On In Amber, Butler may have found a handful more peaks and his share of valleys, but few can emerge from the shadow of what came before.

Certainly they want to expound upon the past, not to replicate it, which makes Like Love Lust their most adventurous album to date, and in some ways their most calculated and self-conscious.

The Gold Fire Sessions combines Santigold’s musical past with a passion for spontaneous experimentation. It plays like a distillation of joy.

The generational chasm between parents and children can feel deep and dark, but Anne, both the album and the person, builds a bridge with light and tremendous empathy.

Four of Arrows’ best songs are ones Menne co-wrote, ones that keep the energy up and the ideas simple.

Proof of Youth mostly recaptures the enthusiasm and unique sensibility of "Thunder Lightning Strike," further filling that niche for lo-fi sample-based old-school-noise-rap we never knew we needed filling.

As humble, tastefully appointed psych-pop goes, the Proper Ornaments surely have their hearts--and heads, wooden or not--in the right place.

My only real complaint is that the physicality of the bass and drums could have been emphasized to an even greater degree-- while your ear is constantly drawn to the rhythm section's permutations, Leaneagh's voice sits perhaps a bit too prominently in the mix, and the exhilarating wildness of the drumming is often suggested rather than truly felt.

Minerva's music remains an acquired taste, and Will Happiness Find Me? is not a record to convert people who've been put off by her stuff in the past. Still, it's noticeably clearer in its vision than anything she's put out before.

Within its limits, the album is fairly diverse, though after so many records, the style might be wearing a bit thin.

While it doesn’t always work, it’s Yves Tumor’s use of field recordings that gives Serpent Music an ambulatory quality.

The versatility of core members Auscherman, Kevin Krauter, and Keagan Beresford--each of whom writes, sings, and swaps instruments--affords them chances to try on different masks, a huge strength despite some inevitable flat results.

6lack’s great instinct is knowing when to do a little less, and on 6pc Hot it pays off sublimely. He no longer sounds like a replacement-level R&B singer. He's starting to sound like a master.

Home for Now isn’t necessarily groundbreaking; there are plenty of bands working with similar fusions of indie, pop, and electronic music, but the album shows them clearly moving forward in their abilities and ambitions.

What Jakobsson has always tried to accomplish with DJ Seinfeld was to try to tap into some grand universal emotion, a sense of want inside us all. This time, he finds it in joy instead of grief.

The two of them could’ve used nostalgia to coast on the legacy of their nearly decade-old debut to turn in a serviceable redux. Instead, Why Lawd? leans into a rawness and fear Yes Lawd! only hinted at.

It's a true global-pop album, and a hopeful template for things to come.

Summer Sun is pleasant, if nothing else, but that's such a loaded word for an album that clearly aspires to (and ought to be) so much more than it accomplishes.

The Posterkids sound positively ageless through No More Songs about Sleep and Fire, not having missed a flailing beat through the intervening years of decreasing tempos.

Problem is, where Elf Power previously made every extra instrument sound like an essential part of their songs, here, these things just sound like last-minute additions aimed at making one song sound remotely different from the next.

That's just the thing with Badly Drawn Boy-- he doesn't care about momentum, or continuity, or a lot of other things that you might quite reasonably care about when you sit down to listen to his records.

Ultimately, Chain Gang suffers from a lack of depth, but it's not so painfully hollow that listening isn't kinda fun.

It's all terribly charming. Too bad lyrics are straight from soporific bio class margin-notes.

Overall, the combination of outward-looking and backward-leaning influences on What It Means to Be Left-Handed makes for a pleasing combination of slacker indie rock ennui and joyous, ravenous culture-borrowing.

Some of the songs are undercooked, or at least they begin to feel that way as the grooves stretch out past five minutes.

Seems Unfair is full of characters who seem to struggle with everyday minutiae, but Jones throws a magnifying glass on what may seem to more worldly observers like small stakes.... Sometimes his plainspoken quality is too much.

If the objective of this excursion is simply to make a funky, spirited, low-stakes caricature of a dangerous, indomitable industry, though, then the album was worth the wait, the bloat, and the occasional cringe.

Across Hunted’s seven tracks, Calvi contorts her dance along the spectrum of gender and sexuality into something more of a march, stomping between tenderness and brutality.

These detours feel slightly random up against some of the most unadventurous tracks in his catalog, like the smoky ballad “Didn’t Come to Argue.” Like most of his albums, Trying Times could use a little editing, but that’s part-and-parcel of the James Blake package these days.

Harvey remains mostly reverential to his sacrilegious source, but Delirium Tremens is much more than just Gainsbourg fed through Google Translate. Rather, it amplifies the unsettling undercurrents that always stewed beneath Gainsbourg’s impeccable arrangements.

Thorn refuses to see an ending as the end on Record, and the results are wickedly funny and relevant to listeners of all ages.

A byzantine, feverish album that unravels and pieces itself back together song by song, a mind gradually turning inward on itself.

