It’s triumphant music for the hyperactive, plural city; it’s confrontational as a means to achieving communality, with no particular loyalties except to an anonymous, shifting collective of people who all want the same thing as Young Fathers--to be one thing, then the next, then the next.

There are good ideas somewhere inside The Air Conditioned Nightmare, and anyone determined enough to look might get something out of them. Lyrics ranging from naively clichéd to slyly astute.

Wilson’s chipper duets never reach equilibrium. Either his presence feels underutilized--the syrupy "On the Island" with She & Him, in which his vocals are scant--or the guests feel shoehorned into musty production that undermines their own charisma.

There are times on Captain of None where the album’s architecture is so compelling it's easy to miss the resonance of the songs themselves.

Insides is Fort Romeau’s second full-length record, and although it doesn’t continue on quite the same upward trend of his recent discography in the risk-taking department, it does boast some of his most fully dimensional and impressively produced work yet.

As the tempos stagnate towards the album’s back end, though, the affective force of her vocals loses potency—particularly on the pedestrian ballad "One Day"--and all the runs in the world can't distract from the sameness.

Iit never feels forced or like she's making some kind of push. It's unhurried and natural and real.

With Dark Red, he’s taken another turn, slipping out of the pop-shadowing path he was on in exchange for something darker and bolder, but compromised by its own disorder.

What For? is so passive it leaves your system the moment you’re done with it.

The rest of the record isn’t as brassy as "Foreign Object", an obvious crowd-pleaser, but it’s occasionally as bold.

Occasional goth clichés aside, Deeper is a thing of beauty.

In truth, they display a confidence in declining to chase or win over new fans that is exceedingly rare in legacy acts.

R&B informed the Sonics’ unhinged passion from the get-go, and This Is the Sonics pays proper homage to the group’s roots.

Despite production from current-day heavy hitters like Da Internz and Mike WiLL Made It, he still comes off like a relic from the past, the class clown who never quite grew up.

While Hunter seems more enamored of radio hits by the likes of Gary Numan and Flock of Seagulls here, Lower Dens never quite settle into an easy genre hook.

Nothing is a long album, with one cut coming in over the six-minute mark, and when it is sludgy, it is exhausting.

Little of Kintsugi gives the impression that Gibbard’s motivation to reboot Death Cab is matched by legitimate inspiration.

Cosmic Troubles sounds a sadder, vaster album than before, but one whose meditations can soothe your bones like an inviting stream.

You have to let your guard down, and Godspeed have to transform feelings into compelling records. They're still on track.

There is nothing new in Malin’s depiction of New York, and that may be the whole point: He wants this milieu to be instantly familiar.

While Primrose Green is a great statement for a '70s freak-folk cosplayer, I just hope it’s not a career-defining one for Walker.

It doesn’t always reach the level of spiritual purity it could, but there’s a touch of steel and a sense of pacing that was missing from Föllakzoid’s prior work, positioning III as a gateway for a much a deeper dive into altered states.

This record is a return to the spare folk of Seven Swans, but with a decade's worth of honing and exploration packed into it. It already feels like his most classic and pure effort.

There are easily as many misses as hits on the album, and 14 tracks is probably about seven tracks too long.

Without an overarching conceit like Once I Was an Eagle, Short Movie comes off sounding like a transition record, a short movie in the sense that it’s a prelude to something bigger.

Scuba's music has always sounded wonderful--warm, rich, enveloping, ultra-vivid--but Claustrophobia feels like a major step up; the sonics are simply dazzling.

Though enjoyable, it may land in a limbo, too simplistic for fans of great chamber music or its challenging modern variants; too classical--lacking bells, whistles, samples and beats--to make it more than pleasant dinner party music for people coming from the indie side.

The band plays with tremendous power, verve, and energy, but the results feel leaden, even after dozens of list For all of its dense conceptual underpinnings, The Ark Work comes up curiously short on new ideas long before the album ends.

Time to Go Home is a beautifully composed record about confronting your fuck-ups, but it’s also a record about feeling numb to them.

For All My Sisters is a scruffy, buzzy and very hooky guitar album that doesn’t quite scan as "punk" or "indie".

The newness of it is exciting, and so is the fullness of his vision; between the narcotic mood and the omnipresent murk, Dream a Garden suggests a maze-like expanse within its borders, perfect for getting lost in. Unfortunately, the album only partly lives up to those promises.

What follows is a musical of sorts wedged into the gut of the album.... This digression is conceptually ambitious, but the execution seems to purposefully undercut the exercise, as if the suite was the result of an argument between a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other about what the album should accomplish that was won by neither.

The album’s backward-gazing perspective doesn’t detract from the fact that Freedom Tower contains some of the Blues Explosion’s most inspired, vital music since their mid-'90s peak.

