Jaguar is a sleek cocoon of funk-tinged R&B that excavates what it means to be in control.

Feed Me Diamonds is best, though, when it gets emotionally heady.

Happy Birthday is strikingly raw. Moolchan’s refusal to bend to conventional song structure or recording techniques gives the music a sense of joyful rebellion. ... But as an artist whose defining quality is economy of language and texture, she falters when her songs are packed with too much sonic stimulation.

Elephant Jokes just has a good feeling about it, as if Pollard really liked this batch, so that's why he deigned to play an instrument on it, maybe, and why he slips a little intro in and closes it out with the very final-sounding 'Architectural Nightmare Man.'

Though uneven, Lover is a bright, fun album with great emotional honesty.

The results sound just fine-- if somewhat familiar to fans of Tortoise, To Rococo Rot, Pan American, or Radian's previous work.

Loving the Alien offers a reset for listeners--to hear these albums fresh, liberated from their composer’s dismissive opinions.

While exactingly played and produced, Speakers Corner Quartet’s songs don’t always push forward stylistically; a few tracks, like “Can We Do This?,” built around Sampha’s familiar coo, feel like songs you’ve heard many times before. But there are moments of breathtaking originality.

The taught 12 tracks mark the producer's most diverse and song-based work yet.

An explicit testament to Lo’s chaotic love life, an unashamedly sexual and emotionally impactful piece of work. Lo ends up baring much more of her soul than her body.

The complementary pieces are all keystones here, and stylistic variety--the focused punk-vibe grit-and-grind of P.O.S., Dessa's smooth venom, Cecil Otter reining in agitation, Sims and Mike Mictlan rounding out the rewind-demanding punchline barrage--is what keeps the album alive even when the words start to blur.

The themes Cara explores here are moving and mature, but she dilutes them when she relies too much on metaphor and conceit.

Eastman’s music has steadily accrued new champions over the past decade, and it’s gratifying to see another high-profile inclusion of one of his vital works. But in general, this confusion is endemic to the project, which is full of excellent performances of strong repertoire without a lot of obvious common ground.

The most fascinating Bob-project in years.

Something you might say about even the best stuff on Invisible Girl. Khan and Sultan move between the trappings of doo-wop to skid rock so fitfully it's easy to miss that some of these tunes aren't all there lyrically.

That the Strange Boys never actually blow their tops may prove a liability for garage-rock heads looking for more fierce, swift kicks, especially over the course of a 16-track album that would benefit from a few edits.

Ways of Meaning is drone music with a light touch and the gravity turned off.

Despite its maturity, melodic strength, and direct connection to what came before, Runaway Found can't fully distance itself from the suspicion that it might just be "eh" in the long run.

The whole album kind of sounds like Fleetwood Mac, or at least descended from the same 1970s Los Angeles studios that incubated similarly crisp records by Jackson Browne and The Eagles, glassy marbles of sound with storm clouds of color swirling inside.

Squint into the haze, however, and you'll discern moving parts in these simple and rootsy songs that help them resonate.

Dreams in the Rat House combines elements of their debut, I Wanna Go Home (particularly the off-the-cuff hijinks and threadbare fidelity), with the songwriting focus of their great second effort, Sleep Talk.

Throughout the album, glimmers of invention and humor are allowed to shine through.

Levy is at her best when she’s retreating into fantasy.

There are no sour notes here; it’s a lovely listen from beginning to end. But you may sometimes get a sense of déjà vu, either because so many of the songs draw from a similar set of sounds, or because you’ve actually heard them before—six of the album’s 14 tracks came out on other records in the past few years.

"New Day" has a transformative effect within the album, whose middle is as strong as any sequence of songs Keys has recorded.

Most of these songs are really pretty damn good. Tanlines have never had a problem with the set-up, but it's in the delivery where the occasionally falter.

The results as a whole, whether fabulously disastrous or formidable, offer an aural spectacle that other 55-year-old, or even 35-year-old, rock stars should dream of wrangling.

