Summertime '06 is breathtakingly focused, a marathon that feels like a sprint.

As with any piece of music that ebbs and flows this forcefully, you should listen to it loudly, and try to get swept away by it.

Koze finds home for these misfit songs, and by doing so gets you thinking about possibilities, what else that might be out there waiting to be rediscovered.

The songs here are airy, and often provisional-feeling, while Thundercat's lyrics reliably invoke death, mourning, and vulnerability.

While Get to Heaven's ceaseless terror and heavy arrangements can be overwhelming, more power to Everything Everything for attempting to offer a nuanced understanding of a broken world at a time when a lot of their significantly less imaginative British indie rock peers say worse than nothing.

The Victoria OST marshals more instruments than his solo piano works, but not many more--each new sound, whether it's a husky-throated cello on "Our Own Roof" or the subcutaneous hum of organ keys on "The Bank", tiptoes in carefully and gingerly.

It's unclear from this album what they came back to accomplish.

Feels Like doesn’t reference any specific dates or weather, but it feels like a summer coming-of-age album.

Musically, Pale Horses functions as a kind of career summary, compressing their musical digressions into a coherent whole.

One clunker on an album full of gems doesn't drag everything else down, though, and Thompson deserves all our respect--he's been through the major-label wringer, found his place where he can be celebrated as he deserves among his independent fans, and is still making complicated, thoughtful, intricate, resonant music on his own terms many decades deep into his career.

It's a strange and forgiving album, less toothsome than the ones that preceded it, but Musgraves' resistance makes this album important, even when it's imperfect.

While he obviously has good intentions, at times, Bridges can't help but come off as an imitator.

It shows how Ruess might succeed on his own as a good-hearted Midwestern boy--not quite a star, but someone capable of appreciating their light.

Son Lux’s avant-pop has always leaned more heavily on avant than pop, and Bones is probably too skittery for a breakout commercial hit (though “Change is Everything” could be a dark horse).

Morrissey has often talked about exaggerating her feelings in song to make up for her youthful lack of experience, but within the lavish Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful is a songwriter whose knack for subtle self-assertion needs bringing to the fore, not dressing up in quirk.

Kalevi speaks softly but moves boldly, and Jaakko Eino Kalevi feels like a refinement of his own unique spirit.

Payola is fast and furious, but carefully engineered for maximum, straight-ahead velocity.

They were called the World's Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band for entirely too long, but if that designation ever applied it was here.

Baird's voice sounds as potent and icy-clear as ever.

The big news is that The Epic actually makes good on its titular promise without bothering to make even a faint-hearted stab in the direction of fulfilling its pre-release hype.

It's a no-frills record that recedes into the background without much fuss, which works for and against the album's overall impact.

For the most part, Déjà Vu is rickety and wholly unnecessary.

This is pop music made with synthesizers, but it's not what you'd call normally synth-pop--even when Diamonds builds his minimalist beats into proper grooves, the songs are tense and twitchy.

On an album of 13 tracks, it would have been nice to have a few that don't follow the same template. Still, there's no doubting Kölsch's mastery of his chosen style.

While Year of the Hare offers nice sounds and concepts, it essentially works best as background music.

You’re Going to Make It makes life sound like one big bouncy castle of fun, and that unquestioned contentment renders Mates of State musically anonymous.

There's a feeling that nothing on the album is accidental.

For the most part, they remain a powerful trio with perfect chemistry, capable of embedding great hooks and marvels of rhythm section athleticism within riff-worshipping hits.

Weaver’s benefitted greatly from the rising tide of artists who are challenging pop’s sonic and structural rules, but on The Fool she sounds like she’s lost at sea.

Olympic Mess speaks volumes without utilizing language or conventional musical tropes; it's an experience so captivating that language only breaks the spell.

Unveiled and ineffectual, Matthewson’s gripes get boring quickly. The sense that you’ve heard these songs before--or at least their frameworks and tricks--doesn’t help.

One-note? Perhaps, but the note is hypnotic. There is much to be said for an album that is simply exceedingly nice, like a hug or a blanket.

Lantern’s risk-taking is daring and giddy, but its favored mode, and Hudson Mohawke’s best, is hooky, crowded, rap-conscious electropop.

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

The chemistry between the two bands isn't so perfect that a second collaborative album would be preferable to whatever either of them has up its sleeve next. When FFS does click, though, it's a little delight.

Restless Ones establishes Heartless Bastards as a straightforward arena-rock band, one that's grown more refined with time.