Earl is carefully whittling away at the proclivities he's always had, remaining confident that he’ll light upon something that feels fresh and honest. So far, he's right.

Fortune packs a subtle yet undeniable emotive force whose impact can linger long after the projector has gone dark.

After six albums, Cabic has yet to build a discernible and discrete identity for this band. It remains the ongoing also-ran from a loose freak-folk confederation that’s splintered in a dozen surprising ways.

It’s a cohesive listen that doesn't quite translate into a cohesive statement of purpose.

In the end, Barnett returns invariably to herself, a subject she finds hard enough to understand. If all this seems a little heady in discussion, it's to the credit of Barnett and her band--Dave Mudie, Dan Luscombe, and Bones Sloane--that it doesn't sound that way on record.

The first three discs of The Smithsonian Folkways Collection are as fine a retrospective as you can find for Lead Belly, showcasing the diversity of his repertoire and the precision of his playing and singing. What distinguishes this collection is its scope.

For better and for worse, there is nothing cringe-inducing on It's Decided; the record mostly sounds like I should remember to tip my barista.

The music feels wedged between weight classes--too ridiculous to be indie rock and too ponderous and generic for Top 40 pop.

Wand excels at delivering heavy and murky sounds, but they're a bit late to a conversation that their peers have already dominated.

Throughout, and to the album's benefit, the duo's individual identities are more fully dissolved, so they can be more malleable in pursuing the idea behind a given song.

Lamar’s new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, doesn’t explicitly bill itself as a movie like good kid, m.A.A.d city did, but the network of interlocking dramas explored here feels filmic nonetheless, and a variety of characters appear across the album’s expanse.

We’ve got some Black Metal Muzak here, competent musically but too timid to go into the depths, emotional, musical or otherwise, that black metal should strive for.

They're still doing what they've always done, but Fantasy Empire is the best they've done it in a long time, and the new sheen makes everything seem magic again.

For an artist who has undergone so many identity experiments before her debut, Soft Control is a promising, if not groundbreaking, beginning.

Perhaps in the end they are simply too smitten with the idea of Smith as a beautifully doomed artist to create anything beyond a loving, reverent, and therefore sheepish tribute.

Here they sound like they’ve settled into their status as a reliable indie rock institution. Strangers to Ourselves is a pleasant album, and one that completes their transition from "inspired" to "sturdy".

Goon isn’t an album of layers; what you hear is what you get, which in this case turns out to be something special.

His masterful way with configured elements provides the illusion of a story without dictating the narrative: Here, you decipher the tones and rhythms, and conjure your own ideas of good and evil.

Rebel Heart grows confusing and irreconcilably uneven as it progresses.

The music evolves so gradually, it's easy to find yourself wondering how you've wound up at a given point; there's a sense of traveling without moving, of zooming in and out between broad strokes and pinpoint details, toggling between distracted reverie and close attention.

Even with the decibel meter dialed down to accommodate his wounded croon, Mendel struggles to assert himself, flattening out the album’s dynamic variation in the process.

Empire is a wonder of absurd tricks and unforeseen turns, but the ultimate goal--rendering its music as something more than just a side platter to gripping TV--proves elusive.

It would be hard to call the album unsentimental. At times it feels as though Cantu-Ledesma is fighting his way through the fog, swinging wildly, exhausted but determined.

SOL has less gravity when it steers away from its majestic solar themes and tries to put its abstract sensations into words. Eskmo's vocals, while delicate, still feel intrusive.

It's all crunchy and cloying and probably better if you're high, but that just makes Wasted on the Dream something like a store-brand version of your favorite cereal; it's close, but not there, usually a matter of texture and feel.

On their first full-length collaboration, Late Night Endless, the two draw on their formidable pedigree, yet at times the album feels cluttered with sound.

Thanks to its pared-down gear list and capricious flow, Levon Vincent feels like the work of someone left alone in the studio, sketching in real time with what's at hand and moving on. And that spontaneity gives it an even greater sense of intimacy.

What's refreshing about Kennedy's tracks--alluded to in Madak's quote above--is the amount of fun he wrangles out of such a sparse and austere template.

This is an inspired collection of songs, even if you do get the feeling Hopkins prefers to spend his late nights alone.

Melbourne, Florida is an exciting progression to old fans, and a solid entry point for new audiences.

Eat Pray Thug isn’t lacking in ideas, just focus, and there are long stretches where it’s much harder to connect to Heems’ persona.

Here Segall and his band perform the songs pretty much as written, only louder. It isn't Segall's best record, but it's worthwhile if only in that it documents the whole crew playing together at the peak of their ability.

Even those who decided years ago that this album was going to be great will be hard-pressed to find a great rap record here, only a sporadically enjoyable one.

