The notion of a 2xCD set of rehearsal recordings smacks of unnecessary indulgence, but whether you take this as an alternative canon of R.E.M. music or a document of a band working hard to find its future by revisiting its past, the album is successful in providing a new perspective on a classic group desperately in need of a new narrative thread.

Comparing the two releases, it’s clear that Calexico and Iron & Wine have found a way over the years to leave a little more mystery in the words and let the music provide more of the clues.

TLC's letting-go is bittersweet and good, a sometimes somber, sometimes playful requiem for their time together (and with us).

The hooks aren't quite as catchy or well-written on Murder For Hire 2 as they have been in recent months.

The problem here is that, while the guys are definitely on here, they're still nowhere near groundbreaking, and as a result, they rise and fall depending largely on Karen's delivery.

While most of the dance world continues to view the creation of a solid album discography as strictly optional, Signs Under Test is a strong entry that proves Tejada's quietly building up a legacy of excellence.

Dispensing with the irony and bombast that always seemed essential to Hot Chip’s work, this solemn collection places the onus on Taylor’s singing.

It’s a confident debut LP from a young band seizing its moment and cutting the tension with a chuckle.

Like McGregor, he set an impossible bar, and even if he doesn’t clear it, the fall leads to something arresting nonetheless.

It's nasty and explosive and full of bile, a hard rockin' bare-knuckle blow to the temple that'll lay you flat out. In other words, How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident is just the thing for the modern man, those confused and angrily impotent brutes.

For all its wholesome ingredients and folk-on-sleeve earnestness, Out of Sight settles into a space out of time, one immediately adjacent to our own, where perhaps the ancient magic hasn’t dissipated.

In short, it's familiar without feeling rote.

There are enough solid songwriting chops behind the facade to sustain him, and there's just as much-- if not more-- to be said for the production. T-Bone Burnett, Rick Will, and Arthur himself each take co-producer titles, and what results is a raw, endearing sound that blends each instrument perfectly while remaining crisp as a bell.

It’s not a conventionally sequenced DJ mix, either: Segments of seamlessly beat-matched tracks (almost certainly Kode9’s handiwork, given the style of them) abruptly give way to left turns and trapdoors.

How Many Times necessarily loses some of its steam after that song, and how could it not? “Songs Remain” is the heart of this album as well as one of the finest moments in Rose’s catalog so far, showing how heartache can change how you experience a city and how music can keep you running.

This is ambient folk, shot through with ambient anxiety.

Though these heart-in-her-hand lyrics take center stage, the production across EYEYE is both entrancing and bizarre. The album balances mourning and meditation, filling its vast, gelatinous sound field with phantom backing vocals, floorboard creaks, spaceship synths, and eerie, carnivalesque melodies.

Through wallowing in its own mire and coming out the other side, Cigarettes After Sex becomes one of those restrained, low-boil albums where tempo, repetition, and muted composition construct an entire story within the pauses between the notes and the ideas between the lines.

Oh Sees prove that aforementioned Afro-funk excursion is no random one-off experiment, but a reliable rhythmic foundation that can fuse seamlessly with their signature garage-psych sound.

P2 shows a man who is patient and relentless in honing his craft, getting closer to the debut with each track.

What was once alienating and difficult in Eat Skull’s music now reads as interesting quirks attached to pleasing packages. With III, Eat Skull is willing to be loved--and be loveable, too.

It’s dirty, smudged music, bitter with the terroir of suffering.

If nothing here quite reaches knockout-blow strength, fine--it doesn’t really need to. Goldfrapp have found their platonic ideal, and that’s ideal indeed.

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.

Love Is Not Enough is never not invigorating (save for “Beyond Repair”), but its more vicious songs are such refreshing evidence of Converge’s vitality that every departure from that energy feels like a pulled punch.

So Far Gone still scans as one of the most compulsively listenable mixtapes of a great year for mixtapes.

ny footholds you might find in the record’s craggy surface are slippery by design. But as a result, the pleasures of Space as an Instrument feel hard won, each moment of melody and peace an epiphany amid a backdrop of stormy uncertainty.

If Flying Microtonal Banana’s randomized approach is ultimately less transfixing than Nonagon Infinity’s maniacal focus, it nonetheless shows that, after eight previous albums, this band’s creativity and curiosity knows no bounds, and their singular balance of anarchy and accessibility is still in check.

An album about unfit enemies and deserved death that nevertheless delights in its own music-making élan.

The tinkering of the trim Spoon attitude has become the most engaging part of their latter-day career. For a band that seems built on a reliable formula, they remain full of possibilities.

In between appearances from Drake, Minaj, and Wayne-- who offers lukewarm verses and/or deranged-but-palatable Auto-Tune hooks on most tracks-- a slew of numbskulls, weirdos, and little kids sometimes make things interesting

While they revel in disorientation, Mod Prog Sic marks the trio’s most direct appeal to the pleasure center.

