The takeaway here is that, two albums in, Cold Specks have the graceful part down pat--but there’s room for more expulsion.

Wire never wanted to be a satisfying band, yet they somehow became one--which leaves the otherwise bold impulse behind Document and Eyewitness curiously inconclusive.

With the futurist sound of Brill Bruisers, the whole band embraces a more electric version of itself—bulked-up in chrome-plated armor, firing on all cylinders, and ready to steamroll anything in its path.

Wilderness of Mirrors isn't groundbreaking in general, but it is new territory for the often-cerebral English, and he puts an engaging, commanding stamp on this style of ambient overdrive hymn.

While [Matt Sharp] wisely defers to Wolfe and Laessig to deliver the album's biggest hooks, his unwavering wistfulness still has a way of flattening out Lost in Alphaville’s emotional terrain and lending the album a steady-to-a-fault temperament.

In seeking their answers from the indie rock firmament, Literature have found something freeing, as Chorus sounds surprisingly fresh. More importantly, it sounds like the record their previous recordings hinted that they wanted to make.

As immersive and deep as the lake around which it revolves, Meshes of Voice adds a new dimension to the output of both its makers.

Dialing down his avant tendencies has given Moiré a fresh perspective and helped tame his music, for better or worse.

A fragmented 12-song album that trends toward the same path that he already spent five albums exploring.

Oddly, for an album that cheekily presents itself as a long-lost ’70s prog cut-out bin artifact, Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk’s most notable characteristic may be its 29-minute brevity, offering a tasting-menu sampler of the various modes the Lips have been exploring for the past five years.

As obsessed as Pallbearer is with endings, the music here is timeless.

So though it does often feel like JJ have hit a wall on V, when they're able to scale that wall and dance with the stars, the album's a treat.

For now, though, Kimbra's status as "That singer from the Gotye song" woefully underserves her full potential, but so does The Golden Echo.

While there is much to admire about Beal taking such an abrupt left turn at this crucial juncture in his trajectory, in this case, it’s one that, more often than not, leads to an aesthetic dead end.

O’Connor is pushing herself on every song here--maybe not always in the right or most obvious or safest directions, but always with some purpose.

That air of obligation presides during The World We Left Behind, a nine-track slog.

With every bungled attempt at pop, metal, or pop-metal, Get Hurt just rewrites its own worst case scenario.

The new-stuff disc offers few hints as to where the label is headed next, which is unsurprising, but the variety on display is only matched by the quality of the tunes themselves.

Wagner’s songs remain skeletal--still just bone and flaking flesh--but the sound is more polished, crisper and starker and at times even slick.

With Boyhood [the Richard Linklater film], you grow invested in the characters as they evolve over 12 years; you can enjoy the flow of Lacuna just as much, but in the 11 songs here, you just wish there was some character to begin with.

The sounds themselves—sumptuously tarnished samples and breakbeats worn smooth as river rocks--are their own reward, even when they don't do what you expect them to.

Vol. 2 proves there’s more than enough country funk out there to fill a good Vol. 3.

The main drawback to Worlds’ sound, an impressionistic approach to mass-appeal fare, is that anyone with their ear to the (festival) ground might find these sounds to be relatively old-hat.

FKA twigs is not a masterful lyricist, at least not yet; some of her couplets feel clunky, like she's grasping in the dark for rhymes and coming up with the objects closest to hand ("If the flame gets blown out and you shine/ I will know that you cannot be mine"). But when she zeroes in on the essence of a thing, she hits hard.

Like their namesake, Melted Toys’ willfully warped nature can get in the way of their utility.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Being is most compelling as a pop album when it’s not trying to hook you; the rest is promising, but perhaps could do with a little more dementedness.

Somehow L’Amour sounds less there with each spin, beckoning you into its hazy world even as it dissolves into gray. The mystery is so perfect that it’d be a tragedy to solve it.

End Times Undone neither elbows past nor dwells too much on Kilgour’s considerable legacy. It’s a frozen moment in a continuum, and it shines with suitable magic.

The main problem is that the music is so self-conscious, as most of these songs sound like a band still trying to feel its way forward. The quest is noble and even necessary; the results, much less so.

The melodies for their slower and more winsome songs hit harder and soar higher than the power chord explosions, which can feel a little stale, like maybe someone forgot about that Schlitz can.

Its style is limited, but the band manages to spread out within it, discovering their own idiosyncratic little vocabulary without ever exhausting it.

