Music Can Hear Us lays out DJ Koze’s panculturalist ethos clearer than any of his prior studio releases, island-hopping from wispy echoes of son Cubano (“A Dónde Vas?”) to Japanese-language doo-wop (“Umaoi”) to, uh, Damon Albarn-fronted Afrobeats? .... To show the next generation how it’s done, DJ Koze throws two absolute heaters into the back half of Music Can Hear Us.

This second-hand facelessness runs throughout Volta, which still reads oddly rote and cold with this addendum. Even with its hulking abundance, Voltaïc is flesh without bone.

The Heretic’s Bargain [is] their most cohesive record to date, and suggests that it will likely be bested on that count by the next one.

Where the old Bondy would sometimes show his hand too blatantly, the new Bondy is playing his cards with greater aplomb and much greater skill. When the Devil's Loose, A.A. Bondy's second album, is evident of this ever-growing skill. But that's not to say there isn't room to grow.

That impulse to complicate is thankfully mediated more thoroughly and evenly on Love Yes than on previous efforts, only poking through here and there. It is also striking that this very complex album was recorded entirely live; the music seethes with precarious energy.

This may be Herren's least accessible project to date.

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

Like all of Mazzy Star's releases, Bavarian Fruit Bread works well as a mood piece and makes good background music, but it doesn't reward close listening.

Quality aside, the questionable sequencing of Amnesiac does little to hush the argument that the record is merely a thinly veiled b-sides compilation...

So the production is great, the songbook is varied, and the band is tighter and more ambitious than ever-- the only problem with Louden Up Now is the unfortunate paucity of ideas within the songs themselves.

A madcap sense of humor animates all his best work, and The Life of Pablo has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography. Somehow, it comes off as both his most labored-over and unfinished album, full of asterisks and corrections and footnotes.

Folding Time serves as a stopgap for an aging sound without a firm grasp on its bearings. Should Sepalcure continue writing from their fixed point, they'll have to project further and further from its origin.

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.

Remixes may dominate the 24-track collection, but the group’s original work wins out in spirit.

It’s classic Hornsby: both squirrely and crowd-pleasing, weirder than you’d expect but as traditionally, autobiographically confessional as he’s ever allowed himself.

Lacking the dynamic cohesion that made its predecessor more than the sum of its tracklist, it feels like merely a collection of random tracks, which, despite their common themes, begin to sound haphazard in their arrangements and sequencing.

Cohen will never be able to escape the context surrounding Bloom Forever, but he refuses to let himself be defined by tragedy. His bold, distinctive debut album stands a million miles from the celebrity circus, and will endure far longer than mawkish titillation.

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.

If the sentiments are tough, the music itself is tender, borrowing from Belle & Sebastian and Brill Building pop to create a sound that is both pastoral and urbane, straightforward yet sophisticated.

Martinez may not be able to right the wrongs of the past, but he does Palacio's legacy proud on Laru Beya. And by bringing this music to a world stage, he may also help secure his people's cultural future.

Throughout it all, his arrangements burst with a vitality that belies their modest construction. The sounds may be humble, not that much more hi-fi than his early demos, but their vision of funk as lifeblood is never anything less than radiant.

Certainly Cohen’s music is serious and often melancholy. But there’s a lot of joy in the way her songs illustrate and embody her thoughtful verse.

Whether it was intended or not, White's personality sometimes overwhelms, and makes Consolers sound like a little sibling to Icky Thump--a little less unique, certainly, but another loose, comfortable affirmation of what they do well.

Free Reign II is precisely the sort of risky, rejuvenating album Clinic needed at this point in their career, one that audaciously upends the perception that this band just releases the same album over and over.

A little more editing and pacing might have made the whole album like this, but given enough time, Triangle has moments of clarity to be found.

