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.

It's another excellent chapter in CFCF's story, a strong case for how much unexpected magic can be found in the ordinary and, more importantly, in CFCF's ever-mutating discography.

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

On Memory, there’s a clarity and intensity to Ramone’s songwriting that leaves little room for gimmicks, employing the earnestness that made the Brooklyn DIY scene such a refreshing break from the coy art rock of early 2000s Manhattan.

Apart from those ['Hey Dad!,' 'World/Inferno vs. the End of the Evening,' 'Dead Sailors'] and the relatively slight 'Do We Not Live in Dreams?,' though, Major General hits some massive highs and nary a single crushing low.

What The Golden Casket is missing is the kind of contagious earworm that made Modest Mouse radio mainstays. There’s no “Float On” here. There’s not even a “Dashboard.” But the album rewards the time and patience it demands in a way the last couple haven’t.

But for all the softness telegraphed in her music, Allen’s third album Eight Pointed Star is spiky and hard to pin down, its familiar environment camouflaging lyrics that can be vivid and fantastical.

On their best album yet, Hiatus Kaiyote shine by building an architecture around these emotions, coming alive when they allow themselves to be more than just a great band.

Even on an album as wholly electronic-sounding as Damogen Furies, Jenkinson's musicality remains organic and responsive.

It's billed as something of a minor release (in the same way What a Time to Be Alive was minor but they still wanted your money for it), but it's still an "official" one, meaning Future swings for a few radio hits here. They feel more obligatory than outright bad.

While Water Curses is plenty enjoyable on its own, it also sets you dreaming about where Animal Collective will go next.

Oh Holy Molar, Felix's second album, recalls the starkness and exaggerated intimacy of records by Cat Power and Scout Niblett, but Chua is a far more reserved and poised individual... [Yet some songs] reveal the limits of Chua's voice and aesthetic.

Like its predecessors, Dodge and Burn can leave you wishing for more interaction between the two leads--the duets are always the highlight of any given Dead Weather record, the moment when all that simmering tension boils over. But Mosshart once again handles the heavy vocal lifting with menace to spare.

When Reich's music quietly departs from its source material, the piece achieves lift off, as the form fades and the piece settles into a seething, anxious rhythm of its own.

Reflections--Mojave Desert is arguably his most ambitious recording to date, if only because he availed himself of the Mojave Desert itself as his recording studio. Clocking in at under half an hour, the soundtrack shows Floating Points in a transitional phase.

Festival is refreshingly cohesive, exploring varied themes without drifting off-course.

Fittingly for a band that’s spent the past few years retooling itself, it takes some time for Queens to shake off the cobwebs and get back to full strength.

The contrasts within the songs are more interesting than those between style and source.

With Outrage! Is Now, Death From Above join the rare breed of artists who are able to capitalize on their maturity without betraying the spirit of their youth.

If guitar-based music is still your source of shameless pop, you'll probably enjoy In the Belly more than most records that actually aspire for art.

Every song is midtempo, chugging along with the dreaminess of everyday life. If you want to glean something deeper, you have to lean in.

On Twisted Crystal, Guerilla Toss journey to the edge of the universe and grapple with the mysteries of human existence. Such adventures can be panic inducing, but here they conquer anxiety through curiosity, finding excitement and even solace in abstruseness.

BEAK>> retains the same eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere as its predecessor.

Fuzz consistently run the risk of noodling for a bit too long or pushing one idea a little too far. It's tricky to balance loud and quiet, and Fuzz are still finding their footing.

etric's clunky riffage and hi-hat beats are replaced by simple piano figures and subtle adornments (strings, feedback, breathing organ) that draw out Haines' most stirring vocal performances to date, and the muted milieu highlights her natural, sensuous whisper, lending a sympathetic thrust to these broken-down anthems for a thirtysomething girl.

As with other Magnetic Fields projects, some deeper cuts succeed more than others. Still, any lows aren’t particularly low.