Gist Is is full of clever turns of musical and lyrical phrase which will dispel possible accusations of self-indulgence and pretension, and somehow, within just a few listens, it becomes easy to enjoy this unusually paced album of so few easy hooks, and so many seemingly insignificant words.

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

On Time Is Over One Day Old, any emotional extreme or attempted musical shift just ends up sounding like stasis.

These songs rip and burst and go.

The Voyager is not quite so easily summed up. It’s not anchored in one particular scene, but plays as broadly California, with sly nods to the Byrds in the guitars, the Go-Go’s in the vocals, and Randy Newman in the wry humor.

The diversity of sound the band rolls out on Pe’ahi is certainly refreshing, but it takes a chunk out of the foundation of their career.

The idea is clever, and very Beck: a mix of the modern and the antiquated so fluid that you start to see how they're not that different to begin with. The execution feels out of his hands, and really, out of everyone's--just another project whose purpose seems lost in the labyrinth of production.

It’s Shelton who confidently ties everything together and insinuates a larger story arc in the sequencing.

Racy is big, it’s bold, and positions its creators closer to "pop", only to reveal them as a pop band by context rather than nature.

Shattuck doesn't often telegraph the resemblance, and the band's growl-and-bash obscures it, but if you're listening for Beatles-of-'65 nods, they're all over Whoop Dee Doo.

The soul of Shabazz Palaces is pairing next-gen sounds with classic brass-tacks show-and-prove emceeing, and Lese Majesty tugs those extremes as far as they've ever been pulled; that it never shows signs of wear speaks to the strength of the bond.

With By All Means he completes a three-release run that's as solid as any in recent memory, even if the answer to the question of whether he has another gear in him remains unanswered for the time being.

The more human Ab-Soul dares to be on record, the stronger he becomes.

Where past efforts buried its intimacy under coldness and severity, Will To Be Well offers a warm, familiar embrace.

While Liminal is a testament to the Acid’s breadth of vision and production prowess--seamlessly incorporating everything from subterranean techno and avant-R&B to proggy sci-fi soundscapes and sad-bastard bedroom folk--its uniformly predictable pacing, with every song painstakingly built up from a pause to a pulse, grows wearing over a 51-minute stretch.

It’s a lot to tackle in seven songs, but there’s a depth and richness in both texture and songwriting that show glimpses of a new direction, one that might free them from their own drone-rock noose.

The album's most convincing when tackling the push-and-pull conflict between the individual and his hometown, as Common's good intentions are buoyed by memory, generosity, and attentiveness to his craft.

While Drop the Vowels doesn't carry the game-changing nature of that album, the relative sonic variety it provides compared to Luxury Problems' expressively singular mindset makes for a solid introduction to one of contemporary techno's most consistently exciting collectives.

It's a record shot through with feelings of anxiety and anger seemingly related to money, art, and other artists.

For Ween newcomers, FREEMAN is bound to sound odd, even off-putting. I get it. But this is the promise and labor of appreciating a lifelong cult artist like Freeman: taking the time to engage him on his own terms.

There are a handful of moments here when he turns himself inside-out over the course of a song, bringing him into the orbit of those artists he so obviously idolizes. Now he just needs to figure out how to emulate his starting position.

The result is a strictly passerby album: one that is heard and then quickly forgotten.

Upright Behavior is Schatz's attempt go pack as much of this essence into one space as possible, and it comes on like a combination Chinese finger trap and bear hug.

For all Jackson's personal struggle and exploration, Paradise feels like a safe record, calibrated for the comfort of an imagined audience, working at its best when it becomes almost invisible--the accessory to the experience and not the experience itself.

None of these covers is quite as transformed as “Jezebel”, so nothing on Strange Weather delivers the same subversive charge. Partly that’s due to her choice in material, which for the most part is recent and more indie-oriented.

Ultimately, Constricting Rage will either prove redundant or ravishing.

2 Chainz been rapping for over a decade, but now his music sounds like he’s just entertaining himself during late night recording sessions and (correctly) assuming his audience is along for the ride.

For Those Who Stay won’t change your opinion either way, and at the most, it might make you feel more strongly about what you already believe.

Sure, the twitchy alienation of their earliest records is long gone, but the Old 97's are still fighting the good fight against respectability.

