It’s fun and messy and you might forget it completely by the next day. No regrets, though.

What Are You On? bristles with unchecked bitterness that often curdles into condescension.

While she can’t always shake the anodyne songwriting that plagued her past work, it’s still her best album to date.

Echoboy slakes our thirst for accessible but quirky pop.

Ladytron has succeeded at programming a record so distant that you'll wonder just what comprises the wind beneath their wires.

Sure, it's just acid jazz with disco and bossanova inflections; naturally, the arrangements are less than surprising; of course the beat could use some variation. But this is about transference, not transcendence. The Mirror Conspiracy provides the soundtrack your mediated soul requires, and that's all that's important.

La Increíble Aventura doesn't quite equal the sheer power and range of the band's best albums (2001's Arde, in particular), but it's a powerful statement nonetheless, capturing one of Spain's greatest exports at their darkest and most ferocious.

Throwing Muses are the counterpart-- or maybe the antidote-- to the driven, enraptured solitude of [Hersh's] solo material; they deliver a release and an excitement that's been missing from her work for years.

A record of mixed materials that still sounds natural; a far cry from some of folk music's more hamfisted attempts at acoustic/electronic collusion.

The album preserves their defining qualities: superb lyricism and powerful tension. But it's missing two key elements of Low's last outing. That is, the engaging songs and captivating production.

It's a dense, ambitious record that finally has the confidence needed to pull of the swagger they've been approximating.

In Camera is an impressive debut for both band and label.

The result is comfortably atonal--a headphones listen that's difficult but ultimately more haunting.

Though this album is a beautiful, well-executed listen, Blu will only really be fulfilling his potential when he starts looking toward the future again.

Frustrates as much as it entices, even more so than the Mikael Jorgensen & Greg O’Keeffe album, its older spiritual twin. ... For the third album in a row, Jorgensen has proven himself to be masterful at carving arrangements so that all the parts work in tandem in a perfect balance between form and function, not a skill to be taken lightly or under-utilized.

Like all GBV albums, it’s slipshod and freewheeling. ... Also like GBV albums, there are bright spots, and they make dismissing the band harder than it should be.

It was and is a spotty album from a time when Prince was making a lot of those.

Words are sparse on caroline, but that indomitable, communal spirit courses throughout, accomplishing something nearly impossible for a largely instrumental post-rock album: to project urgency and timelessness simultaneously.

Get Fucked is everything you want a Chats album to be: fast, crass, and loaded with more instantly quotable Aussie idioms than Crocodiles Dundee and Hunter put together.

Byrne’s recipe is comfort food, sunny nourishment in troubled times. But his determination to look on the bright side of life yields an album with no ambiguity or subtext. All the joy is right on the surface, delivered with relentless gaiety that becomes hackneyed long before the album is over.

Both the scant material and under-inspired lyricism are symptoms of the same problem: a dearth of unexpected ideas from an MC once seemingly capable of endless ones. Ghost’s done worse, but he used to be so excitingly unpredictable. Now you pretty much know what you’re going to get.

Laraaji brings a broader array of compositions to the eccentric Bring on the Sun. Where Sun Gong is dark and improvised, Bring on the Sun is made of weightless hypnotic loops (one is called “Laraajazzi”) and contemplative vocal tracks with standard song structures.

SR3MM ends up being their clearest personal statement yet, finding their voices almost coincidentally.

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.

Should I Remain… is lighter, looser and more concise, in the same way that you refine your story once you’ve tried telling it a few times.

The mysteries that Robinson can’t seem to turn away from might elude our understanding forever. With Light Falls, though, he makes a most convincing case to go toward them rather than try and evade or ignore them.

Tyler Ballgame has a special voice; he just hasn’t yet made it distinct.

The album is not as wholly satisfying as either "Clandestino" or "Esperanza," mostly due to a handful of truncated, underdeveloped tracks toward the end, but it's still full of excellent songs and inspired collisions.

It's a decidedly bummer affair, and even though the aggressive tempos suggest they're willing to fight against the crushing weight of existence, there's no relief to be found anywhere in Dartnall's lyrics--not in material goods, not in your fellow man, and certainly not in romance.

In the end, the record is a disjointed listen--there are some really beautiful and even moving stretches but too many missed opportunities to truly bring together Ring's love of pop with his natural gift for beats.

As a guitarist, Forsyth has a clear and immediately identifiable voice. His tones and melodies are familiar yet fresh, at once embodying grace and freakiness, tradition and experimentation, the past and the present.

If you can resist getting totally stranded in its opiate-friendly atmospheres, the joys of 936 are easy to pin down.

He has softened his electronic and industrial edges and folded in guitars laden with effects pedals; steeped in post-punk and even grunge, it frequently captures the energy of a band playing together in real time.

While the two new records don't match up to the original’s mastery, scattered throughout both are glimmering moments of this carefree abandon and commitment to the bit. It's clear that twigs has never had quite so much fun.