Across the hour, Funeral sounds less like last rites for Wayne and more like a resurrection.

It is the most relaxed of her recent LPs and by far the best, a return to form that privileges the emotional immediacy and kinetic sensation that’s defined the best of her music for years.

The core strength of Love in a Time of Madness is its range of dance-pop appreciation.

TEED's approach to dance-pop, much like Goddard's main act, sounds especially everyguy. The project's live show provides plenty of evidence that the stuff pleases crowds, but you get the feeling that he's doing this for himself more than anyone else.

Self-consciousness hovers over MAITREYA CORSO like a cloud. She’s comfortable when she can hide—fit neatly inside a shadow, as on the twinkling, toy-piano-poppy “Great Minds”—but recognizes it’s time to outgrow that.

Colores’ concept is steeped in this earnest (if slightly indulgent) pursuit. Each of its 10 tracks corresponds to a different color, in a sort of sonic mood ring.

New listeners will be immediately confronted with a couple of very catchy, horror-laced new wave anthems about fatal beatings and bulimia, and make that perennial first-Xiu-Xiu-experience decision: Do I buy this?

It may have taken them too long to get here, but on To Drink From the Night Itself, they recapture their heyday while leaving their imitators in the rearview.

Even though Owls serve as a touchstone in 2014, there's still little that quite sounds like Two.

It's all extremely pretty, and without seeming completely manipulative or cloying. Black Box Recorder, however, are still a bit dopey when it comes to lyrics.

The music’s subdued hum brings to mind Eno as well as contemporary artists like Tim Hecker and Oneohtrix Point Never, except the mood feels divine in an almost undefinable way.

When he’s at his best, you feel like you’re getting a well-selected sample from the endless trove of sounds and ideas blubbing inside his brain.

Your Arsenal, unlike the previous year's Kill Uncle, sounded like the work of a real group--as indeed it was.... This edition comes with a slightly muddy but passable live DVD filmed at California's Shoreline Amphitheatre in October, 1991, four months or so after the concert that became the Live in Dallas video.

It's their best release yet, but it it takes some time to sink in.

It’s impossible to fully grasp the album’s narrative arc without the aid of a written guide—detailed promotional materials, for instance, or any of the highly personal interviews Shabason has given. Without such thematic grounding, The Fellowship still delivers rich and emotionally engaging ambient-jazz, but some of the more abrasive passages (“13–15,” “Escape from North York”) wind up feeling more like fragmented narrative transitions than satisfying compositions.

WLIB AM has a better hit-to-miss ratio than just about any radio station you can name anyways.

While the music on Land and Fixed revels in this newfound clarity, the vocals are still processed and manipulated. Where that juxtaposition worked on earlier recordings (when the two sides were still on the same playing field), it doesn't coalesce nearly as well here.

On IRÉ, Combo Chimbita don’t just herald the coming of this future; they usher it into existence, note by electrifying note.

Between My Head and the Sky becomes a bit of a muddle in the middle, with Plastic Ono Band's free-form approach yielding less satisfying results. [...But it] simmers down considerably in its closing third, shifting away from boisterous band jams toward meditative tone poems and piano pieces.

With follow-up Forget the Night Ahead, Graham takes his cryptic musings into a pitch-black place, but he still connects enough to make all the fraught drama worthwhile.

The illusion of continuous chatter and conversation is compelling enough even if you don’t understand any of the languages spoken therein.

Cry Mfer is expectedly eclectic, hurdling between indie folk, electro-pop, and one piano ballad for good measure—while the differences may feel jarring, the common thread is Konigsberg and Amos’ unflappable chemistry, and their willingness to put even some of the most difficult sentiments to tape.

Bitchin Bajas remain flame-keepers of the sphere where Teutonic poise meets new-age fuzzies, but here they act as patient collaborators instead of scene-stealing spacemen. Still, this seven-headed hydra of head music remains a great ambassador of vibes.

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.

