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.

Like so many country albums, especially recent ones by Monroe's friend and bandmate Miranda Lambert, The Blade could be stronger if it was more streamlined and sequenced with some kind of overarching narrative in mind, but that's almost beside the point when the album sounds so damn good.

There are solid hooks scattered all over No Life For Me, and they sound like they could've been knocked out in five minutes--each melodic note notches in the expected place over thrumming power chords and steady drums.

This is Ducktails’ most discriminating and tasteful album, but the project is at its best when there's a certain amount of exploration even within its narrow parameters.

There are moments on Gold and Stone when it seems like these songs long to wander off, to further explore some of these textures and moods, but not a single track extends past the four-minute mark, almost as if out of fear of throwing the album off its tight schedule.

It’s not that the album is bland, it’s that it doesn’t really do anything or go anywhere.

Here, and on the album’s other highlights, the air of mercantile anonymity feels generous rather than cynical, the music as anxious to accommodate its imagined audience.

The moments where things sound like they’re spilling over, bleeding outside of the track's imaginary lines, are when LP is most thrilling.

The strangeness and slightness of Instrumentals 2015 is admittedly refreshing in our age of overdoing it, and it does fit with the whisper that is Pearce's overall career arc, but when placed next to Flying Saucer Attack's best music, it still comes off like a faint echo.

Echoes is more of a grab bag: Enormous festival fillers and hard-nosed club bangers rub up against wondrously bizarre studio experiments and some of the best pure pop songs Rowlands and Simons have ever made.

Instead of opening up new possibilities in the originals, Beam and Bridwell unwittingly demonstrate how limited certain songs can be and therefore how unsatisfying certain covers can sound.

Isbell is obviously familiar with the music of the region, yet Something More Than Free sounds nondescript and--worse--placeless.

Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone seems geared towards introducing a contemporary to the High Priestess of Soul, and how well it does that remains to be seen.

Sometimes the songwriting relies too heavily on swelling harmonies and crescendos, and occasional lyrical clichés grate.

Nearly every proper song on Currents is a revelatory statement of Parker’s range and increasing expertise as a producer, arranger, songwriter, and vocalist while maintaining the essence of Tame Impala.

Transferred and restored from S&M Recordings’ original LPs and tapes by Emmons himself, How Far Will You Go?'s 16 tracks are threaded together by deft production details and a forthright sense of humor that posits the duo as unsung heroes of those glam, pre-punk years, which, in essence, they were.

Sometimes Williamson sings, after a fashion, which is where Key Markets gets weird, in much the same way that early Fall records got weird when Mark E. Smith tried to carry a tune.

Atheist's Cornea maintains an urgency that’s palpable even for those who don’t speak Fukagawa’s native language.

As a whole Lucky 7 sounds a lot like everything else Statik Selektah has done up to this point; the album is neither offputting nor particularly exciting, and it's hard to feel strongly about at all.

Homesick is not quite a concept album, but there's a ghost of a narrative visible in the record's bookending tracks.

Whereas that band [Title Fight] used shoegaze and sludge as references and jumping-off points, Creepoid treat it like the whole point, and the album grows wearying long before it's over.

For all of their upgraded production, instrumental technique, and influences, All Is Illusory sounds like a record that primes the Velvet Teen to succeed around the time Cum Laude! was released—but making the best "2006 indie rock" record of 2015 makes them stand out in a way that they hadn’t managed yet.

The Internet’s songs have always felt like scenes of salaciousness happening just out of earshot. Ego Death finally pulls us into the maelstrom.

The effort and energy are there but the soul is missing.

The beats are all quality, but without voices there's not much they can do in three-and-a-half minutes that they don't have the strength and presence to do in two.

Pattern of Excel is similarly idiosyncratic--it feels, in many ways, like a fistful of sketches torn from the notebook and tossed to the wind. Making sense of the ways they fall is part of the pleasure of this quiet, cryptic record.

For enthusiasts of the goth/post-punk nexus, it absolutely has its moments.

The record walks well-treaded territory lyrically and musically.

It has a bigger-budget feel—stronger guests, better pacing, and a more careful consideration for its audience.

Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints is a nice reminder that footwork's version of classic rock still overflows with bizarre juxtapositions and high-wire pileups.

While he's deeply indebted to traditional sounds and familiar structures, he comes alive most when he's sewing fissures into the forms he knows so well.

We have 12 microwave-nuked approximations of Drake songs circa 2013 and Kanye songs spanning from The College Dropout to Yeezus, with none of the wit, soul, or edge.

Mercy is studiously lovely, like a brochure for paradise, and over its course it begins to feels like a sunset in Grand Theft Auto V: beautiful, but a replica.

Maybe it only all coheres in flashes, but if Meek Mill works best in bursts, then so be it.

The scope and ambition of Morning/ Evening is profound, and will hopefully inspire producers to take bigger chances and not be satisfied with pop- or club-friendly lengths. Even where Morning/Evening doesn't quite work, it's daring and expansive.

Their debut introduces a band that sounds confident and fully formed.

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.

Focusing on Wildheart's overt eroticism is one way of listening, but it's impossible to overlook just how seriously he's taking craft.

Younge’s soundtrack evokes Sly Stone’s improvised funk and buffers Bilal’s ruminating ballads, and the LP falters when it strays from that sound.

The confident diversity of My Love Is Cool indicates a band who have their own thing all figured out, who shouldn't veer from their own strange path to live up to outdated narratives that dictate what a young British band should be.

Some moments on Moonbuilding show the Orb, if not regaining their form, then offering up decent ambient music. But elsewhere they revert back to a formlessness that's devoid of their quirky stoner persona.