Aside from its appropriate feel for a good time get-down in a surprisingly cheerful cartoon post-apocalypse, it's hard to get any real emotional connection from these cuts.

Guilty of Everything is loud, it’s distorted and it’s heavy, but it’s not aggressive. It’s actually quite comforting.

The moments where Mastermind gives us William Roberts the man instead of Rick Ross the gangster flick composite character with the borrowed name are scarce, and he remains committed to dialing in good life platitudes that increasingly ring hollow.

The Satanist is a terrific coil of most everything Behemoth have ever done well, a strangely hopeful vision of hell wrested away from its very grip.

Cooley’s superlative performance on English Oceans would be more worthy of celebration if it wasn’t negated by Hood’s most non-committal songwriting to date.

Death After Life gets a little cute here and there (cf. the extended roboseizure freakout outro to "III"), and it starts to lose a little steam near the end, when the downtempo digression of "VI" and the hopped-up yet unsurprising "VII" roll towards the official conclusion.

The net result of the half-thoughts that make up the patten mythos throw the music into a certain light, depending on how it's received.

Who knows if the Men would be energized or completely lost if they took more time next time out, but Tomorrow’s Hits for now mostly succeeds in toeing the line between being on a roll and being in a rut.

It’s disappointing that these songs don’t have the bones to stand on their own, especially since a precedent for truly great Major Lazer songs exists.

Ava Luna are an exhilarating live band, and Electric Balloon is the first thing they've done that comes close to bottling that energy.

This is passionate music, delivered with searing honesty by a man who didn’t mind disappearing from the conversation if that’s what it took to articulate what he was trying to say.

They’ve made the first record of their career that feels like it might teach you something over time. It is rare, and special, for a band to be this effortlessly and completely themselves.

The urgency and vigor he packs into the unplugged punk of Workbook--the frequent knuckle-scraping attack of his strumming, his refusal to whisper or withhold--are what make the album a testament to tension rather than hesitance.

By burrowing down into a few key sounds rather than stiffly approximating a dozen-plus, the intermittently funky, unshakably finicky Wave 1 is a mostly welcome return.

Interscope’s trust in TDE saves the album from the awkward test tube collaborations that bog down many of its peers, but Oxymoron’s doubling down on a reliable formula makes for a relatively risk-averse listen.

There’s a purism to Moody’s music, but it’s made of muddy waters (literally, on “Sunday Hotel”), dusty vinyl grooves and—if the Popeye's inner sleeve is to believed—greasy fingers.

Thankfully, it's not just dour missives and desolation--there's life in these songs.

Each of the 11 songs here are positioned at some point in an endless cycle of going out, scoping girls, getting drunk, making out, passing out, and “waking up in [your] clothes.” But for Skaters, such scenes are apparently so routine that they often sound disinterested in their own debauchery.

There was always a tendency to divert into different styles on their prior albums (at least from 12 onward), but always with a feel of continuity underpinning it all, as if each path they took was firmly routing off the same road. Here, their razor-sharp sense of direction feels strangely blunted.

Lucky for us, there’s no one else like them and on Present Tense, their success has allowed Wild Beasts to be even more like themselves.

Not only does it uphold the myths of baby boomer greats like the Byrds, Neil Young, and Simon and Garfunkel with a staid type of reverence, but it also piggybacks on the legacy of one of Beck's best records. It's the sound of a rule-breaker dutifully coloring inside the lines.

True to its title, Voices in a Rented Room is modestly scaled and simply structured; the tone and form established in a song’s first verse don’t change by the time we reach the third. But even within these confines, New Bums rarely retrace their steps.

St. Vincent continues Clark's run as one of the past decade's most distinct and innovative guitarists, though she's never one to showboat.

The album, and the woman steering it, are not only comfortable with their eccentricities but strengthened by them, and the effect is enthralling.