The Sparks catalog does not lack for unpleasant characters or situations, but existential anxiety rarely comes through this overtly.

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.

Their identity isn’t as sharply defined here, but the hooks and surprises on S.W.A.G. are strong enough to fuel their soul-searching.

Thrown on at a barbecue, dinner party, or drab commute, Blowout is sure to enliven the mood. Yet Kirby’s work also rewards careful listening, sprinkled with moments that jolt you to attention as surely as they soothe.

If you’ve loved Built to Spill’s music your whole life, Untethered Moon will have this same comforting, classic feel.

It might not be your cup of tea, but there's little denying its charm.

We Are Your Friends might not be a completely successful album, but it's rarely less than a compelling one.

The Stephen Kings of menacing post-rock, it seems that in absence of Young Team's glorious cacophany their tremendous build-up often comes to nothing. And it sounds as though they've come to terms with that.

More often than not, All Nerve is a satisfying listen because it lets the Breeders dig into their reasons for being drawn back into each other’s orbit--including the left-of-center hooks, the withering poetics, and the shared prickliness toward meeting outside expectations.

It's accomplished and impressive always, but sometimes to the point of verging on an overstuffed din.

Even Arm’s most acidic lyrics are tempered by some of the band’s tidiest performances to date.

In addition to remasters of The Idiot and Lust for Life, Pop’s new boxed set loops in the decent if not great TV Eye Live (a live album originally released in 1978 to free Pop from his RCA contract), a disc of alternate mixes and edits, and three live discs all recorded in 1977, featuring Bowie on keys and with very similar tracklists—a show of excess for anyone but the most ardent completionist fascinated by the variations in delivery and ad-libbing from different performances on the same tour. [Grades for seven discs: 86, 90, 63, 50, 74, 72, & 63]

Those out-of-character moments are few and far between, but listeners willing to roll with the lack of punch Little Joy offers will find that shortcoming easy to live with.

As Free Reign shows, when Clinic take their time, they can build up a bewitching groove.

Something fresh might help Orange Can retain their strengths as musicians, while developing their own voice and avoiding blandness.

Like their peers and forebears, Valet create simple music that feels expansive. Only here, the swirl of fuzz and echo isn't an exit from terrestrial woes, just a comfortable place to take stock for a moment.

It’s an accomplished record that, given the variety of Jordana’s catalog, feels short on surprises; having mastered the nuances of production and songwriting, she’s still finding ways to make her voice ring clear. Yet her melodies are dynamic, her ballads immune to adolescent melodrama: the toughest hurdles are behind her.

Da Mind of Traxman is notable in part because it's an album more concerned with footwork's past than its future.

Dan Geller and Amy Dykes have a buried knack for the driving groove; songs like "Move On" and "Holland Tunnel" want to rock your body and jack you up hardcore, but are limited by their sound and recording quality.

Ultraviolence finds one feeling--a seedy, desperate, hyper-romanticized sense of isolation and loss--and blows it up to drive-in screen proportions, saturating the color riding the blue crest of sadness for the better part of an hour. Whether or not you want to take this particular ride will largely depend on how much stock you put in “authenticity,” your tolerance for Del Rey’s vocal tics, and your reflexive response to her lyrics.

The lyrics rarely transcend pillow talk, but it hardly matters; Dornik leaves the poetry to the arrangements.

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.

It’s the first Wilco album in years to activate, in fits and starts, the band’s long-dormant experimental gene; the first one in years where the songwriting feels as guided by the production as vice versa.

Virtually every track on You Are the One I Pick showcases Felix's remarkable instinct for knowing when to ramp up their instrumentation and when to hold back. Yet when an album is this carefully arranged, there are also moments when all the fingerprints on a given track become distracting.

Gou’s studied craftsmanship coalesces with her tastemaking abilities. It’s most meditative in its unwavering commitment to methodical bass. Gou has always appeared to have an old soul and with this endeavor, it’s on full display.

Hour of the Dawn sounds like a summer record, meant to be played when emotions are high and the sun is out. Most importantly, it shows what she’s capable of when the shine has worn off.

