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.

Lost Themes is plenty dark and heavy but shorter on inspiration.

Zs demonstrate an energy and urgency here that they’ve never before had, as these pieces leap off the page in exhilarating fashion.

The result is a little absent-minded, with the difference split between gleeful assertion and wanton noodling, the type of album that might sound best when you’re thinking about something else.

As always, that mystery resides in the sounds he manipulates. No one else sounds like Phil Elverum.

He's gradually but noticeably building up a real identity on record. But if that next level's within reach, there has to be one obstacle to overcome: Firsthand truths take longer to sink in when they're delivered with secondhand styles.

For those who grew up worshipping at the altar of such ephemeral sounds, a record like Depersonalisation is a welcome bit of gloom, even if it ultimately feels like a record you probably already own.

As the band churn up sound and fury, we can hear the strident strains of Balliet’s cello, scribbling suicide notes in the background and lending some gravity to an album that sounds, tragically, weightless.

For the more casual, less obsessive listener, it can be a bit of a snooze. The songs are well chosen and certainly revealing, but Dylan and his band play them all pretty much the same, sacrificing any sense of rhythm for stately ambience.

Further Out does successfully sound genreless despite being referential of a half dozen genres at once and is presented as a continuous listening experience.

In its often inchoate roar, We Are Undone bears little resemblance to the laser-focus punk-blues of their earlier work. The songs just aren't as good. The most satisfying callback to Two Gallants' halcyon, mid-'00s prime comes in the album's second half.

ll We Are makes a stylish first impression, showing up so impeccably tailored that you wonder if it secretly fears all of that fumbling human contact that could mess things up.... Meanwhile, the back half of All We Are is filled with slow jams that barely stir from a post-coital heap.

It doesn't require your full attention, but it tends to capture it. I like to imagine what it would feel like to stumble across the piece on the radio, late at night, perhaps in your car, having no idea what you were hearing, or why.

Sullivan, better than singers and songwriters in almost any genre, creates worlds where relationships take on more complex dynamics, but are immediate in their effect.

Musically, it’s the grittiest-sounding track on the album, with eddies and distortion clotting the guitar licks and evoking the more destitute vistas of San Francisco. Lyrically, however, the song sounds entirely disingenuous.

Instead of following his darker impulses or fantastically out-there indulgences, Coombes plays it safe.

On each of his many releases to date, Collins is always trying to reinvent one wheel or another, and even though that's traditionally seen as a fruitless exercise, what he and Desree have ended up with on Silk Rhodes is an invention worth marveling at in its own right.

On Your Own Love Again has more earnest moments, but its unadorned emotional uncertainty is profound and relatable.

It’s still a Napalm Death record through and through--which means shredded eardrums and tinnitus for days. After all this time, we’d expect nothing less.

Range Anxiety goes by in an instant, makes minimal demands, and is remarkably enjoyable for its simple pleasures. It may not have the heft to move you, but it’s gentle and never unwelcome.

Taken as a full-length by two groups that treat the format with some suspicion, You, Whom I Have Always Hated is a remarkably cohesive and singular album. Though it shows signs of both responsible parties, it also proves their inherent restlessness.

A warm, intimate debut album that leaves space for darker contemplation—those stray thoughts that light you up at the end of the night.

The two musicians match well in terms of overall ethos, but at some points it feels like they just stopped listening to each other, and what should be otherworldly comes clunking to the ground.

Theirs is the rare lead vocalist/backing vocalist dynamic that feels like an equal partnership, with Violet’s injections propelling these songs nearly as much as their rubbery bass lines or pogoing guitars.

It’s simultaneously her most mature feat of arranging and almost psychosomatically affecting.

Ten years deep into their career, the Dodos have never actually steered too far from their roots, but the loose, unselfconscious feel of Individ proves that there is something to be said for recognizing and playing to your strengths, trusting your chops, and simply feeling things as intensely as you possibly can.

"Blissfield, MI", like most of Runners in the Nerved World, is such an effortlessly enjoyable listen that you can miss the tension and ambition emanating from a band that’s chasing greatness as an escape from being Midwestern also-rans.