Throughout Ripe 4 Luv you can sense that it’s taking every ounce of discipline Cook has to play these pop songs as straight as he does, so he can be forgiven for indulging a little kitsch at the finish line.

Acollection of songs that may not necessarily venture into any new sonic territory for the venerable band, but ultimately doesn’t really need to.

At times, White’s knack for simplicity lapses into the slightly generic.

It’s harder not to fixate entirely on the formal elements of the music, rather than the things that might make it personal. That leads to records where you listen to and admire them from a distance instead of getting immersed in them.

While Jack Ü doesn't exactly roll the ball forward, or do much else to make listeners rethink the principal actors here, it's dumb, loud fun from two architects of the dumbest, loudest fun of the 2000s.

Policy's highlights maintain a precarious balance between classicism and cataclysm, but the album often tips too far in either direction.

The quieter work here may suggest a way forward, but Wild Strawberries has a transitional feel.

This is music that proudly exists as sonic information, music that invites you to meditate on how a simple tone with a halo of white noise, pulsing along in medium tempo and working through different melodic combinations along a major scale, makes you feel.

After clocks in at a solid hour--and it's an hour you'll feel, because while After boasts a stacked lineup of well-crafted songs, it's a choppy ride to make it through them all.

None of the songs on Shadow of the Sun sound new, but the familiar sounds create an atmosphere of safety that allows the more unexpected elements of the record all the more noteworthy.

Ultimately the music becomes another mask, another thing Barnes is trying to untangle, in a great chapter in the lengthy, wonderfully ornate Of Montreal compendium.

You've really got to fight to make your way into You're Better Than This, to carve out a little room amidst its unstable rhythms, its twining guitars, and Maguire's screams-of-consciousness. But that's precisely what inspires such devotion in Pile's growing cohort.

If not all its experiments yield consistently entrancing results, Comb the Feelings is the sound of Grooms basking in the first radiant glimpse of a future that, not too long ago, it didn’t think it’d live long enough to see.

The complementary pieces are all keystones here, and stylistic variety--the focused punk-vibe grit-and-grind of P.O.S., Dessa's smooth venom, Cecil Otter reining in agitation, Sims and Mike Mictlan rounding out the rewind-demanding punchline barrage--is what keeps the album alive even when the words start to blur.

This obsession with connecting and disappearing in rapid succession is fitting for a record that finds Purity Ring trying to stake their claim at pop's center but ultimately retreating within themselves.

While the songwriting may be on autopilot, Gallagher’s decision to self-produce Chasing Yesterday was a smart one, resulting in an album that feels both intimate and expansive.

Though Krill aren’t quite ready to let go of the anxieties that inspired them to write their eccentricities in excrement in the first place, Fist suggests that there is light at the end of the sewer drain.

In spite of the formalism, individual tracks on Quarterbacks are a sharp jolt. Together, they blur to make the album more of a mood piece.

Though the busy, Reichian loops help decorate the retro palette, it's the sort of intricacy that can encase art-pop in bulletproof glass, demanding admiration without meeting us halfway. At its best, though, O Shudder's timeworn skill is to combat looming adversity with verve and rhythm, emptying the mind through the body.

This record reads like an object lesson in how former glories are sometime best served by becoming a malleable part of the present.

The result of so much suspicion is an album that’s somehow both loud and timid--all clamor and no soul.

Ultimately, what’s most disappointing about What Happens Next is not that it will in any way tarnish Gang of Four’s legacy--if their vanguard reputation could withstand Hard and Mall, it can withstand this. Rather, it’s the unshakeable feeling that, if Gill had released this as some newly branded collaborative project, no one would question why it wasn’t a Gang of Four album.

Future Brown feels overwhelmingly like a bunch of intriguing ideas left to drift off inconclusively.

While the composition of Bad News Boys adheres to a tried ‘n’ true formula, the songs here consistently yield charming little details.

Seasonal Hire sounds more like a Black Twig Pickers album than a Steve Gunn album.

It's good for what it is--better than it needs to be, in fact--yet what it is is only a fraction of what it could be, if only Earle would stop trying to tidy up his inspirations.

EarthEE makes one think more than feel.

Dark Sky Paradise is a big leap in the direction of the ideal Big Sean full-length.

The songs on here are surprisingly strong, such that any of them could have appeared on a proper album at any point in Beam’s decade-plus career. But the collection never sounds like the sum of its parts.

Physical Graffiti is Zeppelin's best album ultimately because it felt like a culmination.

Her blasé delivery might seem impenetrable at first, but there is warmth and wit to her work that rewards those who are patient enough to hear its message.

Some of the rougher edges and raw(er) emotion that got the twins noticed in the first place get ironed out a bit. And one side effect is that a few of the album's final tracks sound somewhat similar in tonality, tempo, and their vibe. But Ibeyi still find subtle ways to create shape.