Even if Lonely Crowd doesn't quite live up to the bar set by Broken Record Prayers-- which was, after all, a singles collection-- there's still something dependably refreshing about a new Comet Gain record.

Deep Sea Diver deftly modulates their energy over the course of Billboard Heart, whose front half zigzags through cinematic scene-setting and jittery accelerations, and whose back half mellows into a more pensive slow burn.

Folkocracy is a fun listen.

The skits poking fun at impatient fans and his quips about song leaks don’t fully conceal that Forever is JID’s attempt to be a hip-hop ringmaster playing every role in the circus. Even so, his expanded ambition is impressive.

None of these modes are new—you might hear echoes of the Ramones’ brash vintage punk, PJ Harvey’s spare 4-track demos, or Jeff Rosenstock’s radically optimistic pop-punk—but Grace comfortably inhabits each.

At first listen, it’s as perplexing as its immediate antecedent Not the Actual Events. ... The EP’s final track is both the strongest and strangest.

Alela Diane hasn’t upended the form, but that probably wasn’t her intent. What she needed was a port in a storm, and About Farewell is a very sturdy bulwark.

It’s darker than Roar, but also wiser, more mature in its conflicts.

Don’t Get Too Close, the more adventurous but marginally less successful of the two, scores the interior world of our hero’s adventure in a very-now merger of emo, rap, J-pop, memecore, video game music, and angsty boy-girl duets.

This is as close as Bowie has ever come to simply "pretty good" in his storied career.

There is zero daylight between the artist and his vision, as he pounds tirelessly away at one very specific idea. It is less an album than a set of 15 variations upon a single theme. It is the Rustiest album possible, and you have to respect that kind of doggedness.

Nisennenmondai maintain grooves until they reach a sort of anxious frenzy, then move to the next buildup. For all the repetitious melodies and rhythms that form the core of the record, they don't sacrifice subtlety or surprise.

Even as Motivational Jumpsuit faithfully approximates the grainy fidelity and 60-second dosages of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, it can’t maintain the same dizzying standards of pop euphoria throughout.

It feels like he’s constantly remixing himself, taking apart ideas from as far back as his 1978 debut Earthquake Island and using new technology to augment and re-contextualize them for the present era. In a perfect Fourth World twist, the music remains entirely grounded in the now while also sounding like it’s been floating in the cosmos for eons.

The album's infectious, but with enough edge to temper its undeniable desire to connect.

We Are the Champions might disappoint some diehard fans, but it's also proof positive that JEFF the Brotherhood can play with the big boys.

While hooks abound, WeirdOs also plays as one big, roiling piece. Like the live jams from which it emerged, the album has peaks and valleys, passages of unrelenting intensity followed by space-out cooldowns that offer the slightest moment to breathe.

Russell's recordings are enormously idiosyncratic, and a lot of Master Mix's contributors try to normalize his music: sanding off his bristling electric cello tones, hammering repeated phrases into choruses, singing with dramatic intonation in place of his ethereal reserve. (The major exception is Lonnie Holley, whose four brief "interludes" here abstract Russell pieces further.) That often works just fine.

On to hell with it, PinkPantheress sculpts a digital-age paradise that exists only in an invented memory of the past, setting the stage for a career set more firmly in the present.

Odyssey is Fischerspooner's attempt at kicking and screaming their way out of punchline hell, so it's a bit of a surprise how good everything sounds.

Era showcases all the work Disappears have done cutting and splicing and regathering their sound together to regain their identity. It’s still lurking in the shadows, but finally, it's there.

On ABOMINATION REVEALED AT LAST, Osees begin their return flight to the garage-rock headbanging of their mid-2010s material. There’s too much synth and wooden drumming to sound like a full throwback to their Thee Oh Sees days, but you wouldn’t be misguided if you said the album’s title and art mirror Mutilator Defeated at Last from a decade ago.

