Shine Your Light never gets oppressive, though during its final third, it does suggest what living in a record store might be like after the novelty wears out--kinda lonely, a little bit stuffy, and leaving you subject to others trying to tiptoe around.

Nun finds Teengirl brightening familiar color pallettes in more noticeably energetic ways and heading in an even more dance-oriented direction with a look not dissimilar to the aesthetic developed by the UK label Night Slugs.

Milosh’s crisp electronic soundscapes work mainly as contrast, immaculate bedding designed to melt away as his warm voice slithers in. At his best on Jetlag, Milosh builds up his tracks in the simple interest of pulling them back to let the vocal take over.

Yours to Discover never feels like a dishonest record, just one where it’s incredibly hard to grasp the intentions or ambitions of its creator.

Vile has mostly left his interest in extreme tape manipulation and soggy lo-fi charm behind him, but the Jamaica Plain EP offers a brief and fitfully pretty glance backwards.

Five Spanish Songs never feels like an vanity-project indulgence, but rather a clear, concerted effort on Bejar’s part to communicate why Luque’s songs are so special to him.

If there's a criticism here it's in the way these songs don't stray far from the original pieces, instead working as tasteful updates that add a dab of cohesion that was never needed in the first place. It's a treat for fans, which is really all a project like this is ever going to be. But it also highlights a continuity in their work.

These songs are also song-focused—the artists assembled here may all have deep experimental streaks, but they never ignore pop’s pleasure principle, and there are hooks all over the place on this near-flawlessly sequenced compilation.

You don't get anything that great [as "1777"] on the rest of the album; that said, it's an emotional peak you only need to reach once on a collection like this, and the restraint on the following tracks helps with the overall thematic.

Direct Hits proves the Killers have fewer actual hits, let alone great ones, than you thought and makes you wonder if they made their Greatest Hits album too early or whether they can ever legitimately put one together at all.

Earthless are incredibly indulgent, sometimes to a fault, but they’re much too excitable to be called selfish or masturbatory. The dudes are once again just riffing here. It’s a trip worth taking, at least a few times.

The tracks, and the arid stare their grooves perpetuate, are like crop circles drawn into the UK hardcore continuum: functionally new, eerily primeval.

They manage to cut down some of the weight of the sung pieces, casting them in a more unique light, while giving San Fermin much needed tension and even a bit of violence.

Otherwise, all these nested layers of samples and beats and propaganda wrap infinitely around a hollow core, making for excitable music that eventually collapses into boredom.

Calvi’s synthesized enough musical styles for at least three artists, and she’s clearly got ample chops to pull any of them off. She’s born to make a grand concept album one day. What she needs now is that grand concept.

More than any Markers record before it, the trio seem to be communicating deep within the subconscious, tapping into soul that's been hiding behind the noise for years.

Sister is shorter than its predecessor The World. The Flesh. The Devil, but suffers from the same fate: the disappointing, overlong ending.

Kirby's fondness for disorder is a perfect fit for this type of material. Dream states rarely make sense until you plunge deep into them, and Dead Empires throws up thousands of different routes to get tangled up in on the way down there.

Their preferred form of power does occasionally blur into its own monolith. But it does add force and pacing, tweaks that help these 11 songs stand independently of the need to see them played live.

An unhurried, casual nature is part of what makes Get There’s softer material pretty, but it could also be the thing holding Minor Alps back from writing truly great, uptempo rock songs.

It's nasty and explosive and full of bile, a hard rockin' bare-knuckle blow to the temple that'll lay you flat out. In other words, How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident is just the thing for the modern man, those confused and angrily impotent brutes.

There is less to dig into on it's a big world. To be fair, there are two bona-fide new Kurt Vile songs on it's a big world out there.

John Talabot's DJ-Kicks entry isn't the flashiest mix you'll encounter this year, and there's plenty of room for debate as to whether it ranks in the upper echelon of the series' many installments.

