd requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and that remains true on Beauty Behind the Madness. You really have to buy into his bad-guy persona.... For newcomers, there's a whole world to explore, and on Beauty Behind the Madness it's richer and smarter than ever.

Both are more than capable of crafting memorable hip-hop music, even if they're too focused on cranking out bangers at an industrial rate to notice whether anything they've made stands out.

It's a beautiful, heavily textured, highly sensual record, heady sugar on the tongue.

At its best, Invite the Light manages to bring together Dâm-Funk’s wilder, more experimental side with his newly refined pop side to produce not just some of the strongest material he’s ever made, but some of the strongest material to arise out of the current funk boom.

The lyrics rarely transcend pillow talk, but it hardly matters; Dornik leaves the poetry to the arrangements.

Bruun has sealed many of the foundational cracks in her compositions and owned the audacity of the project and the form at large.

Stuff Like That There may not always intrigue on a track-by-track basis, but, taken as a whole, the record stands as a loving portrait of Yo La Tengo’s vast musical and social universe condensed into a small wooden frame.

It's startling to realize Pickpocket’s Locket is the odd Carey Mercer release you can almost mellow out to. Once you delve deeper than the pleasant aesthetic, however, it's hard not to wish for a few more distinguishing moments to hold onto.

Musically, Nephew in the Wild feels like a logical progression from Ashworth's past work; lyrically, however, it isn't always as clear of a step forward.

Three records into his return, on the most Spartan cut of the bunch, James is sounding more energized than ever.

Meliora is a step in the right direction, but their pandering can only go so far, and even then, it might be misguided.

It points to an artistic flexibility that will pay dividends down the road. The room to grow is there, should he decide to pursue the colors Wave[s] has opened up for him.

Gardens & Villa’s self-conscious, spindling attempts at regression and societal contemplation are admirable and occasionally catchy, but there are so many other albums--Reflektor, Kid A, even the oft-maligned, ahead-of-its-time Metal Machine Music--that navigate the intricacies of technology and society more compellingly and less heavy-handedly that you can’t help but write it off as another brick in the firewall.

Most of Hermits on Holiday is pretty spontaneous and free-form, but it rarely lapses into the stuff of jam-band nightmares.

The Expanding Flower Planet feels like an album full of trap doors, where a single, unexpected sound can deposit you into new worlds.

While Kasher’s platitudes are presented as hard truths forged from experience, most of the time, it just sounds secondhand, scripts written by someone whose worldview has been shaped mostly by Cursive records.

M3LL155X (pronounced 'Melissa') builds on her previous work, exploring ideas of dominance and submission and drilling down almost completely into the self. Instead of obfuscating her soft voice with layers of effects or singing in that cartoonishly frail and breathy falsetto, twigs prowls confidently over M3LL155X.

Royal Headache have taken steps forward since their last album--they’ve cleaned up their production and diversified their songwriting. Ultimately, though, the important bits are intact: the passion, the power, and the hooks that demand being shouted joyfully.

In every other sense it’s another impeccably measured step forward.

This affectionate tribute reveals an artist who managed--amazingly enough--to remake rock'n'roll in his own image.

Kempner has a knack for these odd little about-turns that elevate Dry Food above the usual plainspoken acoustic indie fare.

E•MO•TION is as solid and spotless a pop album as you're likely to hear this year, the result of several years working alongside a storied list of contributors.... but E•MO•TION fails to tell us who Jepsen is or wants to be.

Despite the noise and murk, it's easy to listen to—once you're a minute into one of Risveglio's songs, you pretty much know what it is and where it's going. It's music that is alien and strange, but also familiar.

At its best moments, Sounding Lines drifts in an intriguingly ambiguous space where each member invokes the genres they’re best known for playing while bending generously to accommodate their partners.

Though Dej's talent is walking both sides of that divide, she's a strong enough singer and rapper that it's great hearing her not stuck on instrumentals that straddle the genre fence.

Marela’s lyrics sometimes lack craft and thoughtfulness, like words plucked from a diary and dropped into a song without regard to word choice or rhythm. It’s a fine line between childlike and childish, and too many songs tend toward the latter.

Squint into the haze, however, and you'll discern moving parts in these simple and rootsy songs that help them resonate.

Much like the techno of yore, Persuasion serves its primary purpose as dance music, but is also intelligent, experimental, and above all, fun--all qualifiers that many of Blondes' compatriots could learn a thing or two about.

All of these songs were available as part of the 2002 Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe 2XCD. Right, all of them. Even the liner notes included here.... If you're looking for silver linings, it’s the first time 25 of the 30 songs have appeared on vinyl--purists, there’s that. And, of course, the music itself is mostly great.

Jamison's most captivating and personal album yet.

Live at the 12 Bar, unlike much of Jansch’s catalogue, isn’t perfect. You hear mistakes, clumsy knocks at the microphone stand, and even his breath as he plays. But mostly, you hear this master traversing a musical map of his life, hard times and all.

Ultimately, she makes Faded Gloryville sound not so much like a place of diminished opportunity, but endless possibility.

Knowing that this is Dre's finale, there's a pleasant melancholy that frames Compton, and with the music in our ears, acknowledging that maybe that's for the best.

Jessie Jones is a well-rounded introduction, one that holds little back.

Fortunately, Body Complex never gets bogged down by ambient music's wallpaper associations. This isn't music for living rooms; it's music for living in.

What Love Is Free does so well, and so simply, is hone in on just the beauty of finally letting go, physically and mentally.

It’s evident that Deaf Wish can adopt just about any sound or style that they want to, and that’s what they seemingly tried to do on Pain. For many other bands, that approach could muddy the waters or create a convoluted listening experience, but this doesn’t happen here. They choose to be themselves--each one of them--and it works.

