The tracks on Remembrance don’t sound like they’d be improved with people spitting over them, but they do connect to the emotional world of a certain kind of rap production, with chords and patterns that suggest tension, danger, and, ultimately, melancholy.

As ardent and inviting as Something Shines and We Are Divine both are, Sadier seems content at this point to coo to the converted.

Like all of Cohen's albums, Popular Problems sounds slick but slightly off-kilter, like someone trying to imitate music they've read about but never actually heard.

Some of Commune is pretty splendid.

Mallet percussion, multilingual lyrics, chesty vocal huffs, fumbled acoustics, roundabout vocal harmonies, tentative EDM dipping, Asian monasticism, "Rule Britannia", American gothic: they all get sucked into the vacuum of This Is All Yours without leaving an impression.

These songs feel less like songs and more like treasures, ones that fill you with power and wisdom, and as a result, Too Bright seems capable of resonating with, comforting, and moving anyone who's ever felt alienated, discriminated against, or "other-ized," regardless of sexual orientation.

If the stories are slightly different, for better or worse, the song remains the same.

In its winning attempt to paralyze you, Sway may have paralyzed itself.

Syro contains some of his most tactile music; it’s a headphone record par excellence, an hour-long feast for the ears.

Shellac go straight for your throat and don't loosen their grip until the bitter end.

Weirdon doesn’t attempt to alter the course or conviction of Polizze’s faith in six strings, a volume knob, and the truth, but it does make it more compelling than ever.

The band makes unexpected dynamic pushes seem easy to pull off and easier to internalize as a listener, but on first listen, each comes as a surprise.

The whole album feels like a good enough time if you throw it on in the background, but as a follow-up to a deeper body of work that rides on fascinating ugliness, why not hope for something that actually commands your attention instead?

The sprawl is less generous than it is indulgent, rendering the album more intimidating and less accessible than it should be.

It’s the pro-forma songwriting that transpires between those brontosaurus blasts that ultimately proves problematic. By using their muscular might to prop up otherwise featherweight tunes, Royal Blood have effectively built themselves a castle and furnished it with IKEA.

Where Julia filled almost every available space with either emotional fullness or palpable absence, City Wrecker feels pinched and constrained; the former was a drain to listen to in the best possible way, while this new one only occasionally breaks the skin.

Unquestionably, Gainsborough's sonic ingenuity continues to be his greatest asset; his growth as an artist hinges on accepting that others can't always enjoy his noise as much as he does.

Ryan Adams is a persuasively dark album, one defined by themes of struggle, instability, isolation, and regret.

Despite uneven pacing, This Is My Hand works on a visceral level, conjuring Worden’s intended image of tribal, fireside collaboration through a rich diversity of texture, detail, and tone.

Souled Out capably buffs Jhené Aiko’s strengths and shellacks her faults, but the moments where she steps out into the depth of her story transcend the synergy of a group of musicians with good chemistry.

A record that finds SMD operating at half-speed when the accelerator is pedal is close within their reach.

Bono may have self-deprecatingly described Songs of Innocence as “the blood, sweat and tears of some Irish guys...in your junk mail,” but it’s not even that interesting--it’s just a blank message.

Imagin shines whenever it isn't contorting to fit preconceived notions of format.

After its auspicious start, The Dew Last an Hour tries to convey similar sentiments amid agreeable, midtempo synth-pop that skimps on the pop and piles on the twinkling, harmonized guitars and vaporous melodies. What begins as a cooling blast of fresh air dissipates into pleasant ambience.

If you're inclined to Tennis negatively, they look like a group of blank people offering bland sweetness devoid of deeper meaning. While the band might've fit that description at one point, they've since grown past it, so if you're one of the listeners who dismissed their earlier work as banal and bourgeois, know that Tennis has since earned another chance.

With The Physical World, Grainger and Keeler haven’t entirely scratched the itch they instigated a decade ago. But they’ve learned to live with the burn, and that’s the next best thing.

Commonwealth as a whole is that of a noble failure. It's an interesting experiment, albeit less fulfilling than the band's best and recent work--but quality and relative position within their deep catalog aside, the album's very existence is heartening.