Shulamith, in this way, demonstrates again Poliça’s greatest strength: making music that’s both an easy and a torturous listen.

They worked on about 20 demos there, but none made the record. Shields: Expanded collects the best of these previously unheard Marfa tracks, which amount to captivating sketches, rather than scraps.

Purgatory/Paradise really is unlike anything I’ve heard this year.

Most of Mug Museum is bare and direct, quaint and unassuming, but Le Bon makes a rather grand occasion out of it--she's a master curator and consummate immortalizer.

Whether this breakthrough portends a change in course remains to be seen, but, at this point in their consistent-to-a-fault career, it's encouraging to hear Wooden Shjips draw the emotion out of their motion.

If there’s a way in which UZU falls short of the band’s debut, it’s in the recording itself, which is a bit hazier this time out and consequently robs the music of some of the direct, visceral power it had on Yamantaka // Sonic Titan. That said, the songs and performances are good enough that it nearly doesn’t matter.

Pre-Human Ideas is a step toward breaking the barrier between disparate environments--mountains and websites--all by creating something using a simple computer program. Meditate on that during the organ prologue and epilogue here, and better know Phil Elverum.

Julia's impressive discipline rarely gets in the way of its ability to affect; it's all so deeply felt, it's impossible not to feel it, too.

In the absence of a rare-cuts windfall, Vol. 2’s most novel attraction is a series of one-on-one interviews conducted with each individual band member over the course of 1965-66, a good year removed from their most breakneck period.

Across the album, Hynes sings, writes, produces, and plays guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, synths. But this is hardly a solo act. In fact, one of the record's greatest strengths lies in its pitch-perfect deployment of guests.

A few awkward moments aside, Fool is at its best when Temple sounds the least like the Here We Go Magic guy; its buoyant, unfussy front half, out of character though it is, is up there with Temple's best work.

The word "caramel" is most readily embodied by this music's sensual, flirtatious leanings. Unfortunately, sometimes it seems to just mean "slow", i.e. the pace of swimming through caramel.

It feels like a very French-pop-star gesture, extravagant and essentially useless, and perversely enjoyable for exactly those reasons.

It's just a return to very familiar territory without the urgency and mystery of Luscious Jackson's 90s-era music--the Lollapalooza Nation equivalent of, say, a new Winger or Y&T album. For the most part, it even sounds like it was fun to make; if only it were as much fun to hear.

Dessner's mordant vision is uniquely his; these are real, meaty works, troubling and beautiful.

NYC, Hell 3:00 AM isn’t going to be your thing if you’re on the hunt for the next edgy crooner about to blow up--you’re only going to hear it in DJ sets if the DJ is extremely brave or suicidal or both. But if what you’re looking for is an experience, one that can offer something extremely rare and powerful, if not exactly fun, then this is it.

Widowspeak seem to have found a home in the swamps, and now they're inviting us in to set awhile.

Eminem’s too talented a rapper with too good a Rolodex for this to flop, but damned if Marshall Mathers LP 2 doesn’t give it a go.

Matangi is a disappointing record because of how listlessly over and "beyond" everything it is--to the point that it often feels uncharacteristically weary and out of touch.

The Regal Years does a thorough job of not just compiling the Beta Band's recorded legacy, but underscoring the real reason why they're missed--it’s not just for the music they left behind, but for the infinite possibilities within it that had yet to be explored.

Surfing takes the disenchanted bits of Swearin' and blows them out into 34 minutes of honed unrest—it's a self-aware, deliberate, and ultimately truthful sophomore slump.

Antiphon is still a likeable, pleasant listen that will always wait for you by the hearth after a long day. But for a “forget everything you know about Midlake!” album, it's almost exactly how you remember them.

Free Your Mind manages to be Cut Copy's most homogenous and it's most "message-based" record yet, and in doing little other than turning on, tuning in and dropping out, there’s precious little separating it from the vapid electro-pop to which Cut Copy used to be an alternative.