The Go-Betweens' endless enthusiasm for their own work is what propelled them out of that Brisbane bedroom in the first place, and the richness of context that this box provides makes it a deeper pleasure than its component albums are on their own.

It's a tricky muse, but every Lupe project has found a way to harness at least 15 or 20 minutes of his fluid, fleeting mind. Tetsuo & Youth is the most generous gulp he's managed in years.

Viet Cong has only seven tracks and more than half don’t pass the five minute mark. Yet all are heavy, ingenious contraptions.

Too top-heavy to sustain its momentum, yet too fleeting for its thematic framework to cohere, Uptown Special is that rare beast: a concept album that actually could use more fat.

It takes something else, something that can’t be explained by a mission statement. For a band so well-loved for writing from their heart, it sounds like they got stuck in their head.

The lack of any sort of critical thesis or undergirding may seem merely academic, but it translates into performances that are wanly reverent and unanimated, celebrating the music mainly for its age but not its actual history.

The soundtrack is a pungent, incoherent, occasionally haunting trifle. The feeling is of a bunch of intelligent and talented people trying on a bunch of funny-colored clothing and giggling at each other. If you're not wearing the costumes, there's a limit to just how entertained by all of it you can be.

Despite the stumbles, Nights includes some of California X's best work, and these moments are so strong, it's impossible to write the band off.

Slurrup is the unmistakable product of Hayes’ peculiar personality, infusing songs that feel like lost '70s classics with dispiriting images of stardom unattained.

The failure of this album, in addition to being overlong and under-ambitious, is the idea that maturity should beget lazy, hammock songs.

The album has the particular aliveness of music being created and torn from a group at this very moment--tempered, but with the wild-paced abandon that comes with being caged and then free.

Irreal is a deliberately exhausting listen. The band dares you to see how far you can stomp behind them without a melodic phrase or a lyrical narrative to grab hold of.

Though a few songs stretch out an interesting idea too far—for instance, the post-Nae-Nae scrum "My X"--SremmLife is a showcase of an electric new talent paired with all the trappings of a bigtime major label debut.

It's clear that he's arranged them with an ear for future extended mixes in which the pop songs fall away, leaving only the shuddering metallic chassis underneath. Maybe, in retrospect, it's his judicious sense of balance that holds him back: a few more extremes, and his next work might really sing.

It’s a playful, fantastical response to some serious life changes.

Rather than feel tacked-on incongruities, the three Rave Tapes remixes found on the EP’s second half provide a welcome, unpredictably outré counterpoint to the linear songs heard on the first.

Black Messiah pulls together disparate threads few predecessors have had the smarts or audacity to unite.

The Pinkprint’s singles underwhelm.... But they’re redeemed by the bonus tracks—a thrilling, confounding six-song set that elevates The Pinkprint from an occasionally transcendent, if unbalanced, break-up album to something far more intriguing.

A Los Campesinos! Christmas is a record for those who want to spin a seasonal record that's both crushingly isolated and humorously self-aware.

It's not her finest work, but it's plenty good enough to rope a cohort of new fans into what's promising to be one hell of a creative ride.

It would be a tall order to expect them to rival Frost's raw power, but these remixes don't unearth much fascinating stuff, and the EP turns out (mostly) competent but wan.

2014 Forest Hills Drive is a decent album selling itself as great. It wraps itself in the garments of a classic, but you can see that the tailoring is off.

It’s a strong album, but it’s not another Forever Changes, whose accomplishments in retrospect were unrepeatable, or even another Four Sail. On the other hand, Lee wasn’t aiming to craft something in that vein.

A handy 4xCD compilation (disc four a fascinating set of outtakes and unreleased material) that captures the good Captain’s cagey albeit failed move towards mainstream rock acceptance.

It’s just voice and guitar throughout, but Kozelek’s nylon string work is consistently engaging, even as he falls back on some of his go-to fingerpicking patterns.