It’s all the more disappointing that, despite the rawness of these recordings and the private nature of their creation, O sounds weirdly noncommittal on Crush Songs, as though the sparse demo arrangements were a form of holding back.

Avi Buffalo are trying and failing to act their age on At Best Cuckold, and ain’t nothin’ wrong with that either.

His process of filtering out the bad has failed him on Adrian Thaws, leaving an album that bears both his names but offers less of himself than ever before.

Banks could certainly go places--but Goddess doesn't, and instead seems content to wallow in the same depressive rut for an exhausting 59 minutes.

This album sounds best in the context of the Hiss Golden Messenger catalog--as a comment on and a celebration of the spiritual and creative toil on the previous albums.

If not all of Lullaby’s fusion experiments succeed, there’s enough inspired alchemy here to earn Plant the right to bring it on home.

Even as she treads upon dead earth, Castle’s connection to nature is potent as ever: with Pink City, she reminds us of how good it feels to be alive, even when life gets in the way.

On Ores & Minerals, there was a measure of spaciness that’s been lost here, perhaps surprisingly considering the circumstances of its birthing. If that album was a leap, this one is a step, and a gingerly one at that.

With El Pintor, Interpol don’t sound as much like Interpol as they do a band that really wants to be Interpol; it’s a sad notion for anyone who once held this band’s music dear to their hearts, but taking into account what came before, it’s a miracle that Interpol still exist in this capacity at all.

Parry's writing is shimmering, jewel-like.

Even though Anchor is a truly disappointing work from such an inventive mind, it’s not enough to suggest that he’s reached the point of creative bankruptcy.

Seen It All: The Autobiography doesn’t deliver on either one of its titular promises.

Earth have seemed overdue for a change, and these songs collectively represent a promising half-step toward it.

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.

For all their reverence toward the past, Bitchin Bajas know how to live in the present--there’s no knowing distance here--so at its best, Bitchin Bajas doesn’t give you ideas about sounds, but the sounds themselves.

It seems almost unfair, though, to criticize Gallab for the minor crime of engaging with a sound that’s not as inherently interesting as what he’s proven capable of elsewhere, as Mean Love cements his reputation as a capable musical wanderer willing to engage with a variety of sounds.

YOB’s latest record stands as one of their densest, so it's good that the band's greatest asset, their impeccable pacing, remains intact.

In essence, Overjoyed is the sound of the Fairs playing along with themselves, or at least the sweet, weird boys they used to be--not always with as much spark or chaos, but mashing up the fruits just as gleefully.

Four years later, though, all Blonde Redhead has to show for its lengthy studio hiatus is another too-obvious bauble.

It’s fun, sure, but it’s also thrillingly restless, at times almost desperate.

10 Summers closes with four R&B tracks—two songs and two interludes, all of which act almost as palette cleansers after the unrelenting hardness of the previous eight numbers.

Melodies coast, but they don’t always stick; everything’s too mannered, too clean, and the album is marred by a clinicality further punctuated by its bonus tracks.

A sprawling, complex, and fascinating document of American indie rock.

Turns out, so-called mini-Mariah can hold her own in 2014; and while the best songs here may not be timeless, they certainly feel right for right now.

There’s nothing embarrassing here, just a few miscalculations amid some typically strong material, but Mascis has proven that he can muster more joyous ingenuity and imagination than he does on Tied to a Star.

Pale Communion only toys with the building blocks, revealing influences that were already apparent but refusing to invigorate them alongside each other.

An album this guileless is bound to be polarizing, for the very fact that it resolutely resists the urge to provoke.

Outclassed by their own ambition, the band has aimed Annabel Dream Reader toward the lofty heights of Poe’s glum, fog-shrouded majesty--and winds up hitting, at best, late-period Tim Burton.

The main issue with Green Language is that it feels scattered.

While Junto is at least happy enough to lift spirits, it feels like they've left it to others to reintroduce anarchy to the dancefloor.

The ample generosity of Manipulator highlights the cruel paradox of showbiz: When you give the people everything they want, you can’t leave them wanting more.

An album that retains the precise brutality of London Zoo but feels labored in comparison.

The Man Upstairs has warmth and charm galore, but it needs someone, anyone, reaching down to more strongly pull the strings.

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.