Brain Holiday sounds like that kind of safe space, but it’s also a testament to what can be accomplished when you’re a little distracted.

L-event isn’t a world away from the Exai material. It's not passive listening.

She's Gone is delightfully restless teenaged guitar-pop made by grown, well-traveled women, the contrast of which necessarily adds a sheen of introspection over the whole affair.

Rapor should be a display of Grossi’s adaptability, but it just ends up leaving you to wonder what he actually stands for as an artist.

The collection has the potential to appeal a number of different audiences--Converge die-hards, Motörhead speedfreaks, Southern Lord hardcore kids--but partially on account of its stuffiness, falls short of those marks.

While it's no Manifest Decimation, Retrash is still one of the year's most notable mutations of thrash, and Oozing Wound show a lot of promise to get even weirder.

Craggy and hard as hell, you'll wish Chance of Rain forged a few more such moments [like the title track], but its consistent, nagging ability to knock you off balance is worth wrestling with.

Fever Hunting is a record of intense, personal reckoning, but one that doesn’t waste your time with concerns that are anything less than universal.

It is hard to parse all that's disparate here, and in searching for its most personal form, Son Lux unwittingly dipped into the uncanny valley of digital music trying to become human--something a little too perfect to believe.

LC! have never sounded so muscular or crafted melodies as instantly memorable.

Night Time, My Time isn’t the reactionarily somber anti-pop drag it could have been--instead, it’s a smart Kelly Kapowski hair-whip and loud bubblegum-crack of a record that lends itself to compulsive listening.

They've given us something in the present tense that, these days, feels depressingly unfashionable: An Event--an album that dares to be great, and remarkably succeeds.

He doesn't really offer sharp, pointed lyricism, but he does give the album a haze of depression capped by a few moments of catharsis.

Dabke lives or dies by its ability to make people move, and although Souleyman is no-frills, and borderline gruff compared to other dabke performers, there’s something in his stentorian singing that’s irresistible.

As a single-disc shot, Soul Music is a truly unique and enriching experience: a collection of old sounds from one of dance music's enduring mainstays, re-assembled in a way that sounds fresher than ever.

Kwes’s gentle songwriting sensibilities are unable to keep up with his exploratory beat making and the result is too often a mismatch that ends up leaving the listner at a loss.

The tracks here suggest that along with trap rap, Chicago house, electropop, and the dozen or so styles that get vigorously nodded at over the span of 10 songs, he’s also starting to get a grip on the rules of composing the kind of stuff the Hot 100’s made from.

Much of this album, like most of her recorded work, resembles a well-organized room decked out in tasteful furniture, with every part slotted neatly in place.

Red Fang certainly sounds good on Whales and Leeches, with the production of the Decemberists multi-instrumentalist Chris Funk again giving their instruments ample breadth and weight. But they do not match that surface with substance.

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.

Even at six tracks, it’s stunning how much life (and death) Wareham spreads over these tracks, and makes these tiny whispers of songs feel like the biggest secret anyone’s ever told you.

Cut 4 Me is an ambitiously catchy record as well as being an aesthetically ambitious one.

Wish Hotel might be ephemeral but it's ultimately pleasing, a cloud of scented smoke floating from your speakers to score an overcast day.

No Poison No Paradise, his latest, features some of the ugliest-sounding, and therefore best and most fully-realized, music of his career.

When Weiss manages to get outside himself, Intersections uses emo as a step towards something more resonant.

The majority of the record is a classic ride-or-die Motörhead proposition, punctuated with just the right amount of breathing room.

The shadows its shape casts may not always create flattering silhouettes, but there's both comfort and anticipation to be found in knowing that Silver's constantly tweaking the lighting.

While Cosentino is anxious to figure out who she’s become, Fade Away points to how strong she’s been all along.