They're no Basement Jaxx, and it's easy to hope for someone with more professional skills to come fill in the Audio Bullys' blueprints.

If Krüller is warmed by a nostalgic human past, it also bears the chill of a posthuman future where the machines grind on without us, an intimation that seeps from his music like a corrosive fluid and lends these songs a bitter, heroic weight.

For a collaboration between a songwriter and a producer who helped push her to the outer limits of her vision, Melody's Echo Chamber is an impressively immersive debut.

They manage to cut down some of the weight of the sung pieces, casting them in a more unique light, while giving San Fermin much needed tension and even a bit of violence.

Unlike "Ok-Oyot System," Hera Ma Nono credits all songs to the band, as opposed to individual band members, and no doubt the results sound more cohesive as well.

It’s the rare occasion that Hermansen’s ambient interests align so neatly with his disco instincts--a small step, perhaps, toward a new era in his exploration.

The first three proper songs delve into crisp, clipped percussion arrayed into loping dembow rhythms. All three feel like clear extensions of KiCK i’s “Mequetrefe” and “KLK,” but they also stand on their own. ... The shift midway through from glitch beats to turbocharged four-on-the-floor is the rare case where Arca’s maximalist instincts miss the mark.

For an album cast as a fresh start, Fall Into the Sun mostly feels like closure.

Swimming hinted at an artist who’d finally cleared his mind and found his footing. Circles provides some resolution and helps finish Miller’s final thoughts.

The not-new songs here don't sound reworked so much as run through some kind of cartoony scrubbing contraption, Wonka Wash-style, emerging stunningly clean out the other end, the curvy surfaces all gleaming in the sun.

While the album as a whole doesn't wallop the way "She's the Dutchess" does, its more spacious, ambiguous, and, yes, adult songs are intriguing and affecting.

Throughout the album, Fuchs' playing is exemplary, but not in a showy or needlessly florid manner; he simply gets to work and gets the job done, content with being just one part of a greater whole.

Everything Wrong Is Imaginary never quite feels like the career-culminating record it should be.

Though its songs are simple and occasionally repetitive, the incisive lyrics cut through the clear country air, enough to turn heads a few times.

This gripping chapter in his exploration might not quite be his definitive statement, but then definitive has never been of interest to Fernow.

While they may have shed some of the quirks that made them unique, Invisible People is far and away Chicano Batman’s most accessible record, with big, clean hooks to match definitive statements. A decade into writing songs together, they sound stronger than ever.

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

Manic as the source material may be, Lopatin’s score remains entirely surprising, which doesn’t mean shocking, per se. It’s more that it has a large blast radius in the movie, itself a funny character in an ensemble of unintentionally funny characters. Lopatin is brazenly and consistently there.

There is very little club to be found on Jesus Is Born—it is a pure gospel album. One of the most radical elements of the album is what’s absent: Kanye’s voice. Instead, he’s assembled a massive choir to channel his Christian message in a joyous, all-consuming wave of sound.

Following their first two crunching and careening albums, it may seem as if the M's have lowered the bar for themselves, but through all the detours they've made an album that sounds more like themselves than any previous work.

Surprisingly enough, the album’s highlight comes in “Sit Around the Fire,” which was surely Hopkins’ riskiest move. The deeply moving piano-synth track features the late spiritual leader Ram Dass speaking to a congregation in 1975.

Determined to give fans a jolly time after a five-year absence, Lucifer on the Sofa doesn’t let up and won’t change minds.

Cunningham is capable of crafting lean full-length statements; R.I.P. and AZD are sleek and streamlined. But he’s too wily and restless to want to do that all the time, so we end up with albums like this, where he expands the canvas to make room for private jokes and stray thoughts.

Long time fans will undoubtedly be delighted, but it's tough to predict if this record will inspire converts.

In the place of anthems, though, are carefully constructed gems making up a sequencing run so solid it takes a few listens to pick out the exact drop-off point.

Pollock is clearly in her comfort zone here, both vocally and musically.

For all its finesse, it can obviously never replicate the futurism that defined its biggest inspirations; these classy reproductions only highlight the chasm between us and that halcyon moment.

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

High Note complements rather than contradicts those bleaker depictions of 21st century America and casually argues for Staples’ legacy as an agitgospel singer.

Dood and Juanita works so well because Simpson sounds comfortable within this form and just beyond it.

I miss the enveloping nature of Daniel’s last two albums, the feeling of floating through a particularly absorbing dream. But the new album does have plenty of buoyant moments.

A Study of Losses has some of Condon’s most effortless songwriting in years, melodies flowing with the easy appeal of the best of Lon Gisland and Gulag Orkestar.

Vanishing Point is both an anachronism and, if you’re on Mudhoney’s wavelength, a hilarious bulwark against everything that’s annoyingly ephemeral about contemporary underground culture.

