Where the ambient interludes on Pearl Mystic felt like necessary pauses for the band to catch their breath, on The Hum they serve a more crucial, connective quality, melting down their road-running rave-ups and molding them into "Mother Sky"-high odysseys and opium-den comedown ballads.

There's something bold in the smaller scope of The Endless River, but it proves to be one of the few Pink Floyd releases that sounds like a step backwards, with nothing new to say and no new frontiers to explore.

Release is not Cave’s strongest record, but it’s not a bad entry point. An odds and ends compilation, it provides a clear picture of the group's evolution from free-form psych-noodling toward its more sublime and trance-inducing current incarnation.

Although Michael is likely destined to end up a minor effort in Bundick’s expanding catalogue, his talent and radiant passion for new musical ideas and a wide breadth of sounds render the album a worthwhile effort for even casual listeners.

Ultimately, Wyatt has made a sadly triumphant album that questions how our minds remember what they remember.

Nausea is easier to listen to than Sunbathing Animal in part because it seems less ambitious.

Even a casual listener could hear the spark--Staples' first fame came from getting the best of known mic terrorist Earl Sweatshirt--his production values have finally caught up enough to push him past the scrappy sidekick division into the big leagues.

This is, to date, his quintessential live release, capturing a set that toggles carefully between the band’s luxurious sounds and his urgent songs. The Johnsons are in their most measured and exquisite phase, giving new life to cuts familiar from Hegarty’s catalog.... The accompanying film, however, tries to do too much, in turn missing the simple, genius focus of the conceit.

Nearly every track on Lost on the River has a couple of memorable moments: a marvelous turn of phrase, a brief Jim James guitar meltdown, an instant of the band members discovering how their voices can harmonize. But what it lacks is the casual joy of Dylan's Basement Tapes.

2:54 have built a palatial structure on The Other I, but they still have yet to lay out a welcome mat.

Broke With Expensive Taste glides through all of these, just like the faithful 1 train sampled on "Desperado". Both album and the artist revel in the freedom of a New York City where divisions between these sounds and scenes have ever so slowly ceased to exist.

Rather than shade towards LCD’s sound, Museum of Love pull from the playbook of DFA’s other big band, Holy Ghost!, favoring the timbres, patch settings, and smooth productions of elegant 1980s new wave and nu-romantic acts.

The Lips’ Fwends are so intent on tripping up the songs’ rhythmic momentum and weirding up the basic melodies with hammy vocals that they ultimately reinforce their sturdiness. They’re trashing all the furniture in the house, but not bulldozing any walls to open up new vantages.

While Hypnotized nudges Perro and Chiericozzi out of their established comfort zone, it also has the effect of making you appreciate the tightened-up craft and finely curated song selection they exhibit with the Men.

Ironically, in trying to tap into the mystique of America’s most storied cities, Foo Fighters completely demystify their own creative process, effectively turning the Sonic Highways project into a glorified homework assignment--educational, perhaps, but laboriously procedural.

His project, like the guy himself, has clearly reached, if not maturity, drinking age at the least. If Alex G keeps it up at this rate, the next round'll be on him.

Their 13th album, La Isla Bonita, is among their most accessible, reaching for moments of escapism that never entered the frame on 2012's Breakup Songs.

What’s always set Clark apart is his eclecticism, dynamism, and flair for the dramatic, all of which is on fine display here. His tracks don’t drop as much as they slip or swerve, forever off-balance.

Throw Haerts on shuffle and it’s uniformly accessible and uniform, period.

Human Voice gently nudges him back into the spotlight to speak his mind alone, and even if his voice isn't the most exciting and innovative one in today's electronic music landscape, it is unmistakably his own.

77 is long; 18 tracks and 68 minutes, and you’d think that if a band insisted on staying around for so long they’d have more to say, or at least display more stylistic variation.

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.

Alone for the First Time is the furthest he's pushed himself, and the growing pains on the album can be chalked up to the strain of trying new things, a kind of adolescent awkwardness that shows signs of maturing into something sophisticated and unique.

Despite the dual versions, Storytone never finds a comfortable middle ground: the orchestral versions too maudlin, the solo versions over-sharing.

The album’s stationary sound and glacial pace, ironically, make it a more demanding listen than Dirty Beaches’ more outwardly confrontational, punk-inspired previous releases.

It’s bleak and beautiful in the same way Keep You is, and it gives a lot provided you put your share of effort into it. And so you’ll probably feel exhausted after listening to Keep You; as well you should.

Taken as a whole, it is an album about unstable unities, things that cannot easily hold together, wholes breaking to pieces and being put back together again in new and unfamiliar shapes.

Behind his accented murmurs, Woolhouse fills out Songs with bolder strokes than the pale production of Life After Defo.

As soon as they figure out that they don't have to lift wholesale chunks of inspiration from any of their heroes in order to make their point, they may find a way to more creatively harness their '90s worship. Until then, Lifer has just enough life of its own.