Low on anthemic hooks and heavy on riotous noise breaks, Year Zero finds Reznor waving his digital hardcore flag high.

There are few standout tracks; instead, the most arresting moments emerge out of layers of increasingly damaged sounds that set an uncompromisingly bleak mood.... It doesn't quite work as a standalone experience.

It's a fittingly strong ending for a band that did almost everything right.

As long as the Low Anthem discount the idea that this music was once meant to stir the blood, rile the soul, and actually be exciting, it's always going to be historically inaccurate in a way no amount of sepia-toned ambience can overcome.

That sense of connectedness lends these songs a reassuring familiarity, as though they were new corners of a strange world whose boundaries grow larger and whose scenery grows more inviting with every Oldham release.

Feed the Animals helps to solidify Gillis' role as the supreme 80s-baby pop synthesizer.

Pinegrove’s new album Marigold contains some of their signature warmth but lacks the luster that made their initial run of albums exceptional. Self-produced by Hall and Pinegrove multi-instrumentalist Sam Skinner, Marigold is endearingly rumpled, but the mood is more melancholy, more dreary.

Way's most compelling moments on Sorry are those in which she's particularly hellish, strong, and lyrically bold.

At its best, angel in realtime. so convincingly sells his grand vision of the world that it’s easy to accept the grandiose production, too. The whole gambit is so outsized that, even when it only kind of works, it feels like a victory.

Like Mum on a smaller scale, or a lightly medicated, loose-lipped Four Tet, his introspective songs sway hazily from image to metaphor, between yesterday's folk and tomorrow's digitalism.

While none of these 13 songs attempt the subtle weirdness of “Bad Liar” and the emotional thesis—self-love!—can be a bit one-note, Rare is the 27-year-old’s most cohesive record to date. ... But it’s difficult to come away from Rare with any real perspective on who Gomez is other than that she doesn’t want to be the person she was, whoever that similarly mysterious shadow was.

At long last, a real sense of identity has begun to coalesce in Rocky’s work.

In every other sense it’s another impeccably measured step forward.

It's the kind of record that will have a profound impact on a small number of people, be ridiculed by many more, and never be heard at all by almost everybody.

As strictly a listening experience, though, it's a decent document of a bunch of relatively unexceptional guys who willed themselves to greatness for a couple of years there but couldn't stop being relatively unexceptional.

The album comprises expanded and elaborated versions of incidental music crafted for the film, however, even in fleshed-out form, SYR9 can feel frustratingly incomplete, with many pieces coming off as a series of loosely linked fragments lacking an emotional center.

This Time mostly serves as a reminder of why he's troubled more than why he's great.

Amid last year’s dual hubbubs about their newly sharpened rock songs and their subsequent crash, Live at Maida Vale preserves the memory of the pugnacious, strapping quartet at the center of it all.

Even if they don't quite hit the heights of the A-Trak-name-checked influence of Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique (how could they, let alone anyone?), they've created a hedonistic, piston-pumping album that bears as much relation to the urban hustle-and-bustle as it does to festival crowds' surging, ecstatic mindsets, a love letter to NYC that sounds good just about anywhere you're likely to hear it.

For all its emotional charge, Changing Light barely feels more intimate than Share This Place.

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.

The six-piece around Houck is more competent than combustible, a quality that’s long made Phosphorescent a good band to see for a 90-minute show but not one that makes you need to take them home.

Blackalicious is most effective when Gift of Gab’s knotty multisyllabic schemes unspool without decryption and nestle neatly in the nooks and crannies of Xcel’s soulful romps.

At times this sunny, heart-on-sleeve temperament seems harmless and even quite endearing. More often it simply grates: he’s too precious, too twee.

Every track is given space to unfold, building into a record that feels deeply thoughtful and unified, in step with her contemporaries yet detached from any particular scene.

Where earlier albums achieved this feeling through lyrics alone, Snapshot of a Beginner incorporates songwriting into a wider vision, one that feels truer to the band’s intentions.

Find the Sun can’t necessarily be described as a confident album, but its creator’s willingness to document her spiritual growth and present herself as vulnerable feels uniquely brave and honest.

What Spiritual Cramp might lack in blood, it makes up for with zippy efficiency. The band pulls the focus away from its propensity for carnage and toward their instinctive sense of melody, trading disorder for a methodicalness that galvanizes rather than placates.

They've developed a larger musical vocabulary, but the results can be cumbersome.

Lucifer is just their third album, and yet it's unmistakably drenched in their specific brand of patience and calm.

Stelmanis has said she listened to a lot of early Cat Power while recording Olympia, and while nothing here sounds anywhere near as stark, the lyrics often do, and lead appropriately tense, nervy sounding songs.

All Things Will Unwind, both suffers and succeeds in relation to its scope.

On Enderness he gathers and subverts modern tools to construct his indictment of the modern world.