Helms Alee doesn’t slough any of its previous interests wholesale, and each aspect of their musical personality is too distinct to camouflage with the rest. But the seams now crisscross in brilliantly unsuspected patterns, giving each element its space and the benefit of contrast.

Digital Resistance might be older and wiser, a transmission from a lifer, but that not a quest out of which they’ve aged.

If you’re in this emotionally combustible state, you’ll relate to You’re Gonna Miss It All directly and deeply. If you at least recognize it in retrospect, you can just as easily appreciate its wealth of infectious songs that are both sharply observed and sharply written.

Lyrically, Lo-Fang songs range from almost embarrassingly inert to annoyingly overwrought to frustratingly tone deaf.

The slate of beats on Cilvia Demo unites into a consistently immersive, complete album package that's just as ruminative as the lyrics.

High Land is not only his first statement of intent as a songwriter, it’s his most innovative, his most influential, and his most timelessly vivid. Peaking early can be bittersweet, but the album is all the better for it.

Despite its problems, Oblique to All Paths is the kind of commendable idea that feels like a way forward.

Hunn is an adept mixer, and he plays the long game in a way that rewards close listening.

Even as Motivational Jumpsuit faithfully approximates the grainy fidelity and 60-second dosages of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, it can’t maintain the same dizzying standards of pop euphoria throughout.

As generous as Guilt Mirrors might seem, it puts an oppressive onus on the listener to find it.

Nothing much happens in The Soul Is Quick--it's possible to wander in and out, picking up a thread you left dangling a few minutes before. That's where Willner excels, in creating these supple moments where you can get totally enveloped in what he's doing, or check out from the world for a while, or just leave him running in the background and marvel at how slowly he moves through time when your focus returns to him.

The hard-driving Blame Confusion, in too big a hurry to stop and take in the scenery, simply lets too much whoosh by in the periphery.

With Small Town Heroes, Segarra proves herself one of the most compelling stylists in a folk revival full of suspicious acts either too beholden to tradition or too uncritical to make much of it.

Cheatahs might not be a very ambitious record, but it is kinda ballsy.

Finn sounds best when Dizzy Heights is at its dizziest, when he has to completely rethink how his voice fits a song. On the other hand, he sounds slightly less engaged on the more straightforward tunes, which perhaps don’t offer the same heady challenges.

Halfway between French Romantic and Nashville outlaw, Loveless’ songwriting can come across sometimes as overly bleak and therefore sensationalistic, yet Somewhere Else makes such boldness a virtue, as thought decorum blunts creative expression.

Burn Your Fire for No Witness conjures the past without ever imitating it, swirling its influences into something intimate, impressionistic and new.

While its standout tracks are strong enough to ensure Phantogram maintains its current altitude, there are a lot of places to turn to for this sort of thing these days, and this album ultimately underwhelms next to the pure-pop punch of Haim, the cutting lyricism of Lorde, or the radiant grandeur of Chvrches.

Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place. Instead it moves, and moves others with it.

There's an organic, humanistic ethos operating behind her music: we are all people, and we're all moved by the same primal passions and stimuli.

Acoustic has all the ponderousness of a forgotten episode of MTV Unplugged, and that setting only highlights Band of Horses’ worst tendencies.

There’s pretty of sunlight on Galore, but no heat or friction, as everything from the production to Pepperell’s enunciation is so glassy that all of these somersaulting hooks might as well be gibberish.

Entire swaths of music are cut from Persson’s cloth; she is a known quantity. For better or worse, this lets Persson get away with an album like Animal Heart, one that isn’t much of a statement.

Real Hair keeps its runtimes tight and its choruses front-and-center, pulling in some of Major Arcana's looser ends without sacrificing its fall-apart charms.

When you're operating within a strict template, you have to find some distinctive way to fill it out--a felicitous phrasing here, an unexpected chord change there. Without those elements, there's little on Sun Structures to remind you that you are, in fact, listening to a new band called Temples.