The sequencing shapes the album beautifully, creating a sense of emotional fatigue while only hinting vaguely at redemption. Thematically, however, that cycle implies a romantic fatalism, as though every relationship is doomed to end painfully. That’s what makes Gentlemen at 21 such a compelling and necessary reissue, even if the album has never been terribly hard to find.

Cohen is a genially commanding stage presence, falling on his knees at crucial moments and doffing his cap for his accompanists' solo turns. The Old Ideas songs, sprinkled throughout the set at just the right intervals, are naturally at home, capped with the wry God-speaking-to-a-man-named-Leonard "Going Home". Otherwise, the songs you know and plenty of songs you should know better are probably here.

36 Seasons is more in line with the spirit of Ghostface’s recent output, where he’s more prolific and "for the love" than ever and somehow lazier at the same time.

Power of Anonymity is a masterclass in the sleight-of-hand that we call techno; there is virtuosity in the music's very attempts to sneak past under the cover of darkness. It may pass unidentified, but it will not go unnoticed.

Over the course of the next 10 minutes, the recording stirs to life in a slowly mounting atmospheric swirl of eerie guitar squeals, rain-on-tin drum patter, random bass blurts, and frosty-breathed coos, before the two groups find a common ground on a stalking rhythm that eventually yields to a series of seismic, Boredoms-worthy psych-metal eruptions at the halfway point.

Now he's breaking out with a full-length record that's more restrained, more skeletal, and often more mournful than anything he's done before, a metamorphosis from somebody who's had fans growing to expect them on the regular.

It’s a seamless and occasionally thrilling listen that establishes a fact many could have predicted: Blige’s throaty vocals, as passionate and emotional as ever, are an ideal fit for house music. Nonetheless the album doesn’t exactly play out how you might expect.

It’s the easiness of Monuments that truly make it an outlier--whether Corgan constructed a masterpiece or just sounded labored, it was obvious that a ton of effort went into Smashing Pumpkins

Its hard-psych is ugly, alluring carnival music that warps and melts before us just as we begin to trust it. Through it all though, there’s an undercurrent of humor and fun; Turnbull’s active imagination stretches out for miles and he comes across as a twisted visionary on his most accomplished album yet.

For all his clinical reserve and careful attention to detail--some of these beats might as well contain footnotes--Barnt has ended up crafting an unusually heartfelt testament to techno's emotive potential.

If they've managed to brainwash their listeners, they've done it by making a record that's hard to tune out.

At War With Reality is, above all else, an At the Gates album that feels like a pastiche of At the Gates. At least it’s a spirited one.

It’s no doubt a conservative record, maybe even a deeply unfashionable one, but much of its strength lies in the fact that it sounds different from everyone else out there.

Where overbearing arrangements don’t get in the way, a cloying sentimentality does.

What makes Painful so eminently approachable after all these years is that it manages to sound like a fully realized, band-defining statement yet unpretentiously off-the-cuff at the same time. It’s a feeling reinforced by the overflow of material available on this reissue.

Classics is charming and sleepy in a '60s samba sort of way, filled with whispering percussion, light electric guitar solos, and string arrangements worthy of the silver screen.

Some songs maintain the attraction of anticipation, hinting at where they might go without ever fully abandoning other options. But others feel more flat than ripe, not so much flirting with tense silence as drifting into empty inertia.

The Velvet Underground's stunning simplicity and unflinching honesty presented an even more accessible model of DIY aspiration, free of Warholian conceptualism and Cale’s classically schooled chaos.

Film of Life doesn’t quite break new ground for Allen, but it does offer a pretty solid and succinct demonstration of Afrobeat’s adaptability to changing times.

The greatest-hits disc is a misnomer: It's mostly a grab-bag of Shady throwaways and deep cuts.

Its curious track listing is split between a disc of Wyatt-as-frontman and a disc of Wyatt-as-guest.

Stewart's increased output and dearth of exploration gives Archives an unflattering offhandedness, and it also dilutes the potency of Vapor City, like putting together an album is just another item to mark off his to-do list.

In addition to rounding up odds and ends, it's an important LP in its own right.