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.

He maintains the foggy tufts of reverb and sing-song melodies of his predecessors, but his lyrics trade unrequited crushes for more practical pining.

The tracks here suggest that along with trap rap, Chicago house, electropop, and the dozen or so styles that get vigorously nodded at over the span of 10 songs, he’s also starting to get a grip on the rules of composing the kind of stuff the Hot 100’s made from.

What distinguishes this record from any number of other nostalgic indie-pop ruminations on suburban teenhood is the sparkling optimism Hovvdy carry with them.

A deeply passionate, impossibly noisy twee record.

There are a few moments when all the backward glancing becomes a bit heavy-handed, but in their most inspired moments, Blouse find the connection between the limits of outdated technology and the terrible bliss of desiring something impermanent.

At times the music can get sentimental and even sappy, but it's never heavy-handed.

This time, though, the band at her back gives that point hooks, rhythms, and textures instead, not just tangents. It's a welcome, if obvious, deviation for a band that's finally more than interesting.

His fourth solo album, Transangelic Exodus, is his most thematically cohesive work to date: a loose narrative about supernatural queer lovers on the run from the law. The misfit feelings surging through his back catalog crystallize here into detailed imagery, giving the album a lurid, cinematic sheen.

One of the most radical departures in Segall’s catalog and a significant breakthrough for the band, exposing and refining the complex mechanisms behind their murky sound.

Despite such extraordinary highs, Ballet Slippers is not essential. If you’re not a zealot, chances are that these recordings—as with most live records, a tad distant and dependent on the power of suggestion—won’t convert you.

The lyrics of Lines Redacted may be forever tied to our present moment, but the album is simultaneously a tribute to the kind of youthful friendships that are difficult to savor before they’re gone.

It helps that most of the album sits squarely in Merritt’s musical comfort zones.

A broader palate is still under development, but Apar provides a path forward without forfeiting Delorean's effortless energy.

It's despairing and unfriendly, but it opens up an entire new world for Sweet to explore, and is richest and most surprising Boduf release yet.

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.

A decade after making her solo debut, Stevenson has found her sweet spot as a singer-songwriter.

A worthy if not exactly earth-moving capstone to the band's career.

The Mirror is more about fresh adornments than drastic reinvention. And that’s OK because the album still showcases many of the best qualities Meek has been pursuing outside of his main band.

It’s a master-level maneuver that underlines the essential theme of the three-disc set, which is that after a quarter century of pushing music into the future, Carl Craig’s still not done.

Wanting to seem OK while secretly falling apart is a tricky dance that placeholder deftly captures. But hearing about a riot is not the same as listening to one. Duffy excels at mapping resolution, which might make you want to hear about the conflict.

Mostly, though, it's nuanced and mature, with a slickness that sometimes drifts into banality and makes you crave a reprieve in the form of surprise gastric sounds or cavalier testicle jokes.

When Smoke Rises deftly translates Ahmed’s poetry to melody without blunting the truth of the narratives at its core. ... But the choice to build it around folk music’s tropes is an innovative way of avoiding the “conscious” stereotype, notorious in hip-hop for a moralizing impulse that tends to hollow out its messages.

Even more streamlined, pop-minded, and high-spirited than their 2004 self-titled debut, it's as if they're single-mindedly attempting to depose the world's problems with a rigorous dance and good times regimen.

Most of Mug Museum is bare and direct, quaint and unassuming, but Le Bon makes a rather grand occasion out of it--she's a master curator and consummate immortalizer.

It’s a record so precise as to be sensory, whose arrangements of harmonies, guitars, and lonesome trills are like the intake of breath before a faltering step.

Perils from the Sea may not be a seamless collaboration, but neither artist has sounded so purposeful in his reverie in years.

Painted Ruins, cursorily an album about battling demons, can feel a little like prestige music. But there’s this moment at the end--a spot where Grizzly Bear records routinely reach their heights--that reminds listeners that tangible realism can be a necessary counterpoint to the quartet’s impressionism.

Swapping their detached sneers for a warm, heartfelt tone, he gives his strongest vocal performance to date. As Forsyth ventures into new territory, he’s found a way to bring his influences along for the ride.

With Trouble, Russell, Morley, and Yeats have dug one foot deeper into the thick, sludgy, noise-strewn topsoil they’ve long called home. Call it a trench, if you will, but it isn’t is a grave.

A capable vocalist with a lightly nasal tone and a dramatic streak, Cabello rarely misses an opportunity to riff or sail into her wispy head voice. But her spoken delivery can be just as captivating.

Disconnect gets its message across through Kamaru’s words and through the music itself, whose darkness feels less oppressive thanks to the creators who speak life into it.

It works best as group therapy, a 30-minute reprieve from the pervasive judgment of adulthood.