That's the trouble with Sunlight on the Moon; things are just fine, but 12 albums in, just fine's not quite fine enough.

The Steinhardt who made Generic Treasure comes off as a guy far too stuck in his own head to get himself into yours.

Sometimes, Pelican suffers from being too weighed down by its roots. That said, when Pelican rages--in a way they never have before--they prove they still have plenty of life left.

These songs have more muscle than the typical McCombs song, with “Wheel” chugging like V-12 pistons, and “Satan” smoldering with sticky saxophone smears. This befits their subject matter as well as the vibe of the album, on which McCombs plays with genre more explicitly than usual.

It still might not--but fetch at least harmonizes more disharmoniously with the tenor of the times.

On Threace, the group’s second full-length for Drag City, Cave’s heart still beats to the motorik pulse, but they’ve broadened out their repertoire to include some of the other groovy, stoney sounds of the 70s.

At just over 40 minutes, Beautiful Rewind is an effortless listen, but when it wanders it feels like a bauble, one from an artist from whom we are accustomed to receiving richer gifts.

It's arguably his best of the calendar year, thanks to strong songs as well as the band’s sensitive accompaniment. Rather than evoke the romanticism of the road (as Sun Kil Moon did on 2003’s Ghosts of Great Highway) or the emotional detachment of touring life (as Kozelek does on every live album), Desertshore pry open his brain and soundtrack his thoughts.

Red Hot + Fela largely presents itself as a blur of lesser, briefer imitations of Fela's Afrobeat grooves, liberally sprinkled with pro forma rapping and vocalists singing lyrics that have lost the political fire they once had.

His restless style makes each piece sound three-dimensional, as shards of songs pass each other in a storm of string activity. It makes for exhilarating, sometimes exhausting listening. But it also makes for music that, though it hints at structure, never sounds predictable and rarely settles.

Christs, Redeemers feels comfortable and somewhat safe, with song structures that are practically standard and a few techniques repeated often enough to become predictable.

In playing it this safe, Summer Camp is just another entry in an increasingly trivial catalog.

Uncanney Valley seems too bent on interrupting serious moments with corny jokes and bewildering asides to say much of anything about anyone else.

While the songs on New don’t have the historical import or epic ambition of his best-known work, they also don’t have the same kind of flaws.

This is music that benefits from being heard loud and/or on headphones in the same way couches are best experienced by actually sitting down in them instead of just brushing your fingers against the upholstery as you leave the room.

Lightning Bolt begins with a spirited sprint before sputtering out and winding up in dullsville.

Following the "haunted murk" of Amaranthine, Youngs takes a drastic turn on Summer Through My Mind, an album of slightly unhinged but almost relentlessly tuneful Americana songs.

It’s not an essential release in the Men’s rapidly growing discography, but as a rare snapshot of a band constantly in motion, Campfire Songs is sensible at least.

Cults' sophomore album sidesteps presumptions about a rising, major-label band and admirably finds contentment not in what they could be, but what they are right now.

Electricity by Candlelight shows off Chilton's instrumental virtuosity and his impressive memory for songs.

Ooey Gooey is a proof-of-concept album--yes, the Dirtbombs can Dirtbombify this ordinarily unscuzzy genre, too--rather than one that plays to the band's considerable strengths.

Barnes seems playfully aware that his lyrics are Gordian knots, impossible for even the most devoted Of Montreal fan (including, possibly, himself) to untangle completely. And yet there are moments of clarity on Lousy with Sylvianbriar that prove Barnes is both his own harshest judge and most lenient jury.

Though repetition is part of its hammering appeal, things eventually begin to grey a bit as the record moves on, losing the punch of the pure blacks and neon reds of the first half. And though those spoken word samples that pepper the album do more obstructing than enhancing, there's no hampering Youth Code's intentions.

The evolving identities of Lee Ranaldo might be a valiant pursuit, but they have made for a problematic tone on Last Night on Earth.