Little Pop Rock's acid-casual serenades... could've featured on any Mary Chain album from Darklands onward. And that's a comment on both the songs' lack of deviation from the JAMC's Sunday-morning-Velvets songbook, and the songs' consistent quality and unhurried charm.

Set your controls for the heart of your bong.

At 22 tracks, it’s a little bloated—but with most songs barely scratching the three-minute mark, it zips along at a pace reminiscent of the radio sets and stage shows that the sound incubated in almost two decades ago.

The Belbury Tales is stranded somewhere between the abstract work of Jupp's past and the fuller sound of the live instrumentation he is applying, making this feel like his most pleasingly open-ended release so far.

While Van Pelt has crafted an album that's sharper in most ways than his debut, it could do with a bit more of these tracks' personality and sense of melodic wonder.

Noble and Godlike in Ruin is cluttered and dense, sometimes overwhelmingly so. Everything feels stitched together, almost surgical—like, well, a Frankenstein monster. When the approach works, it’s exciting.

In a Mood is a referential album, but what ultimately ties it together is Okely’s lyrical simplicity and willingness to let his songs breath.

A quick, pithy album, with 11 songs lasting just 30 minutes. There are patches of tedium, but the best moments are both surprising and engaging.

These detours feel slightly random up against some of the most unadventurous tracks in his catalog, like the smoky ballad “Didn’t Come to Argue.” Like most of his albums, Trying Times could use a little editing, but that’s part-and-parcel of the James Blake package these days.

Start and Complete ultimately achieves what it sets out to do, which is to place a song-oriented frame around another off-the-cuff session by these four disparate talents, who will no doubt spin off in a completely different direction should About Group reconvene.

Witch Cults is like the sound of Broadcast and the Focus Group trying to cast their spells at the same time: Some of the record is great, plenty of it is cross-chatter.

In Burch’s minimalist musical landscape, each lyric she pushes to the foreground becomes loaded with meaning. It’s as though she’s smiling knowingly as she sings, while also feeling every word.

Perfect is the first Mannequin Pussy release that’s as tender as it is tough.

Freed from the desire to make people move, Joakim put together a record that’s unified in its oddity.

Call it mood music for the mindless.

The band's saving grace is its commitment to and execution of its textural aesthetic, owing as much to David Lynch's oneiric odes to Los Angeles as any musical counterpart.

The album is so structurally and thematically similar to that series [Streams of Thought], it often becomes difficult to see the difference. ... But regardless of its scope, Danger Mouse and Black Thought bring good things out of each other. At Cheat Codes’ best, it’s electrifying to see the ways their respective obsessions with history and time inform the whole.

B'Day sounds like an entire album of third and fourth singles, which is still better than an album of filler.

Like nearly all of their studio albums, Circuital may not reach the heights of the band's live show -- a good MMJ concert can recalibrate your gut, it can change you -- but it's a remarkably solid step for a band that's never stopped evolving.

There's no unifying principal here-- just songs that are kinda psychedelic, kinda groove-oriented, and kinda long. While not exactly a disappointment, Happy New Year is a whole lot of "kinda," a record built around hesitancy that clutches the payoff tight in its arms.

As lovely as they often are, the songs seem to drift and float, and Cruel Country plays less like a sculpted double album than a vividly detailed snapshot of a particular moment in time.

Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight escapes as Travis Scott’s best work yet: a combination of elevated significance, self-awareness, and the old trick of spinning something so plain into something so luxurious.

In aggregate, none of this feels like a departure--it’s somehow a step backward and forward at the same time, mining roots as a way to age gracefully.

There's nothing intrinsically flawed about what's otherwise a solid instrumental record, but so much of it feels so close to many of the things happening on the radio and the pop charts right now that, 90 seconds into a song, the mind might start wandering and wondering what this kind of stuff would sound like with Wale or Rihanna on top of it.

Daughters of Everything is rock‘n’roll rendered on Etch A Sketch: imperfect and monochromatic to be sure, but infectiously playful, and liable to spin off into any direction at any moment. And, occasionally, you find yourself marveling at an accidental masterpiece.