Tthese four songs (plus a live rendition of "Tell Me", from the Tramp era) are messier things that fit the unclean nature of long-term severance.

Wild Nights' drab sound might have been saved if the lyrics had some life to them.

For all its blatantly ill-conceived moments, there's something charming about the sheer audacity of Derulo's often bizarre choices. Even when it falls flat, there is character here.

It's ultimately a spotty album from a guy who has released a lot of spotty albums.

Live at Carnegie Hall is the Ryan Adams Ryan Adams, the one who redefined himself at 40 years old as three things no one thought he’d ever be: reliable, consistent and a consummate people pleaser.

Like all of her best work, it finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up.

Whatever pleasure can be generated from Bellamy’s admirable melodic sense and overblown hooks is negated by Muse’s insistence that they’re profound rather than fun.

Rather than feeling stark and severe, there’s an elegant grace in the simplicity. It makes a listener lean in to find an unexpectedly warm embrace.

Chrissybaby is 16 songs long, which might be more of this particular pleasant, low-stakes mood than you need at one uninterrupted stretch.

In spite of their surprising stability, this iteration of the Fall is strangely lacking in audible camaraderie, and on Sub-Lingual Tablet, the distance between frontman and backing band feels more pronounced than ever.

While written with absolute precision and poetic skill that rivals the best rappers currently working, Chance's words tumble from his mouth effortlessly, as if he's already done with the verse by the time he recites it, looking to what's next.

Remember My Name as an album isn’t going to change lives.

Through little fault of Goatsnake’s own, listening to Black Age Blues can sometimes feel like watching wizened blues musicians play the music of their now-distant youth. The style is familiar enough to be comforting, but it’s also inherently trite and redundant.

Romanticism occurs in the distance between what might happen and what does, and listening to Before the World Was Big feels like walking through this exalted liminal space.

Now, she is after a larger quarry: the contemporary chamber ensemble. But she does not quite capture it on The Clearing.

For New Alhambra, his seventh and latest release as Elvis Depressedly, he's crafted a utopian sort of indie-pop, an ecstatic evocation of the second coming, professional wrestling, and radical positivity.

There is no doubt Peace Is the Mission will suffer some criticism from dancehall purists, those exhausted by EDM and people who hate Diplo (a hate that he has certainly worked overtime to earn), but their maturation is palpable across the album's nine tracks.

Full Communism is an album-length exercise of that responsibility. Downtown Boys have two horns and plenty of aggression in their arsenal and, as they play, they force you to acknowledge the world around you.

Much like footwork, you get the impression his music evolved to cater to the demands of athletic dancing bodies. Consequently, it makes a certain sense that attempts here to temper Shangaan Electro’s frenetic pace don’t always come off.

On Carnation, he tries and fails to be something other than himself.

This is a huge, sturdy record, built for arenas and it's richly and carefully enough constructed to endure the extensive exposure Welch's heartache is going to get over the course of this summer.

Like their peers and forebears, Valet create simple music that feels expansive. Only here, the swirl of fuzz and echo isn't an exit from terrestrial woes, just a comfortable place to take stock for a moment.

The savvily sequenced Algiers ebbs and flows between moments of gritted-teeth tension and furious release, its solemn, confession-booth ruminations offset by heart-racing, steeple-toppling rave-ups.

There seem to be so many questions stirring inside SOAK, and yet Before We Forgot How to Dream douses them in so much prettiness that they lose their spark.

It’s the dazzling culmination of Jamie xx’s last six years of work, gathering up elements of everything he’s done--moody ballads, floor-filling bangers, expansive and off-kilter collaborations with vocalists--and packing them tightly into a glittering ball that reflects spinning fragments of feeling back at us.

For the most part, it settles somewhere unusual, if not original.

At long last, a real sense of identity has begun to coalesce in Rocky’s work.

She’s not an ostentatious player, although she certainly has the chops; she seldom solos and usually avoids the fussy filigrees that demonstrate technique as much as they serve the song.

Tthere’s a palpable narrative here, a sense of loss and stillness, and it reanimates Dalton, if only for a moment. It’s good to have her back.

As a whole, Have a Nice Life stands as a decent collection of songs that, while palatable, casually floats by in a sea of average beats by Jesse Shatkin, who produced much of the album.

This is Nielson's most accomplished album, though it's not his most direct, or brash, or explosive.

It’s this unabashed ambition that makes You Should Be Here resonate long after one has internalized its motivational urges ("Can't nobody love somebody that do not love themselves") and tender observations on the mechanics of relationships (see the wistful "Unconditional").