Throughout Flatland, Objekt reclaims his genre's all-too-familiar affectations by making us hear them for the first time all over again.

These finely wrought songs introduce a fascinating and confidently subversive artist and offers a glimpse of the road she’s traveling.

Home Everywhere has every element needed to make a great Medicine album, only they’re deployed in gangling spasms and obsessive over-processing. If only they’d edited themselves a little more--or a little less.

Offering passes that test, it’s both an “important” jazz release and one that’s actually enjoyable to listen to.

He’s constantly halving the distance to his target, getting closer but not quite getting there. But those infinitesimal improvements on Hell Below--indeed, the very places where it remains static--show, in some ways, what that Ideal Album might look like.

Sounding like nothing else and answering to nobody but its creators, Run the Jewels 2 is in a class by itself.

This streamlined set, Start Together, captures that dichotomy, archiving the Sleater-Kinney canon with care: from the ideological-punches of thirdwave feminism to their post-riot grrrl classic rock revisionism, all seven albums have been remastered and paired with a plainly gorgeous hardcover photobook, as well as the surprise of a reunion-launching 7" single.

Oozing Wound have matured without losing sight of the frayed ends that make their music interesting.

Ruins has a vivid sense of place.

Marigolden fares best when it loses the florid similes and addresses character and story.

His last record boasted that he was the Trouble Man, but with a clear mind and fewer visible burdens, Clifford Harris has produced his most thoughtful and substantive record in years.

The lack of palplable passion on Nobody Wants to Be Here is, once again, somewhat disappointing and even more surprising.

Burnt Offering has its own kind of subtlety, and most of it is in the interplay between meter, genre, and mood.

Sound of a Woman fails to spark, as its homogenous textures blend together to rob this music of the personality and emotion it has when done right.

Soused is compelling, almost inherently so, but it’s not a classic.

While the band may have struggled in the past to reconcile their post-hardcore roots with their art-rock ambitions, more often than not, IX marks the spot.

The Best Day proves to be not so much a revelatory, introspective antidote to Moore’s best-known band as a serviceable, equally high-voltage substitute for it.

One thing he is remarkably good at across his body of work is letting in disarming moments of vulnerability, where he pulls you in to spectate upon the wreck of his life. On Phantom Radio there are just a few too many times when it's all dressed up in unnecessary complication.

You get the sense that pretty much any style could be Ware’s if she commits to it, but for now it’s nice to hear her explore a level of sophistication as her star continues to rise.

Meatbodies don't just blindly hit peak after peak, shredding toward the high heavens uninterrupted for a full album. They pull back and indulge their more psychedelic inclinations, letting Ubovich's voice shine, lilt, and echo over steady acoustic strumming.

I’ll Be the Tornado is as accomplished and confident as a band can sound while sorting their shit out in public.

They can be a bit one-note sometimes, but that doesn't make them any less beloved; without their ribaldness, the world of heavy music just wouldn't be as fun.

AWVFTS adapts, making ATOMOS louder and more mobile than its impeccably tentative predecessor—more volatile and disjointed, with basses you can feel in your body because this is for the body.

Trick is nice with atmosphere, but largely a non-entity when it comes to hooks.

Otherness isn't just less immediate than other pop music; it's less self-aware, and way less fun.

It’s a warm, deeply rooted, familiar statement indicative of a real, earned connection.

As a whole, Bestial Burden highlights Chardiet’s ability to re-draw the boundaries of her own artistic approach, ripping out its guts and creating something new out of the decaying remains.

Only the spirited, psychedelic chug of “Spitfire” and the handclap-catalyzed go-go of “Hey Now” come close to clicking with—let alone recapturing—any portion of the band’s former glory. The remainder of the record is filled out with either bland mediocrities or downright embarrassments such as “Flying Like a Bird”, a sappy ballad that sharply delineates every weakness Inspiral Carpets has, from a dearth of energy to a lack of melody.

Thomson's lyrics are at once Single Mothers' main attraction and--for some listeners--their presumptive sticking point.

While the band have reined in some of the volatility that made those introductory singles so exhilarating, there’s a cool consistency and newfound accessibility to Absolutely Free that makes it an easy, enchanting front-to-back listen, the songs locking together to form a smoothly contoured album arc.

When No One Is Lost tries to blend in with the youth, Stars sound like professors rather than participants.

In its most fully realized moments, ...And Star Power is the album Todd Rundgren could’ve released between Something/Anything? and A Wizard, a True Star, its best songs striking an uncanny balance between the exquisite balladry of the former and the progged-out fantasias of the latter.

All the deconstructions and rebuildings on I’ve Been to Many Places are more visceral than theoretical, and you don’t have to know anything about jazz modes or music theory to drown yourself in Shipp’s waves.

It’s her best and most daring album of this century, featuring some of her heaviest and most haunting performances.

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.

Her work is a testament to the power of even the quietest music to help us feel things deeply, an experience that lasts for a few minutes that we can return to for a lifetime.