Unlike many albums to come from its synth-pop cohort, Flux resists being taken apart for playlists. Set almost any similar song against it, and you realize how heady a spell has just been broken.

The King of Whys is never not magnificent, maybe too much for its own good–despite Kinsella’s unsparing account of his father's alcoholism and depression, the handclaps and chipper strumming of “A Burning Soul” could’ve made it a mid-‘90s college hit à la Guster.

Any live show will inevitably have crests and valleys, but besides these specific performances, Okonokos disappoints on a more general level: It too seldom sounds like an actual live album.

Journey is a carefully curated sampling of Garson’s talents as a composer, arranger, synthesist, and sound designer. It adds to his mystique as a channeler of otherworldly frequencies, a grinning virtuoso tapping into the beyond one patch cable at a time.

Weaves’ ambitious song structures used to be too large to wrangle. With Wide Open, they realize the straightforward tentpoles of pop may suit them after all.

Plenty of songs on Lonesome Drifter tell multi-layered stories, but the longest one stretches barely beyond three-and-a-half minutes. The laudable economy of language resembles his fellow Texan Townes Van Zandt. So, for the most part, does the mood.

While it's somewhat difficult to reconcile their whole career in one live disc, the material remains unpredictable even as it gets a little more cerebral. For those who had even a passing interest in Trans Am's music over the years, this set is a fine reminder of why you likely tuned into them in the first place.

There's a weight here that could drag you down if you let it, but mostly this is a band searching for hope amid shattered dreams.

With their boundaries and ambitions by now well established, on Tight Knit Cabic and company largely succeed in luring the listener hazily back in time and into Vetiver's comfort zone.

Suuns and Jerusalem in My Heart does leave you wondering what more the two entities could have accomplished had they worked on this for more than a week.

What we’re left with is a great-sounding Matmos album constructed from bits of Schaeffer’s work. You probably won’t come away knowing much more about either the duo or the composer than you did before, but if it gets stoners curious enough to hit up their local electroacoustic festival, it’s a win all around.

King Gizzard tend to get roped up in the flourishes on Polygondwanaland, before giving way to an instinctive simplicity. At times, it works to their advantage, like when they moderate the dynamics of a feverish tempo on “Deserted Dunes Welcome Weary Feet.” Elsewhere, the band dulls itself by overthinking a section and losing their knack for natural flow.

With its wealth of stellar collaborations, Brooklyn bodes well for the next full-fledged Wu LP, should it ever come to pass.

Don’t mistake their expanded palette for a lack of focus: as always, Darkthrone keep these eight songs’ latent chaos on a tight choke-chain, timing the hellish tremolo riffs as carefully and slowly as an October surprise.

You might find it too retro, or just not hip enough, but there is zero second-guessing on Avery's part: never does he glance over his shoulder with a nod to UK bass culture or a capitulate to a straight house track.

Beyond its canonical interest, Campfire Songs has its own charms. Though rigorously composed, it feels deceptively spontaneous. The atmosphere is both inviting and severe, and startlingly vivid.

Thank Your Parents will take an equivalent span of time to reveal its secrets, especially as this final part is likely to be met with a large degree of bafflement on first listen. But taken as a concluding piece of a larger body of work, as this is intended to be heard, it's a fiercely individual statement to end this chapter in Oneida's unique history.

Viagra Boys have a gift for making listeners wrestle with choices that might be deal breakers if the music weren’t all so ludicrously entertaining.

Runner shakes out as one of this band's most subtly varied albums, and it can be an immersive listening experience if you give yourself over to it.

As expected, Don Toliver’s latest album Life of a DON is hollow. ... But miraculously, the emptiness of it all is an afterthought—it sounds so damn good that who even cares if Don Toliver is an emotionless robot or not (he is). The hooks are catchy and slick. The beats are lush and radiant. And he has this distinctly piercing voice, with a wide range of melodies that could make an extremely basic line jotted down on a dinner napkin sound heartfelt.

Homesick is not quite a concept album, but there's a ghost of a narrative visible in the record's bookending tracks.

Self Worth is a relentless album that never really pulls back, but maybe that’s a function of survival for Mourn, who will probably always write songs with teeth bared. They’ve straightened and polished them on Self Worth, but their bite remains formidable.