The resulting sound feels new, to be sure, but mostly in the sense that it’s not fully ripe. Though challenging and, in its best moments, quite exciting, Music for the Long Emergency ultimately resembles a first draft. Its most compelling ideas are knotted up with its worst, and the whole thing could use a thorough edit.

If you have absolutely nowhere to go in the near future, Bitchitronics will make an excellent travel companion.

Like its older sibling, the songs on Cistern exist independently of each other. The nine tracks feel connected only by the fact that they share the same space on record, more like a collection of long takes rather than a movie.

The gripping parts of Legends Never Die come when Juice is speaking from the heart.

Too mushy and indistinguishable to wallop you in the gut and too cheesy to be taken seriously, the album feels, at its worst, like a series of power ballads with the choruses ripped out.

Front Parlour Ballads offers the traditional Thompson mix of lush folk beauty and cruel knife-twisting lyrics.

[The songs] are linked by, of all things, an evangelical urgency: McBean self-consciously blends Satan-fearing Louvin Brothers sentiments with the Velvet Underground's narco-messianism and heavy doses of the 1970s California Jesus Movement's rhetoric/vibe.

ove Lo’s songwriting is unsubtle but not uncomplicated, and while her scenes are well-worn in pop music—bodies tangled in purple lights, morning sun stabbing at hangovers—her best tracks are both blunt and polished enough to sound original. At its worst, the album can slump into fizzy banalities.

Without a lyric sheet on hand, you can still enjoy the pure animality of Mahony’s voice. You’ll only catch an actual word here and there, but her psychodramatic tantrums—imagine Miss Piggy going apeshit on Maury—are a delight in and of themselves.

A homogeneous shitheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity.

Tahoe only starts to perk up and run counter to expectations with “MMXIX,” an epic, nine-minute track that utilizes all manner of ambient tropes and then upends them.

Write About Love is a grower -- the sort of record you need to play repeatedly, listening to how it fits together, before it can really ingratiate itself.

It's not until Magnificent Fiend's closing trio of seven-minute behemoths that Howlin Rain find traction, though it's the band's willingness to tweak its grand appropriations, rather than the tracks' epic lengths, that helps the songs stick.

Though a mixed bag, Blues Funeral does have its moments.

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.

Kaputt excel at making complicated songs sound fun.

The only outright misstep is “Cocoon,” where a generic 2010s-indie rock arrangement flattens some of the record’s most intense lines (“I’ve become a taxidermied version of myself”). Throughout the rest of the album, the production only elevates her writing.

Callahan has nothing to add to the general conversation about music in 2011 but is making the best albums of his career.

Dreamland falls prey to the unfortunate mode of modern branding that conflates personal nostalgia with making a point. Glass Animals want to talk about The Way We Live, when it’s really just Let’s Remember Some Stuff.

The problem then is one of staying power--Lewis does such a good job of nailing choice sounds and styles from pop's past that you can't help getting reeled in right away; only upon later reflection do you realize that much of her success lies in evoking something else great rather than achieving a greatness more uniquely her own.

Despite the band's two-year hiatus, (k)no(w)here's incremental shifts-- slower tempos, starker arrangements, and the addition of McCann's high, keening backing vocals (which, somewhat disconcertingly, recall Journey's Steve Perry)-- advance the drama.

Fake Surfers doesn't continue these new adventures in hi-fi. Rather, it plays to the Intelligence's extremes, casting a more pronounced British Invasion pop influence in warped, peak-level lo-fi sonics, emphasizing a connection between post-punk and psychedelia that stretches from Clinic and Guided by Voices through the deconstructionist pop of Swell Maps and Wire and back to the whimsical wordsmithery of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence.

Spielbergs don’t deal in complex subjects, and they sing plainly enough that any hook heard on the first chorus can be joined on the second.

Everything about Cast, from its high-end synths and imperious production to Biliński’s alabaster vocals, is superficially flawless and taken at face value; most of one’s time with the album is spent looking for cracks, hooks, or anything resembling a personality. The thing about perfection in art isn’t just that it’s unattainable--it’s also uninteresting.