Beyond Bulletproof is the closest Mozzy has come to making his songs accessible.

BBNG can still be frustrating, but IV is a sign of a band hitting its stride. It’s their most jazz-forward album, and it’s filled with some markers of magnificent growth.

While the songs are wildly improved, I still can't say there's much of a discernible identity.

There's a limp, mostly-constructed skeleton of a great rock record here, and maybe that's exactly what it's meant to be.

If They Live in My Head lacks the woozy danceability of vintage Tetras, it doesn’t skimp on the political bite.

Even as life interferes, you can imagine the album as a flight of whiskey: subtle variations on one recipe, pure fun to consume, liable to intensify one’s desire to punch cops. Very occasionally, the production is countryfied to achieve a spaghetti western vibe, or larded with Halloween pedal effects.

Forgiveness Rock Record's thematic bent is mature, and that sense of gravity is embedded into the music, too.

Music, Trial & Trauma is several albums at once: drill bangers, party tunes, and a series of reflections on Black tragedy. It doesn’t always cohere, but the effect is still rather startling. Loski illuminates the darkened corners of his mind in order to reveal the society that gives power to the demons inside.

The music on Garden Gaia is inspired by the idea of Earth as a self-regulating system, and it’s heartening in that context to hear Weber let his machines fall into disrepair. But Garden Gaia sounds best when they’re swallowed up entirely.

A record with infernally catchy dance-pop hooks and the nutritional value of cotton candy.

The Wild Things soundtrack boasts enough illuminating, atypical turns from Karen O that make it worth experiencing independent of its source.

All in all, Castlemania is a fairly loose and scattered record.

Whether or not Iron & Wine and Calexico ever choose to follow this up with another collaboration (fingers crossed), it's clear that both acts are stronger for having worked with the other.

Some Racing, Some Stopping is the kind of record, in other words, that you'd expect casual listeners to enjoy and critics to unfairly malign.

Saltwater is a pretty record and the songs are clearly heavy with personal significance, but it was almost better when they were a little rough around the edges.

Like Blackalicious' recent The Craft, it displays a real hard-earned competency, something a decade of recording together will get you. But the lyrics lack transcendence or resonance.

Death After Life gets a little cute here and there (cf. the extended roboseizure freakout outro to "III"), and it starts to lose a little steam near the end, when the downtempo digression of "VI" and the hopped-up yet unsurprising "VII" roll towards the official conclusion.

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.

Bigger Than Life takes Black Marble aboveground, where some songs bloom, while others struggle to adjust to the daylight after so long in the shadows.

The arrangements are lean and pared back, even as the lyrics erupt with florid descriptions that feel like direct entreaties to the senses.

Hunx's punk rock versatility has made Street Punk his most through-and-through entertaining full-length to date.

While the collection speaks highly of the Cure's professionalism, it never catches spark, save for a performance of "The Caterpillar", reportedly their first since 1984.

The Hamilton Mixtape has managed to drain away the edge and danger from a Broadway show, a curious inversion and just more proof that you can’t Xerox Miranda’s inimitable work.

Like the best bands of the C86 era, the Drums craft these songs by taking a basic template and perfecting it.

One night in January 1979, Bauhaus ventured into the bat cave and came out with a unicorn.

The math-rock drums and hard-edged guitars that balance the band’s pop instincts have been mostly smoothed out; the blaring brass of some of their most anthemic songs is no more. At their best, Field Music take risks. Flat White Moon is a record that too often plays it safe.

In tone and mood, Three is the opposite of Hebden’s stadium setlists. But within the carefully thought-out parameters of what makes a Four Tet record, he’s finding new, quieter ways to surprise.

Wantonly skipping between sounds with a dilettante zeal, Wolves in the Throne Room seem woefully under equipped for this music.

Waxing Gibbous is a good, if occasionally overdone, album that proves that his musical imagination is still a fertile one.

About half the songs drift by without choruses, and the other half only barely have anything you could call a chorus. The whole thing is over in about 45 minutes. It all adds up to a woozy waft of a record--a perfect listen for mid-summer, when breathing in the humid air is almost enough to get you high.

There's no denying the Joy Formidable's passion, vigor, and pop smarts; it would just be easier to appreciate those qualities if The Big Roar didn't so often sound like a big blur.

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

There are a few spots on Silver/Lead where Wire succumbs to its own subtlety, as words empty and the tempos deflate toward flatness. But the group catches itself quickly, producing the album’s best track, “Sleep on the Wing.”

The songs on First Flower are vibrant and warm--fine dinner party music, if not gripping enough to stop the conversation in its tracks. Still, Burch’s emotional openness and introspection are promising, and her technical skill is undeniable. Her highly versatile vocals add texture, nuance, and depth to everything she sings.

She’s often ventured from the shores of American folk to touch the waters of blues, soul, and gospel, but this time the shifting itself seems to be the point as Giddens stretches her reach further. Even so, You’re the One never coalesces with the clear vision or poignancy of her previous work.