Somehow, Dando's nonchalance here--his stoned cadences, fleeting hooks, loose-limbed guitar playing, and generally rumpled demeanor--comes across as a weird but sincere gregariousness.

He turns his history over and over in his hands, and he relays his findings, tactile and intangible. The record is rich with observations of the world beyond his windows.

The record functions as a well-executed sampler of the magnified pain and horror we've come to expect from this band.

Enter works best when it's not begging for an ENT.

Unlike those records [Lemonade and 30], Allen’s album is too concerned with honoring moment-to-moment feelings of hurt and betrayal to really reach for a mature overview of the breakup. But what the songwriting lacks in conceptual development, it makes up for in raw emotion and narrative thrust.

They’re just the latest to move these pieces around--to use distortion pedals and droning vocals to unpack the mysteries of the universe. But there’s a confidence that with time they could be the ones to finally solve the puzzle.

Overall Brute is a frustrating mish-mosh of middling and artful. When it’s working, there is a certain panache in the high-powered, informationally dense musical speedballs she creates.

Even in its busiest moments, the album has a soothing effect. Its rough charms begin to feel like an acceptance of a world in disarray, refining its chaos into compact moments of beauty.

Here, she doesn’t limit herself to one cohesive palette. Instead, she and producer Daniel James frame Williams’ multi-octave range in a variety of pop subgenres—indie pop, pop rock, dream pop—giving it ample space to roam and ramble.

In recent years, Burial has increasingly tried to escape the linearity of dance music by cobbling together pieces of songs into multi-part suites. With Antidawn, he makes the most of that technique; every track is riddled with fake-outs, false endings, and trapdoors. In that sense, despite the record’s heavy-handedness, there is something playful about Antidawn.

Pissed Jeans haven’t overhauled their sound or reinvented themselves or “matured” as artists so much as they have amassed a new inventory of modern miseries to turn into scuzz-punk tantrums, from catalytic converter theft (“[Stolen] Catalytic Converter”) to crippling medical debt ("Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt").

Tape-chewed textures and digital glitches initially defined Wyatt’s first few releases, but there’s a remarkable clarity throughout Union and Return that belies the fact that for all the beauty of his fourth album, his inherent weirdness still squirms beneath the surface.

Still in search of “a most elusive truth,” but using all of her talents to bring herself and her listeners ever closer to it.

Richter’s approach is almost too cut-and-dry; there’s none of the messiness that comes with processing emotion or the tension and release that defines catharsis. But closer “Movement, Before all Flowers” offers a welcome surprise.

There is much more to Heaven Adores You than endearing scraps, however, and none of them are more important than the version of "True Love" that appears here.

SOAK’s honesty, combined with her considerable musical gifts, ensures that Grim Town is always a nice place to visit, even if you’d never want to live there.

While Trouble Maker doesn’t usurp the band’s primordial peak, it’s far and wide their strongest effort since 2000’s excellent self-titled.

Chet Faker's first full-length album proves that the artist is eager to explore new frontiers.

Ciara feels slightly (though only slightly) weaker when she swims against the current of her own charm and tries for “raw.”

The Rat Road offers no easy answers and—frankly—not all that much easy listening. But if you’re looking for a sometimes baffling yet often entertaining adventure, The Rat Road delivers.

This record doesn't intend to blow your hair back; it wants to get under your skin, and with its twinkling arpeggios, morbidly graceful lyrics, and barely there electronics, slowly, it does.

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

Presumably, this paring down is not a permanent stylistic shift so much as a creative exercise--a chance for Crutchfield to revisit the simple roots of her songwriting practice. In its completion, she has demonstrated just how few colors she needs to paint vividly.

Born Again is superior to its predecessor in nearly every respect.

Tillman varies things up on Fear Fun, reveals an adventurous palette, and makes what may be his best album to date.

The songs on Cocoa Sugar are unquestionably Young Fathers’ most accessible. They have a sense of a narrative flow and an overarching theme, but they’re still knotty and confounding.