Once you stop trying to label what should be a hook and focus on what is, the ingenuity of each song’s design and the ear-turning nature of every maneuver speaks to Never Hungover Again's inexhaustible quality, the kind of album you can play three times in a row without any part wearing out its welcome.

Rankin possesses the sort of radiant but deceptively deadpan voice that lets her to infuse these lovelorn laments with sly, sometimes sinister wit.

Live at Biko is quick to remind us that Benji is as much a comedy as tragedy, at times forcefully so.

Break Line is a musical without an audience, and its creators might be better off if it fails to find one.

Lew has a remarkable talent for portraying scenes in the starkest terms.

It works both as something to take to heart and a to-date career statement, as the making of Honeyblood turned out all right, after all.

Taken as a whole, The Next Four Years moves like a piece of fine engineering—all curved lines, no wind resistance.

eter Murphy’s once again located the razor-thin line between restraint and complete unhingedness that he hasn’t walked since Bauhaus’ first time around, and following his recent exploits has never felt more rewarding.

The best songs on Conversations point to a viable middle ground where earnest delicacy and shadowy tones co-exist, but the band has yet to fully explore that realm.

Even at its best, though, In My World resembles a less-engaging version of someone else, the sound of an artist regressing instead of stepping forward into new territory.

As it stands, remaining at that upper register with every word and line, the album’s 39 minutes feel much longer, leaving one high and dry.

Listening to Complete Surrender, you get the sense that Taylor and Watson would be just as happy making music for, and with, each other in their spare time, revelling in their companionship.

In a humbler, warmer, more openhearted way, Reigning Sound have risen above themselves--as well as the garage-rock idiom that spawned them--while spiritually hewing true.

At times the intricate arrangements come across as a means of covering up unmemorable songwriting.

Sutherland is a massively charismatic character, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the elation that he so obviously feels when he gets from finding the perfect groove. That feeling permeates every corner of the album, but it comes through strongest on two particular tracks.

The switch from acoustic to electric has a lovely lamplit effect on the songs.

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

In a way, it's a shame that Third Time to Harm came out in 2014: in 1980, this thing would've been a mainstay in teen boys' tape decks everywhere.

With L’Aventura, he’s done a fine job of sticking the landing.

Quinn and Donaldson may be getting somewhat longer in the tooth, but they’re sounding younger. And whatever darkness lurks within Family Crimes is swallowed back down with a wise, dreamy smile.

The headspace it produces is calming but frequently, dreamily surreal, and it often seems like a better place to live than the world outside it.

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

Braid don’t have the athleticism or explosiveness of their earlier days, but in a Tim Duncan way, they’re craftier, better about picking their spots.

A well-polished album that sometimes feels perplexingly one-dimensional.

This is an album that asks you to sink into its sounds, takes a left every time you expect it to take a right and moves slowly most of the time, letting things happen rather than forcing them.

Though We Are Only What We Feel plods through similar tempos and uniform textures, Wäppling sings with enough character to keep the record from fading into the background.

This album can't be written off purely as a repetitive mess--this is the sound they were going for, after all, and when they rely less heavily on repetition, drones, and electronics, they find some decent material.

A startling and inspiring record. Eno’s been involved with quite a few of those in the past, but it’s especially nice to experience a new one that reaches us in the present moment.

A record too tart for beauty and too well reared for intractability.

It's easier to listen with fresh ears and hear these strange sounds as something playful, unfamiliar, and approachable, qualities that Gamel definitely possesses.

For now, Careers stands up as a testament to the power of serendipity and a decent first effort from a blooming young songwriter.

It’s better to conceive of Ex holistically, rather than as seven individual tracks—in part because the album's distinct parts tend to blend into one another, with little to differentiate them.

As an entry point into two of the distinct faces of Cabaret Voltaire, #7885 is an undeniably valuable document, and one that’s as much about the importance of growth and change as it is about the birth of a sound.

Too many shards of ideas are shoved into the long songs, and Fickeisen’s flash sometimes borders on showmanship, a glaring incongruity for a spartan outfit like Trap Them.

It's a record just as baffling as it is beguiling.

The bulk of Neon Icon resists coherence or purpose.

Even with their most aesthetically orthodox track, Total Control's total message is radical.

The Atlas Moth hope to be heavy and heavenly, aggressive and accessible, to exist in worlds of light and dark simultaneously. In this instance, they wind up in the shadows of their own intentions, hidden in flat gray instead of beautiful white or harrowing black.