When Corey is at his most inventive, Injury Reserve feels remarkably fresh and singular. ... Too often, though, Injury Reserve gets stuck between its experimental urges and its pop ambitions. In searching for a happy medium, it’s never quite noisy enough or quite catchy enough.

The soundtrack succeeds with taut moments of electronic beauty, but it just as quickly slips into a frustrating, self-defeating insularity. While the precise formula of Boy Harsher’s music hasn’t faltered, The Runner’s soundtrack lacks drive, or a deeper expansion of their sound: It feels more like the musical equivalent of an engine idling.

With Both, it was exciting to see an underground lifer finally getting his due; Through a Room confirms Nace’s inquisitive spirit and formidable skills.

It’s astonishing what he can do with so little. Marci keeps ample daylight between the instruments in his beats, leaving plenty of elbow room for his incredibly dense writing. He’s in top form here, spinning superhuman mafioso tales from impenetrable thickets of rhymes that contract and expand like gasses changing form.

The Best Day proves to be not so much a revelatory, introspective antidote to Moore’s best-known band as a serviceable, equally high-voltage substitute for it.

Migration Stories simply drifts along at its own lazy pace, letting its pretty textures become the connective tissue. Sometimes, Ward’s words break through the haze.

A Productive Cough felt more like a genre exercise than a passion project, and that’s true of An Obelisk, too, except this time the genre is a far better fit.

Memories of the very real pain and passion we felt as teenagers become cool enough to touch when we’re older. In Tegan and Sara’s hands, they become mantras, glimmering and hopeful and full of sparkle.

Even with fewer hands playing fewer instruments, the songs nevertheless sound leaden, ponderous, drowsy. Still, there are some inspired flourishes.

We Knew It Was rarely evinces the same boldness, proffering instead a steady procession of jangle-fuzz jingles that yield moments of brain-massaging beauty (the gleaming outros of “Song From a Short-Lived TV Series” and “What Gets Me By”, in particular) but little of Surf City’s more combustible qualities

The music is undeniably alive, even though--or perhaps because--the band that made it is all over.

Whatever plane The Fifth State of Consciousness represents, Peaking Lights make it sound like gold at the end of a rainbow.

Their musical progressions are incremental and headed towards predictable outcomes. The slower songs are a little bit more country, the more uptempo ones a bit more rootsy, and all of it is bolstered by typically brawny Will Yip production that cuts through the chatter of any barroom or basement.

Aisles is most endearing when it leans into frivolity, largely because there’s little else with such relaxed stakes in Olsen’s discography.

It's not her finest work, but it's plenty good enough to rope a cohort of new fans into what's promising to be one hell of a creative ride.

As ornate orchestral pop goes, Starlight Mints are too oddball-flip. They cram their songs with every sound imaginable without making a compelling case for any, and music that's so congested needs a sense of hierarchy.

One-note? Perhaps, but the note is hypnotic. There is much to be said for an album that is simply exceedingly nice, like a hug or a blanket.

Even the prettiest BROCKHAMPTON songs can feel cramped, but many of these songs, though each endowed with their little moments, are disorganized or inefficient.

By not trying to shock us, Stewart actually surprises us, and OH NO makes it easier to be a Xiu Xiu fan than it’s been in years.

Welch sounds content and resigned, recollecting the stormy Saturdays of the past with a Sunday-morning penitent’s shrug and a born-again sigh. How small, how beige, how disappointing.

There are a few bright spots on this otherwise monochromatic album, most crammed toward the beginning.

Sea Lion's artwork, song titles, and McPhun's background all suggest something pan-global and yet the album shines brightest when it stays closest to its indie rock roots--a reminder that despite their escapist charms, exploration and travel work best as an accent to the familiarity and comfort of home.

This is an album's album, magnetic over the long haul, as Raposa's careful, nuanced tension between placidity and chaos accrues force.