2004's Miss Machine and 2007's Ire Works offered an ever-broadening sound that kinda-sorta skirted crossover-friendliness, a sometimes awkward mash of traditional, melodic rock and hideous shrieking and bashing. Option Paralysis continues in that vein for better or worse.

They may have slightly diluted their sound this time around, but at least they’re struggling on their own terms. The highlights suggest there is an arena-friendly Hinds out there, still waiting to emerge in full.

For all its grandiosity, American Idiot keeps its mood and method deliberately, tenaciously, and angrily on point.

His voice has a palatable smoothness; he’s mastered push-and-pull dynamics, and he swings effortlessly from a placid chest voice to a zephyr of a falsetto. That litheness and control are on full display across Justice. Even when the songwriting is spiritless and the production rote—and it occasionally is, as on the confessional “Unstable” and the saccharine “Deserve You”—he still sings the hell out of it.

For all the songwriting strides Molleson makes on Loud Patterns, the album’s carefully sculpted beatscapes ultimately result in a reactionary act of noise.

The non-R&B covers—the songs that make her and her band push themselves—are more daring and perhaps more satisfying.

These new songs don’t sound terribly different from Stables’ first recordings nearly a decade ago, but the music is bolder and more purposeful, with a broader, richer palette of sounds.

Its best moments are stellar and exhilarating.

If Some Loud Thunder isn't as consistent as the debut, it's an adequate follow-up that contains a handful of fantastic songs, a handful of uneven ones, and a handful of duds.

What prevents Inevitable from arguing for Three Mile Pilot as one of the lost treasures of 90s indie is that they sound too much like themselves; it's a weird situation when a band who achieved success amongst a small, intensely dedicated fanbase in their infancy could return from a 13-year hiatus without having become increasingly beloved in the interim

The Akrons' striking group harmonies are at a greater premium here than before, but the grainy, more intimate production retains a sense of communal participation.

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.

“Denver” drags on for six relatively static minutes, while the limp synth pop of “Athens at Night” never quite matches the wooziness of its imagery. Fortunately, Milk for Flowers’ third act is its richest.

Expect no left turns on The Shadow I Remember. Seven months after Baldi and Gerycz assembled The Black Hole Understands in isolation, Cloud Nothings have regained their full line-up but retained their penchant for rueful concision.

It all amalgamates into a fine late-career achievement for the master bandleader.

Get In was recorded last year, but it sounds like it could have been made at any time over the intervening decade.

In anyone else’s hands, Summer 08 might seem strange and cold. But from Mount, as ornery as it is, it feels like a gesture of trust.

The most disheartening thing about From a Basement on the Hill is its plainness-- it's neither a perfect record (and not one of Smith's best) nor the kind of colossal disaster that could be angrily pinned on money-hungry handlers and desperate fans.

Ouch is utterly, unapologetically about Krgovich’s own [breakup], an album of unvarnished particulars and graphic details. That doesn’t make “Ouch” less relatable. It has the opposite effect. Its specificity is what makes it ring true.

With Lovelessness, Bison B.C. prove that rudimentary doesn't mean uninteresting or trendy.

Though solidly enjoyable, Electric Lines could have benefitted from some more concretely original ideas to propel it forward. But when Goddard taps into his love for house, disco, and techno, his enthusiasm radiates through the speakers.

Olden Yolk have big ideas and big dreams about what type of art they want to make, and for the most part, they execute in such a way that feels both strangely soothing and impossibly lovely.

Yes, the Buzzcocks are doing what they've always done-- writing raucous pop songs-- but there's something to be said for honing and plying one's craft.

The difference, as between fellow Merge band the Rosebuds' debut and sophomore albums, is a greater engagement with the prevailing indiepop aesthetic rather than long-dead flower-cliché epochs, though without quite the songwriting chops of Bell and guitarist Jeff Baron's other band, Ladybug Transistor.

Even on an album steeped in melancholy, Berrin finds plenty of moments to be cheeky and theatrical, just like fellow teen queen Olivia Rodrigo and new pop star on the block Chappell Roan.