It’s got the feel of a bootleg--the recording is at times horribly thin, and the occasional snatches of audience chatter make it sound like the work of someone staggering drunkenly through the crowd with a barely concealed mic.

As is the case with most overstuffed hardcore albums, The Tyranny of Will lends itself well to a cherry-picking approach; keep some riffs and ideas, and toss the ones that don’t stick.

When the ways Bodan tries to eliminate distance come together--the voice, the lyrics, the rawness of the emotion on display--the final product can induce claustrophobia. The effect is undeniably powerful, but there's a fine line between powerful and overwhelming, and his work should grow more potent as he manages to find a balance between the two.

[The minor differences between the early and official takes] are rare, illuminating displays of imperfection from a band that, for the subsequent 15 years, made no false moves.

Instead of growing soft and slick while retaining their songwriting prowess, they’ve stayed fast and raw--but left much of their popcraft somewhere behind.

The intended arc from invitation toward aggression occssionally scans more as zigs and zags between a few distinct suites. Still, the separate moments are astounding, evidence of a musician who has managed to remain inquisitive even as he’s established his signature.

The ritual drama of falling and picking one’s self back up again (taking "responsibility," as Dawson prefers in interviews) plays out in every element of this music, and is key to its elusive power.

The weakest of the three versions of Nothing Has Changed is the chronologically sequenced 2xCD version. It's basically just a slight revision of Best of Bowie, compressed to throw in five later songs....The 3xCD Nothing Has Changed, though, is the jewel among the three variations on the same core material. Its masterstroke is that its 59 tracks appear in reverse chronological order.

It's more of a disappointment than a failure--at the very least, it might serve as someone's introduction to These New Puritans.

Her foibles and off-kilter perspective on heartbreak offer shape and personality to a record that might otherwise be written off as too slick or inert, or indistinguishable from a host of peers making competent, spacious, and downcast pop music.

What’s Your 20? is for the neophytes--it’s a very reasonable place to start for future generations facing down Wilco’s full catalog on Spotify.

Ultimately, Avonmore is a fine addition to Bryan Ferry’s oeuvre, if not necessarily a terribly challenging one.

Alpha plays like a clearinghouse more than a finely-edited set but, largely thanks to its bevy of well-chosen live tracks, its sidelong view of Wilco is worth a peek.

It might seem like faint praise to call Flesh & Machine Lanois’ best and most realized solo album, but it’s also one of the best ambient records of 2014--an endlessly inventive collection of songs built on odd, often lurid sounds and textures, somehow rough and gentle at the same time.

One key difference, though, is in Tindersticks’ fondness for taking small moments and blowing them up big. Here, they turn that method inside out, starting with a huge, globe changing event and working something humble around it, making it feel like they’re respectfully cowering in its shadow.

Though not everything works on its own (the flat electropop of XO's "Animal" is one dud) Mockingjay adds up to a fun pastiche of modern sounds. In conclusion, three fingers out of five.

The campy flair, smirking irony, and deliberately "retrolicious" alliteration matches the scarecrow-genius of his new album, Pom Pom.

Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, one of the finest left-field releases of the year, transcends geography, inviting you to close your eyes and build your own richly detailed world.

Black Metal offers few definitive answers, but this time around the hazy images he's projecting have come into sharper focus.

It's a rare moment of intrigue on an album that's generous in its beauty while leaving little to wonder about, a sky that never rains.

Final Days’ exhilarating, cathedral-toppling spectacle could prove to be the career game-changer that ensures his band remains a cult no more.

So while they've long segued from fin-de-siecle Brooklyn to edge-of-the-continent Silver Lake, losing more than they’ve gained along the way, TV on the Radio are still capable of conquering big stages and broad sonic territory with the kind of precision and power for which their increasingly desperate older contemporaries need to rely on expensive stunts.

Still Life is steeped in Dylan's back-to-basics period at the turn of the '70s, carefully adorned but never skeletal; from the beating-heart bassline that sits underneath "Drowning" to the drunken horns that close out the eight-minute "Amen", Still Life is sumptuous, slightly rickety, offhandedly gorgeous.