On much of the album, repetition crosses into redundancy, especially true on the two Modeselektor-produced tracks, "Tawwalt El Gheba" and "Enssa El Aatab".

Levi and her band sound more like the future than the past, at a moment when we desperately need some more future, and as much as I've come to dig this album's awkward, brash cacophony, I want to hear what they do next even more.

Expo 86, if nothing else, feels like the realization of a Wolf Parade sound; the exquisite Apologies carried the long shadow of its producer Isaac Brock, and Mount Zoomer felt too often like two personalities careening off each other rather than finding some common ground.

Much of it seems strangely blank, neither great nor at all sub-par.

It is a wearying listen, overcrowded and too loud and too harsh, and to engage actively with it is to feel your knuckles whiten with effort.

On Interstellar, she transports us further and takes us higher than she ever could have as the drummer of an indie pop revivalist band.

This is an interesting first step into new territory, a statement of intent.

As leftovers, Close Cover Before Striking is more akin to day-old pizza than three-week-old pasta.

The tracks on The Concretes are easily their most accomplished, fluid statement to date.

It's an enjoyable listen in the here and now, which is all an album has to be, even when created by giants.

From front to back, the album's an acquired taste, and even if it's not the big paradox that an album mixing punk ethics with rap virtuosity might risk becoming, it doesn't have a universal appeal, especially for heads leery of anything that might approach the misnomer of "emo rap."

If Wu-Tang Chamber Music is a hackneyed cash-grab, it's a pretty good hackneyed cash grab. Because once you get past the brevity and the non-Wuness of it all, there is some beautifully executed hardhead grown-folks rap shit on here.

All that tweaking really brings out the details of his songwriting, which are sometimes lost in the orchestration and less polished vocals here. Still, these types of projects can help a songwriter refocus and between them Vanderslice and Choi have made a memorable album that successfully adds a new twist to Vanderslice's catalog.

awE naturalE, like Black Up, is a pleasantly surprising resurrection of the Pacific Northwest-via-Brooklyn hippie-hop that we never might have anticipated a few years ago.

Overlong albums are one thing, but overlong and sonically derivative albums are usually near unlistenable. But it's the individual songs that make Cabinet worth the time.

It’s all about context with Live: each moment is a build to and release from the next.

What he lacks is a presence that feels definitely Bart Davenport, and after a while, it begins to feel like an album full of someone else’s songs--or, rather, anyone else’s songs. His best moments are breezy and autumnal.

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.

Rather than shade towards LCD’s sound, Museum of Love pull from the playbook of DFA’s other big band, Holy Ghost!, favoring the timbres, patch settings, and smooth productions of elegant 1980s new wave and nu-romantic acts.

As is the case with most overstuffed hardcore albums, The Tyranny of Will lends itself well to a cherry-picking approach; keep some riffs and ideas, and toss the ones that don’t stick.

The four songs are pleasant enough, but in comparison to the unruly sounds on Live in San Francisco, it feels like a bit of an afterthought.

No No asks a lot of listeners, that we unpack all of these fun inferences even as we're being assaulted by the 143 different sounds Co La casted into the vestige of a snare drum. No No, on balance, is worth the effort.

On Slay-Z, there are hints of that power. They don’t shine nearly as bright as her almost flawless debut record, but they keep us watching and listening.

What’s missing, though, is the central promise of a supergroup: the thrill of hearing established musicians in a truly different context. Minor Victories’ lineup may stem from different circles, but their approaches are so complementary that there’s rarely any tension or surprise.

When Meath and Sanborn ease into a slower lane, they find a sweetness that isn’t entirely likable. There is a bitterness to their Southern bless-your-heart feel, swaddling sharp observations in mannered dance-pop.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever stand out for the precision of their melodies, the streamlined sophistication of their arrangements, and the undercurrent of melancholy that motivates every note.