That kind of less-is-more approach, where all the clutter is shaved down to a paper-thin framework, is where Ices produces her most affecting material, potentially sketching out a new strain of inspiration for her to follow next time out.

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.

Psalms like Smith’s are more than acceptable at face value as restorative, pure-of-heart acts of grace, yet your threshold for bearing this attitude of exceeding amiability may vary.

On I Guess U Had to Be There, Elucid and Bash dial back the experimentation in favor of a more controlled approach. But even in this restrained mode, they still get busy.

Boeckner most excels when he works alongside someone who provides a stronger contrast. In Wolf Parade, Spencer Krug helps provide that balance; without Boeckner's typical foil, the results remain impressive, if not quite as compelling.

Where Another Life felt bright and alert, shimmying towards oblivion like lemmings in a conga line, Tearless is burned out and overwhelmed. This is ugly music, even at its most melodic.

She has discussed the idea of songs having multiple lives, and that people, too, can live more than one existence in parallel, always aware of their diametric opposite. These songs bridge the gap between the two, exposing the overwhelming darkness that unifies her eclectic output along the way.

The Black Keys who, after 23 years together, know themselves well enough to know how to accentuate their strengths by choosing the right musician for the right song, confident that they’ll wind up with a record that sounds unmistakably like themselves.

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

Humbug isn't better than either of its predecessors, but it expands the group's range and makes me curious where it might go next.

Brief and assured at 10 tracks, E3 AF is the first time since 2007’s Maths + English that Dizzee has managed to tread the extremes of both his underground and mainstream iterations convincingly on a single album.

The transition from happy teenage taunts to cursing and sex talk was probably inevitable, and quality-wise, it's a wash. It's with the sound-- as provided by producers Matt Goias and Fancy-- that you get your payoff.

Where these songs once demanded a whole lot of Northwestern indie-boom attention with their coy appraisals (both inward and outward), in today's context they tend to melt backwards, into the songs we already know.

Planet of Ice is better than its predecessor, "Menos el Oso," but only slightly so.

I'm going to let the band off the hook for the holding pattern; in the meantime, we'll simply revel in the general loveliness of these 10 compositions, which utilize the debut's blueprints in the creation of sublime melodies, absorbing lyricism and delicate harmonic interplay.

Her voice also takes up more space on this record, going deeper and flitting over Stack’s melodies with such abandon it’s as if she might float away.

Where [Winners Never Quit] moved with confidence and conviction of purpose, Control wallows in an amoral netherworld of overamped midtempo ballads and incomplete thoughts.

Trost sings evenly and with an appealing clarity but little emotion, letting her voice tangle with the various layers of sound until it’s just another signal on the switchboard.

Albarn plays the part of heartbroken confessor, but these meticulously polished songs conjure something more real than anguish: the dulling of losses, the warm aura of midlife decline, and the fading belief, with advancing years, that crisis serves to raise the curtain on your next act.

These 11 songs have the overstuffed quality of roomy indie pop that can easily play in the background of an iPad commercial or happy hour at a hip bar. But peek inside: Beneath all the niceties, there’s an orb of heartbreak deep enough to pump blood into your blues.

The mercurial, combustible potential within suggests we may not be laughing at it for much long.

With its winking humor and percolating rhythms, Plantasia might turn away some human listeners, but there’s a sense of joy and possibility in songs like “Rhapsody in Green” and “A Mellow Mood for Maidenhair.” It’s hard not to smile at the oddball charm of this strange enterprise.

Though the record does aim for the same kind of prog-rock atmospherics as their earlier releases, Air have managed to alter their sound this time out, drawing from a wider array of rock influences, instead of limiting their scope to Perrey and Kingsley.... Of course, The Virgin Suicides has its dry moments, but surprisingly, they're few and far between. For the most part, the album showcases Godin and Dunckel's dramatically improved songwriting skills.

There’s something nostalgic about Young, who feels much closer in spirit to the outspoken rebellion of Winehouse or Lily Allen than the puritanical, sober, “clean girl” stereotype of her generation.

If They Live in My Head lacks the woozy danceability of vintage Tetras, it doesn’t skimp on the political bite.

The slower that Russell moves, the better for allowing the disparate components of Everything Is Recorded to settle into something exquisite.