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.

Even when they're digging into the grit of a country's flaws or society's problems, the synth-driven hooks can be outright jovial.

Amelia flits briskly from scene to scene, with just enough musical backing to flesh out the atmosphere: shimmering oceanic drones; subtly driving pulses; dissonant whorls abruptly smoothed into reassuring consonance.

In their slightly glib mastery of pop-song forms, and their apparent belief that great pop music can be forged through sheer force of will, Cut Off Your Hands sometimes recall Bloc Party. The difference, thankfully, is that Nick Johnston seems far more appraochable and grounded.

On occasion the music feels market-tested, straddling a few too many demographics at once—chords and vibes still take precedence over ideas.

Rocky consistently entertains without delivering any one-liners, and the album is sequenced to mask some of the lesser members’ weaknesses. Cozy Tapes stays true to its name.

Not everything here is as compelling, but the true takeaways (the first three cuts, including the outsized, life-affirming "16 Years") are well worth the misguided ambition and watered down moments that inhabit the EP's second half.

As a concept album, Traumazine is uneven. But as an embodiment of the phrase “healing isn’t linear,” its significance couldn’t be more clear.

Real Power plays like the jovial, carefree sound of friends enjoying each other’s company; they just happen to have instruments in hand.

Mostly it's like coming across a public-access channel late at night, where it never feels like the people on screen are fully in control. It works because Copeland isn't too rigidly stuck to his aesthetic, instead setting up his stall and letting the chaos pour in.

As a full-length listening experience, Violent Hearts is a little much-- it runs just under a lean half-hour, but the relative lack of stylistic breadth covered makes a front-to-back spin feel longer.

That atmosphere helps hold up Vodka & Ayahuasca's sense of anarchic, altered-state unease when the lyrics don't quite cut it, though the tolerable-at-worst punchlines and metaphors are easier to stomach the less dead-serious you take them.

He’s willing to be chaotic and a little all over the place, and though that does occasionally result in moments that are hard to process, Robinson proves that he’s as adept at wringing moving moments out of pop tropes as he is conjuring alien worlds.

Earth Has Doors feels like the diametric opposite of "fiddling around."

The only lull is around halfway through, when a stretch of minimal house and techno tracks threatens to pull the set’s pleasantly eccentric mood down to stone-faced seriousness. Still, it’s a slight moment among an otherwise vibrant mix that offers an enlightening peek into Lanza’s singular world.

In Dreams isn’t at all a crash-landing, but it is a soft one, as Duster settle into a perception of themselves rather than fly above it.

Muhly seems at home in this world, and part of the enjoyment of Drones is in how it seems to observe, from Muhly's serene remove, how others are not.

Occasionally, Slugs of Love meanders off course. .... But the album rebounds on its celestial closing track, “Easy Falling,” a plush comedown that breezes by on gentle guitar and Nagano’s leisurely melodies. Like the album’s best songs, it offers a worthwhile escape with understated grace.

Dance Fever is as propulsive as any Florence and the Machine album, but its momentum sometimes feels unearned.

These songs are obscured like frosted glass, as meticulously pretty and faintly unnerving as a porcelain doll. Though the album ends almost as quietly as it began, Obel’s whispery ambient fog lingers far longer.

Libraries nods more to Burt Bacharach, and the record can sag occasionally under the drowsy weight of his influence.

His new album Sorry You Couldn’t Make It restores him to a more even keel, examining grief from greater distance while savoring life’s little sweetnesses. Billed as Williams’ country album, Sorry You Couldn’t Make It hits its thematic marks within funkified arrangements.

Beans twirls and stretches his language, depicting the life of a poet-rapper, heavy on non-traditional boasts and battle rhymes. But he lacks the gulping, deep tone of former APC cohorts Priest and Sayyid, which means the beats usually usurp his rhymes.

Neither Future nor Thug is at the peak of his powers on Super Slimey, which forgoes explosiveness and poignancy for streamlined action, and many of the solo cuts shine brighter than the team-ups.