As Nadler exorcises her own demons, she brings you along with her, making you feel a little less anxious about your own despair. She sees poetry in the mundane, elegance in the gloom.

Though having one good trick in the bag keeps him from becoming a mere oldies jukebox like so many other 40-year rock vets, the sampler platter of Chrome Dreams II suggests his renowned versatility, by comparison to its cult-classic ancestor, ain't what it used to be.

It's not that it lacks tension--indeed, almost every song touches on relationship strife--it's just that the squabbles are gentle, the rage subdued.

Many of the album's best songs seem to inspire comparisons with dancing: There is a connection to the idea of dance as liberation here, as Lloyd's blushing sincerity builds up potential energy, the nimble performance acts as a release valve.

As a pure lyrical record goes, Pro Tools doesn't disappoint, but fans who want everything to be a banger will be let down to find that there's not a lot of headknock here.

While it often lacks the moodier, polyrhythmic highs of Great Lengths and the character that came with it, Martyn's efforts to make it back through no-nonsense propulsion nearly make up for it.

Hawk makes marginal stylistic advances that it could stand to omit, and it lightly retreads stuff that needs no recapitulation.

Lullaby for Liquid Pig is deceptively potent; in just thirty minutes it divines your most closely held memories, guiding you farther and farther back with endless, heartbreaking choruses.

Where others in this vein opt for a hazy, nebulous cloud of half-remembered dreams, Manitoba's music is direct and unassuming while still remaining evocative.

Just as fuzzy and unpredictable as its namesake suggests, with high, hissing vocals, archaic-gone-futuristic blips, pedal steel, keyboards, glockenspiel, and a barrage of other noisemakers helping to build a thick, spacy stretch of soft 60s psychedelia.

It's a damn good pop album, with a little muscle behind its melodies to boot.

Via a confluence of experience, ambition and glossy production, Engine Down have arrived at a palatable music that, with a little more refinement and promotional support, could cement their place in the mainstream cultural canon.

What separates the album from previous Luna product is not so much instrumental alterations as the newly unabashed sentimentality of Wareham's lyrics.

As a backing mini-orchestra, Elf Power and the Strums may not be as inventive as Lambchop or as dark as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but they give Chesnutt just want he needs: a relaxed and less rehearsed environment.

The sonics are familiar, as is the trajectory.

It’s the rare occasion that Hermansen’s ambient interests align so neatly with his disco instincts--a small step, perhaps, toward a new era in his exploration.

Liminal Soul is a little more modern, and dead serious in contrast with Pure Moods’ chintzy gloss, but both albums feel designed to put you back in your body and back in the real world.

Frigid, militant, and rhythmic.

This is a mammoth collusion of synth gasps and distorted swirls, darker and more urban than its meadow-bound predecessor.

You can feel their newfound focus and commitment here, racing through every new crest Hernandez hits or each burly refrain Hill bellows.

This isn’t his grand final statement (that was Blackstar), it’s a cool little postscript tagged onto an earnest, unthrilling tribute.

Elephant Eyelash sounds less crisp and less striking than the folk-plus-beats arrangements of 2003's Oaklandazurasylum, but it brings more heart; where that earlier album's lyrics crackled with the anxiety of beating yourself up after a bad day at school, Elephant Eyelash soars like the last songs on prom night.

The sounds of Touareg and Afrobeat and Ghanaian Highlife are rippling through the eight songs here, each a rollicking, warm reflection of appreciation.

The songs on here are surprisingly strong, such that any of them could have appeared on a proper album at any point in Beam’s decade-plus career. But the collection never sounds like the sum of its parts.

Music Complete certainly doesn’t do anything to diminish New Order’s formidable legacy, but it doesn’t necessarily expand upon it either. That being said, it still sounds like classic New Order.

If not all its experiments yield consistently entrancing results, Comb the Feelings is the sound of Grooms basking in the first radiant glimpse of a future that, not too long ago, it didn’t think it’d live long enough to see.

If there’s a weakness with Blind Spot it might simply be its brevity, or perhaps the marked absence of the kind of swaggering sonic guitar bombast the band unleashed in old songs like “Sweetness and Light” or “Superblast!.” Regardless, Blind Spot feels like an assured--albeit somewhat tentative—way for the band to dip their toes back in the water

Children of Alice is different from its predecessors. Its nostalgia feels less escapist than therapeutic, and its composure amid the mundane and deranged is more of a promotion for mindfulness.

This is functional music that highlights the simple pleasure of artfully arranged sound, the kind of gorgeous and evocative record that fills up the room and shifts your perception for 37 minutes and then brings you gently back to the surface.

I’m Up doesn’t muster up the highs of the Slime Season series—the infectiousness of “Best Friend,” the sublime structuring of “Draw Down,” or the woozy euphoria of “Raw”--but Thug manages to compile many of his best attributes into a tightly-wound 38 minutes.

In his synthesis of varied styles, Hayashi’s compositions feel less genre-defying and more genre-unifying.