While ††† may be on the same scale as Deftones, they’re not a replacement, and it stands to reason that Moreno can ascend to the heights of their previous work. But on †††, it’s like he never had wings.

Whether you find dance music far too repetitive or you live for old Traxx 12"s, you will remember Dance Mania's tracks, as they are among the catchiest and most brazen of their kind, alternately hypnotic and disruptive.

Tranquilzers does very little to reinvigorate or recontextualize chillwave or shoegaze and does even less to signify innovation on its own terms.

It's the mood of Hotel Valentine that stands out the most.

Remaining true to your identity while also evolving and keeping an audience that’s always a moving target interested in you is a tough gig. On Emmaar, Tinariwen are up to the task.

Little Red is not the best album it could have been--a few of the bonus tracks should have made the album proper--but Katy displays a vision for her career that suggests an exciting future.

Chorus, Herndon’s new two-song EP, essentially amplifies the extremes of her musical personality and pushes the tension almost to the breaking point.

The forward movement of July can be entrancing and propulsive.

Mitral Transmission is a fascinating album, then, a would-be footnote that reveals Fox’s willingness to mine most anything for sound. Sometimes, as on the first half of Spiritual Emergency, that process can lead to messy results. But elsewhere, it’s the power pushing Guardian Alien and Fox past their past associations and into a wonderfully strange and unpredictable future.

There’s no chest-puffing here, no braggadocio; this is only the very sincere statement of a person doing his best to work through the worries of living and share any delight he’s stumbled upon along the way.

It’s that they’re one of many bands following this particular path and Dunes’ best hope is that you haven’t heard any of them yet.

Angel Guts is yet another strong, occasionally frustrating record restrained by Stewart’s consistency.

Ultimately, Terrestrials works as a likable listen, a liminal play concerning the push and pull between dusk and dawn. But it serves as a mere footnote or, at beast, an appealing redundancy for Sunn O))) and Ulver.

Whatever the songs on So Long are actually about is up for debate despite their plainspokenness, but suffice to say, they trigger the exact joy buzzers that leave you usually infatuated, perhaps a bit hopefully lovelorn.

After the Disco is a more cohesive record, and that turns out to be the problem: Mercer and Burton's eccentricities have been sanded down to a single, flattened plane.

Songs usually don't develop past their first five seconds, and the album slides back out of your attention field quickly.

Benji sounds more like Kozelek relating events instead of crafting them, which makes the continuity and reflexivity of the record feel both uncanny and the work of protracted genius.

Moon is plenty fine in its own right, and if this heralds a return to further music from Raymonde as well as getting Dosen a little more attention than previously, then nothing wrong with that in the slightest.

That’s the realm where CYMBALS work best, when they use understated sonic brushstrokes--a flutter of synths here and there--to deepen the mood.

Like the debut, this album is only eight songs, but floaty interludes like "In a Bubble on a Stream" or "Juju" allow attention to drift more freely, closer to TTA's super-limited 2006 ambient excursion Escaping Your Ambitions.

As a literary exercise, it’s convincing; as a listening one, it’s mixed.

Beach House the EP succeeds where the mixtape Beach House 2 didn’t, further commercializing Ty’s sound without sacrificing the meat and potatoes of it, the foul-mouthed, sex-positivity of Ty’s quixotic bedroom capers and the production’s precarious balance between slight, house-informed ratchet music, trap and densely arranged traditional R&B sounds.

This is an album whose every layer seems customized, whose every crease seems deliberate. That calculation doesn’t seem to have mitigated Indian’s power at all. Rather, this is the strongest they’ve ever sounded and the smartest they’ve ever sounded.

Held in Splendor is a good example of a record that successfully executes the tropes of psych--it sounds like it could’ve been recorded in 1967 without directly ripping off any artist in particular--without every truly transcending them.

It’s challenging, then, to appreciate the boldness of No Depression, the extent to which the members of Uncle Tupelo insisted on interdependency, on an American story. We don’t have to do that anymore--folks don’t self-identify in the same way, and hardly anyone loves just one genre monogamously--but there’s still something furious and prideful here, something worth hearing.