They’re modest songs for modest moments, occupying the space between the hookup and the breakup, of getting hired and getting fired, that manageable lovesickness, regret, and anxiety that underlie just about every URL and IRL interaction.

True Colors does traverse familiar, populous formats that may be difficult to innovate on top of, but other posi-tinted, mass audience-focused projects have found success by mixing their own cocktails of EDM, soul, and of-the-minute rap production. Zedd’s True Colors, though, feels underformed and unoriginal.

Despite the wide scope of her project, Herndon’s ambitious efforts are appealingly multifaceted and personal, and Platform may turn out to be the most thought-provoking experimental electronic music release of the year.

It sounds different from the old version of the band, but not that different.

Welcome Back to Milk scans as an overhaul of its protagonist’s romantic history, a poised reassessment of domestic situations that seemed okay at the time, but maybe weren’t the best, after all. Wherever her gaze turns, Houghton’s conviction is lethal.

Maybe it's good for a laugh, but only as a defense mechanism against the cringe-inducing experience of watching artistic expression abandon a heartbroken man at his lowest moment.

It’s always just one move too many.

Why Make Sense? is probably the fourth-best Hot Chip album. But that’s not necessarily a knock, because their fourth-best album is still a very good album.

The music is colorful and bright and dizzying. It recalls the energy and wall-of-sound quality of Konono No 1, except more frenzied and texturally varied.

Peanut Butter is a chaotic listen, powerful in parts and fragile in others, and often both at the same time. No matter where it goes, it's always running away from itself.

Set aside the negligible opening and closing tracks, and Sol Invictus has just eight tracks spanning 34 minutes, an underwhelming running time considering how long Faith No More have been away. Such brevity could be overlooked if Sol Invictus was accompanied by a significant shift in the band’s sound, but many of these songs feel like retreads.

PC Music is escapism whose primary effect is to remind us of what we’re trying to escape. We can’t trade body for avatar; we can’t displace longing forever. But for the space of an album--the sheer forcefulness of this intention smashed into a dizzy half-hour span--the sincerity within our most fundamentally artificial impulses comes calling.

Wauters has always seemed breezy but never quite so meek.

On Ratchet, an honest, earnest pop record, Shamir elaborates on the gutsy melodies of those early demos and singles and makes good on the hype.

He has his handful of obsessions, his rules, his limitations, and once in a while he returns and gives us a record like this, something that will be sounding good five or 10 or 15 years from now, or whenever the next solo record comes along.

It’s almost as if the first half of the album is comprised of songs that Crocodiles had finished writing by the time they got to the studio, and the second half is all of the stuff that they came up with while they were there. And this exploratory spirit is where Boys finds its strength.

Anamai may not be as pummelling as a HSY record, but their metaphysical weight makes up for it, producing an even more striking result than Mayberry’s other band.

With Niagara, he's taken strengths from his entire oeuvre to reach deeper into himself and produce what may be his best record yet, one that brings all the fulfillment of noise and transcends them all the same.

It is rewarding to have Herren's voice at the table again, to remind the world where a sizeable chunk of this sound derived.

A charitable perspective might see the band's embrace of pub rock as a conscious rejection of political correctness in the form of so-called good taste; the reality is that it seems like a last-ditch attempt to aestheticize a sublime lack of inspiration.

Like Power's best work, Dumb Flesh moves you when it literally moves you.

It’s all gleaming and immaculate from a distance, sharp and shattered if you get too close.

While Bush is strong enough musically, you can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if this crew had followed R&G with a full-length a decade ago, when everyone involved was still in his prime.

The detail-oriented approach that delighted on the Weather Station’s early records reappears on Loyalty.

For longtime followers of the band, Anxiety's Kiss has the feel of a logical endpoint, the latest natural development in an impressive career of progressions.

Overall, it's clear that HIVE1 doesn't manage to engage all of its composer's talents, despite its occasionally locked-in blend of notated percussion parts and sharp electro-production.

While Rundanns has all the makings of a late-career triumph, it’s less a new watermark for Rundgren’s sprawling discography than an analog to it: beautiful and baffling in equal measure, all over the map, and beholden to nothing but its own inexplicable logic.

Ultimately, 1000 Palms sounds like emotional throat-clearing, the transitional sound of a band finding their bearings, resetting their dials, and getting back on their feet in the wake of a lot of personal and professional turmoil.

It is his most personal record, but not because it's bare and raw, but because it's surreal and dreamlike.

The Good Fight is a streamlined reminder to ignore the restraints. Great music is great music, no matter where it comes from.