Works is a crisp, punchy-sounding record, not far from the unfussy, live-in-a-room feel of early triumphs like Prairie School Freakout.

The songs are long and dynamic, pushing their boundaries to the limit while maintaining spaciousness.

More deadening than the suffocating arrangements and production or the nonexistent hooks is a tiresome perspective that goes beyond the Weeknd and connects to a celebrated lineage of male authors who assume an inherent profundity in treating a psychosexual crisis of mid-twenties masculinity as miserably as possible.

Some may find that the new transparency makes his work a bit pedestrian, the work of another guy with a guitar and a few chords sharing simple sadness. But Ahmed’s senses of song and arrangement remain highly idiosyncratic, where verses spill into choruses and solos in unpredictable fashion.

River runs so well as a unit that, unless you’re able to spot the tunes or sleuth the liner notes, you likely won’t detect that Bachman didn’t even write two of these numbers.

In Slim Twig’s incessant and overbearing winks to the camera, he’s lost sight of his own potential.

Intimate and slow-moving, Woman is good but underwhelming.

Whine of the Mystic is musically plainspoken and direct.

Some of the songs may even leave you thinking they could use another element, but in the end, it's nice that they remain as spare as they do, the edges left soft and fuzzy, the way you see things in the dark.

The undercurrent of darkness in La Luz's music is what makes their work so fierce and intelligent. You could blink and miss their sneaky, underhanded way of slipping unease into their cheerful-sounding songs.

If you like DeMarco, you'll like Another One. It's like a novella, or a made-for-TV movie--something to chew on while we wait for the next major project. It riffs on his established formula.

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

On much of the album, repetition crosses into redundancy, especially true on the two Modeselektor-produced tracks, "Tawwalt El Gheba" and "Enssa El Aatab".

After a while, even unremitting noise and relentless nihilism becomes rote and, frankly, kind of boring. Without the occasional beam of light, it's hard to actually appreciate how dark--or how good--a band like HEALTH can actually be.

Y Dydd Olaf is a crucial minority language record, but Saunders' beguiling melodies and execution also make it one of the best British debuts of 2015.

Living Legend isn't bad, exactly. It's a consistent release with no substantial misfires, full of densely packed verbiage and grand gestures, reminiscent of a time when technique, style, and personality seemed inseparable, interrelated qualities in a rapper's arsenal.

It might be their weakest album, but Presence is among the most special; none of these songs sound like they could have come from another record.

Zeppelin's most singular record, if far from their best.

Coda is a great listen with a skip button close at hand.

The rhyme skills and lurid way with imagery that first brought the group to national attention remain on display throughout the album, but YRN's warring agendas suggest a few more tries are in order for the Migos to get their formula sorted.

This is sparse, windswept music, full of warm, circling guitar plucks, gathering echoes, and long, slow fades.

Rather than build off each other's styles and arrive at a cumulative, comprehensive sound, Teenage Time Killers' revolving cast have conflated quantity with quality, resulting in a pedestrian product that, at best, offers a decent soundtrack to throwing back beers at Punk Rock Bowling.

On Cascade, he’s back to forestalling that knowledge through repetition, which is what gives his abstract pieces their surprising sentience and unaccountable melancholy. The machine is doing the work, but the composer has done the thinking and feeling, and that makes all the difference.

At its best, it feels like an opportunity for two daring drummers to explore with and without their kits.

For an album reportedly inspired by Carl Sagan, the 10-song, 36-minute Momentary Masters is remarkably lean and focused.

His debut album, Knockin' Boots, could actually be the best LP-length statement to come out of house's reawakening.

She is deft and adaptive, at once inspiring dancing and melancholy reflection: La Havas is always in motion.

Where previous PE releases this century have often sounded dated, this one often sounds forcibly modern, the sonic equivalent of your tech-challenged granddad trying to use Spotify.

The production is dense, thin, and minimal, the guitars and drums pushed tight to give all these lyrics extra oomph.

A 29-track, 93-minute rock opera that immediately restored their claims to outsized ambition, as only a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera might.

With this crystalline collection, Watkins Family Hour offers a more compelling insight.

You can quibble with the inclusion of familiar material in a Bootleg Series package, but you can't argue--not yet, at least--with the unreleased depths of the Davis vault.

Seraph might be shifty, but Arsenault still works with blunt force.

The aesthetics of her songs with Hershenow remain timid and careful.

It's not exactly Sic Alps Mk. II, but there are some clear similarities. The record's eerie psychedelic pop strikes a similar balance of order and chaos, with songs that rev up only to be subverted by detours into dissonance and static.

Throughout it all, his arrangements burst with a vitality that belies their modest construction. The sounds may be humble, not that much more hi-fi than his early demos, but their vision of funk as lifeblood is never anything less than radiant.

Star Wars is their strongest record in a decade.

Mable might not be a knock out of the park—"Bench" sounds like lukewarm Weezer, and the five-minute "Out of Body" seems out of place--but it might be one the catchiest sets of pessimist punk songs since Fireworks’ Oh, Common Life.

Locrian chose to slow down and create consecutive meticulous albums. They are isolated and involved worlds of sound.

They are a powerful outfit, and Subjective Concepts is cohesive and fierce.

Future was always straightforward, never ashamed to confess his depression or infatuation, but the narratives never felt so focused, nuanced, or vulnerable than here.

Barring a couple of forgettable, filler-feeling tracks like "Don't You Think I Know?", the biggest drawback of Does It Again is the production. It doesn't sound bad, but the washed-out reverb and pushed-to-the-front keyboard creates a distance that the band sounds like they are constantly fighting to push through.

This set is the document we've been missing of the onstage Family Stone of legend: the tightly knit extended family that sang and played together, the group that magically united black and white audiences. If it doesn't quite live up to their radiant reputation, it comes pretty close.