Come to Life shows Cities Aviv putting post-punk, Oneontrix Point Never-like samples (“Realms”), and even a little bit of rap into one holistically new blend.

Bibio brings a certain refinement and voice to anything he produces now, but that doesn't change the fact that much of the EP is indisputably ad hoc.

Even the songs here that show flashes of congealing eventually end up falling apart into a watery mess.

The new splashes of color are welcome, and they help to lend In Roses a degree of character that wasn’t always present in Gem Club’s earlier music.

With their third release, the five-song Small Sound EP, Tennis complicate the easy breezy beautiful schtick with some positive results.

These slower songs aren't just mellow, they're mundane, and their inclusion leaves Innocence feeling lopsided, a oft-killer rock record with nasty balladry habit.

Cunningham's perplexing persona has always been overshadowed by his ability to confound us with his records; Ghettoville, disappointingly, shifts that balance.

Lord Steppington is just the latest remarkably solid offering from Alchemist and co. and the artists involved clearly think of the endeavors as fun and games.

The whole album is so impressionistic and free-floating that you'll likely hear something else, as Delt intended.

Trouble covers a lot of ground musically, moving through decades and subgenres of pop and rock with each track. But those who listen closely will find a few consistent points of imagery that loosely connect the work: locks and keys, bodies of water, and the telephone.

There are clichés, and there are exalted clichés, and Dee Dee at her best reminds you of this distinction.

Drowners can’t inspire too much ill will or really any kind of strong reaction and that’s fair enough: it doesn’t deal in hot, dirty sex or catastrophic breakups, mostly drunken hookups and easy letdowns.

O'Neil's certainly made her share of enrapturing, enveloping music. But I'm not sure she's ever made one quite as transportive--or, for that matter, as alive--as Where Shine New Lights.

The band splits the difference between old and new into a compact sound that skews more Sex Pistols than Foo Fighters. It’s comparatively gaunt for Against Me! as of late, but it yields the stage to Grace’s voice, which has never sounded better.

The songs become repetitive, and though the harmonies are well-crafted and the melodies are lovely, there aren’t enough moments that demand attention. After a while, all the sounds on River of Souls run together, a little bland and verging on formless.

On Spaces there's a power that Frahm hasn't always been able to capture in his recorded work. But the overriding feel is one of joy at listening to a performer demonstrating the infinite elasticity of sound.

If the concept-album aspect of Maraqopa was a stretch, it’s undeniable this time around.

At its best, Have Fun With God works well as an experiment and as a listening puzzle to work through.

Even at it’s best, TWFB is mostly just a well-crafted collection of genre exercises; a few too many tracks, like the motorik double whammy of “Das Selbstgespräch” and “Idee, Prozess, Ergebnis” and the ironically-titled “A New Direction”, are standard-issue deep cuts that offer little in the way of surprise.

There is not a single second of new or unreleased music waiting for you inside this handsomely designed object.... His three studio albums have settled into cultural totems, albums that anyone hoping to know something about rock history buys sooner or later. Even 40-odd years later, their thumbprint remains unique, a strange and compelling mix of timeless poetic melancholy on the one hand, and cloistered, pampered schoolboy modernity on the other.

Fabriclive 73 is complex and confrontational but resolutely unshowy, an honest indication of the kind of pummeling 3am set you would have heard McAuley bang out over the past 18 months; all told, a worthy completion of the Hessle triptych and an excellent standalone in its own right.

They try to create atmosphere in an airlock, lumbering instead of fostering groove, failing to generate any heat or friction as nearly every interesting turn on these songs happens within the first minute.

With its deliberate, languorous pleasures, this is an album to live with, settle with and be crisply rejuvenated by.

Musically, Strong Feelings reiterates Constant Companion, which is fine, because it’s a good formula and Paisley’s songs are stronger this time.