Rips mostly finds the band walking away from Timony's established voice and pushing toward something more direct and energetic--embracing the past, but also blowing things up and starting again.

There is nothing on Lily-O to break the spell these musicians have too carefully cast. In other words, there is nothing to get Amidon out of his own head or out of our collective past.

As she’s shed the trappings of distinctly 2010s R&B for something less easily time-stamped, she’s revealed a new and very telling set of inspirations.

With all the work to try and incorporate these far-afield guest vocalists aside, it's worth noting that the production itself is more reliant on them than ever. Underneath them, the music is often flat and unadventurous, tasteful where it could stand to be raucous and rigid where it needs to be limber.

It’s beautiful and ugly at the same time and, for now, Iceage have found their own unstable sense of peace.

It's pretty boring and one-note, but if Georgopoulos' indulgent, decadent tendencies produce the occasional dud, it seems a small price to pay for the intrigue of looking forward to what he’s going to do next.

V for Vaselines leaves a lasting pop smear.

Too many songs on Taiga come across as filler—too small and formulaic to impress at "taiga" scale, but too leaden to reach anthemic heights.

RAA don't have the element of surprise like they did on the originally self-released Hometowns, and it doesn't slowly ingratiate the way Departing did, but Mended With Gold proves Edenloff's songs of lost love can sneak up on you even when the music hits you square on the chin.

It’s been fussed over so much that any spark that may have spurred it has been smothered.

His latest, Way Out Weather, is the fully formed pinnacle of his career.

Our Love is a very assured record, from its unconventional, austere arrangements to its unrelenting focus and thematic consistency.

Raw is a perfectly executed version of what Westerners might call global kitsch: a series of evocative tourist postcards showing sunny scenes from Rio and Honolulu.

Ra alights on almost all aspects of its bandleader’s multidimensional sound and presents a coherent trajectory through it, alternating between otherworldly explorations and earthbound beats.

As a whole, A World Lit Only by Fire represents music converted into motion--kinetic and mechanical, inexorable and inhuman. Godflesh, never a forgiving band, has never sounded so relentless.

Flying Lotus has the notion that death should be the only limiting factor, and when he's put out a work that wrings beauty out of that very thing, what's the point of fearing anything?

This album’s equilibrium-upsetting aural eclecticism comes into sharp focus: even if you’re not a working mom trying to function on four hours of sleep per night, the buzzing busyness and hallucinatory disorientation of Cosmic Logic are liable to make you feel like one.

Social Rust proves that real experimentation does not require impenetrability at every turn.

What [3rdEyeGirl] don’t have is much of a personality. Recorded live in the studio using analog equipment, the album is nevertheless too proficient, too slick, and too professional to come across as much more than anonymous.

Art Official Age is not a return to form by any means, but a modestly exciting Prince album.

Everything could be accepted for what it is and be held to a more manageable standard: how good does a Weezer album have to be before it can be considered actually good? As it turns out, about this good.

Certain elements of Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, if given the right amount of attention, can be enjoyable to luxuriate in.

It’s rare to see a band as established as Electric Wizard come back from a slump with renewed vigor and a fresh shot of hellfire coursing through their veins, but with Time to Die, they’ve both surpassed expectations and proved that they’re still as vital as they ever were.

The second half of Cool Choices can’t match the first in quality or intrigue, but what makes the album as a whole worth listening to is Ghetto’s ability to burrow into a quarry of sentimental abandon and talk about what it feels like to be vulnerable.

The Drums are at least halfway to amassing a pretty great singles comp--they just can’t really call it a Greatest Hits.

The “Dimension Dive” tracks sometimes sound like they belong on a different record altogether, although taken in the grab-bag context of Savage Imagination it just about works. It’s just that elsewhere there’s a more coherent flow from one change to the next.

On Singer’s Grave, Oldham tweaks the lyrics and song titles here and there to fit these new, peppier arrangements, but he doesn’t appear to be making any grand artistic statement in these re-dos other than making it clear, again, that he can reinvent himself and his songs in any way he so chooses.

This generation-crossing collaboration feels like a record lodged in a sort of chronological rut, one where a young artist fronts an old-sounding record that sounds like it could've been released at any point in his lifetime--and helmed by any number of MCs that could've sounded like him.

Feel Something is a so-so listen that never rises above the band’s influences.

The New Testament feels mostly like one just-OK thing, easy to enjoy on a pass but much harder to love.

At times, KOCH is so microscopic it feels like there’s barely any place left for this music to go. But Gamble keeps finding new ways to take it apart and reassemble it, to the point where something so closed off, so concerned with the smallest of gestures, feels thrillingly open.

Ontario Gothic is certainly part of a great story; but as a perfectly satisfying half hour of modest and common dream-pop, it's not much of a story on its own.

On Tyranny, that guy has simply worked too hard, and that sense of needless toil bleeds through in every bum lick, brick-walled sound, and garbled burst of noise shoved onto the record.