Natural, the latest in the group's long line of records, is, per Tweedy's dictum, truly post-apocalyptic folk, music for when the lights go out and hope burns only dimly. It's the Mekons unlikely "unplugged" bid.

If your interest in Jamaican music is limited, then Duppy Writer will probably be of even less concern to you than the usual Roots Manuva album. But you also shouldn't dismiss an album this end-to-end pleasurable as some dry retro curio.

"Sisters" and "Growing" display a tendency to let her fascination with the moving gears trump the narrative movement that marks her best material. But fortunately, such moments are few and far between.

The album ends strong, from "America" to closer "Off," but much like most of Royce’s solo catalog, there aren't many songs on Layers that really reward replaying or close listening.

It’s an intergalactic screening turned sci-fi odyssey. There are visions of interstellar travel, premonitions of the moon landing, and parallels to the mythical, relating the scientific with the divine.

Equal parts brittle and brazen, Shitty Hits is the work of a well-past-promising newcomer.

They're moments when, perhaps more so than on any previous record, The Dirtbombs sound like a band of five musicians with distinct input, rather than the many arms of Mick.

Total Loss uses the common tools of pop expression-- four-minute songs, autobiography, choruses, confession-- to create a work of poignant and devastating art.

At his finest, most expansive moments, Deacon renders this dilemma beside the point, but on Gliss Riffer, it's hard to avoid it; the battle between song and arrangement is staged in too small of an arena.

Tove Lo herself often sounds lethargic while singing these songs. She is contending with far more serious subject matter here than on, say, Sunshine Kitty; she is not enjoying herself. She is less daring, less awake, less alive to the pleasures of sex and love than she ever has been.

Ultimately, what’s different about Glasgow Eyes is not the form but the tenor. As they advance into middle age, the tension between the Reid brothers has dissipated, giving Glasgow Eyes an unusually congenial spirit.

Stylistically, Strychnine Dandelion is all over the place, but that pan-60s diversity may be one of its most winning traits, as the Gifts make everything sound lively and modern.

We All Raise Our Voices to the Air sounds less like a tour document than a greatest hits, struggling to sum up the band's career and find some new direction forward.

This stands pretty much alone in Weller's catalog in terms of sheer eclecticism and unpredictable, dream-like flow.

Vol. 2 dive-bombs deeper into the zonked-out ephemera, letting the outré tape noises and sound effects hold center stage.

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

Their preferred form of power does occasionally blur into its own monolith. But it does add force and pacing, tweaks that help these 11 songs stand independently of the need to see them played live.

The group has never sounded richer, fuller, or more confident in their own narcotic powers. Misery suits them.

It’s pitched almost entirely at “Bob’s” die-hards and listening to this album without being a fan of “Bob’s Burgers” is a fool’s errand. Even for fanatics, the two hours still feels like an ill-advised trek. ... The ease with which the soundtrack switches between novelty ditties and riot grrrl homage--a genre the show is most cozy with--is part of its draw.

It’s essentially Bully’s re-introduction as a solo project, and these 12 songs capture the invigorating energy of the band’s 2015 debut.

One gets the feeling that with a little more ruthlessness about what makes the final cut, Goodnight Oslo could offer more hits than misses. As it is, it falls just a little short.

Set to music that looks toward new horizons, Olympic Girls is a gentle study into freedom’s precariousness. The quest can be exhausting and frustrating, but, here, Tiny Ruins relish its brief embrace.

Isn’t It Now? also retains the band’s knack for defamiliarizing their influences, in the same way that Sung Tongs could make you feel like you were hearing a guy strumming an acoustic guitar for the first time in your life.

Not to malign their previous catalog, which certainly trumps most of today's post-punk regurgitates, but Family Myth proves fewer studio tricks lead to tighter songwriting.

Half-Light traces where he’s been so far, a typical theme for any solo debut. This is as understandable as it is slightly frustrating. Because all along, Rostam has never settled for anything close to typical.

In A Dream is Maclean and Whang's most fruitful, balanced partnership, and if it fails to truly make a star out of either of them, it cements them as the kind of ever-evolving collaboration DFA was built on.

When I take into account that 1) there are actual songs here, not just parodies, and 2) most of the tunes were fun to listen to, I remember that playing rock-- psychedelic, trashy or otherwise-- doesn't have to be an exercise in originality.

It's impeccably recorded-- pretty at some points and vaguely somber at others-- but it never distinguishes itself.

Dents and Shells is Buckner in top form, using a broad brush to manifest his enigmatic poetics, hallucinatory atmospheres, and melodies that appear and evaporate like breath exhaled onto cold glass.

Blueprint can be so effective when he's down to earth, it's a shame he feels the need to step up on a soapbox.

Rather than lending International depth, it shrinks the album into an admittedly accurate recapture of top-heavy, single-centered records of Norrvide’s preferred influences.