What is most impressive about The Last Panthers is the way in which Clark has taken all of this incidental music and shaped it into a flowing 48-minute suite that conjures almost as much of an imagined visual story as The Last Panthers show itself.

Bon Voyage celebrates the catharsis of clearing away old wreckage, but it also revels in replacing that mess with new toys.

Brother Is to Son is weird, but it's neither incomprehensible nor didactic.

New York City is less a reflection of the sanitized, hyper-gentrified New York of today than a reaction against it—sneering from the paint-peeling dive bars, flipping off the real-estate vultures, and summoning the snottiest ghosts of the city’s punk past.

Mezmerize's strongest moments are when the band drops the eccentricities and just rocks out.

With this much creativity, it’s unfortunate that the band falls into predictable patterns on wordless bridges or codas that start to feel samey after 10 songs. The spidery instrumental “Singalong,” on the other hand, is a smart sequencing choice to mix up the album’s flow, while “Big Trouble” has the most notable tweaks to their formula.

They're moments when, perhaps more so than on any previous record, The Dirtbombs sound like a band of five musicians with distinct input, rather than the many arms of Mick.

Changes’ lyrics are immediately and sometimes overly familiar, but Bradley’s unmistakable voice is the obvious draw throughout.

Kaputt excel at making complicated songs sound fun.

The End of Silence is Herbert effectively tussling with what "significance" means at this particular moment in time, in a record that's as much a part of the gathering noise of the 21st century as it is a comment on the constant numbing we've wreaked upon ourselves.

Even with occasional missteps, the album fulfills the promise of a new kind of pop star: an out, Black rapper and singer who combines his omnivorous, genre-hopping music, forthright lyrics, and social media savvy to triumph in an industry that threatened his authenticity from the jump.

This album is weighted heavily with [Efrim] Menuck's quavering, strident vocals; a fact some listeners might reasonably regard as an obstacle. Thankfully, however, his bandmates frequently come to his aid both instrumentally and vocally.

Admittedly, the album's moves are exceedingly well-worn, yet like fellow 21st century synth-poppers Junior Boys, Pallers' precise craftsmanship means they're also able to elicit many of the same deeply affecting moods and sensations as their forbears.

Fires Within Fires is a piece of music that’s too skimpy to be a full-blooded Neurosis LP and too bloated to be a lean, concentrated Neurosis EP.

I Don’t Want You Anymore paws at ambiguity. The feelings are raw, and Creevy resists major-chord resolutions.

Flourish is a purposefully alien and repetitive album, and at the outset, it works.... But in the second half, the iterance becomes tedious; footholds are few amidst the long stretches of vast electronic tundra and the Perish side B can feel like a sheer drop towards revelatory closer “In Kind".

That voice is deservedly the musical centerpiece of Anthropocene, a record that, like its predecessor, is given flesh by a wide cast of accomplished collaborators, such as Wilco drummer and tasteful producer Ken Coomer and flashy Sturgill Simpson guitarist Laur Joamets.

Like an solid frame to a complex painting, Levi’s score concretizes and helps control the artistic experience of the film. In effect, the score may not supersede its filmic anchor, but is sure does make the entire endeavor more beautiful.

OK Bear is a good album--it won't blow you away, but I get the sense from listening that Enigk is confident enough in his music not to need to blow you away.

What’s fascinating is how he breaks out of the fugue. Where he once overpowered songs by stretching his tics into main vocals or going on dazzling, hyper-technical runs, his best verses on Punk are in step with the album’s often delicate production.

Though Lamkin's monotone voice is not the most expressive instrument--it barely wavers whether the occasion calls for a Monks-style organ vamp ("Move Along") or a prom-night embrace ("Mexico")--each album side gradually ratchets up the tension and releases it through a raucous rave-up ("Pull Out" on side A, "Parasites" on side B) that successfully bridges the Soft Pack's Nuggets-schooled ethos with the modern-day discord of San Diegan patron saints Hot Snakes.