Ringleader of the Tormentors is, rather than the now-anticipated letdown, another fitting heir to [his] legacy.

The end result is easily the best Built to Spill album of the decade--an improbable late-career reawakening and heartening evidence that becoming dependable doesn't mean having to settle for being predictable.

Centre could be categorized as Frost’s first distinctly American record, and it’s a frightening, prophetic portrait that commands undivided attention.

The record walks well-treaded territory lyrically and musically.

Even as excess weighs down Jonny, the album still glimmers with beauty. Pierce’s depictions of raw, strange intimacy have long distinguished the band’s music, and Jonny’s core scrutiny of trauma and its aftermath plays to his strengths.

Black gets the Art Brut spirit down on record better than anyone has before, with the blazing pop-metal vainglory of Weezer, the scruffy cheekiness of early Rough Trade bands, and lots of enthusiastic backing vocals. Fun for them, fun for us.

While +/- are sharp songwriters and capable mimics, they've gone through one more transformation as a band without arriving at a destination. That said, they remain a step ahead just by their modest ambitions, impulsively coloring and pushing their songs past the comfort level, always adding some detail to keep the listener's interest.

Torrini's voice is pleasant but also pretty anonymous, so it's therefore well-suited to any number of (mostly mellow) musical settings.

Delta Kream is best seen not as a retreat to the Black Keys’ beginnings but rather a signpost on their journey. By spending the time playing the blues that’s buried deep in their soul, the Black Keys reveal how far they’ve gone in a space of 20 years.

Tobin's definitely out to have some fun with this record, though the immense density of these soundscapes prevent them from being reduced to chop-shop filler.

NakedSelf once again finds Matt Johnson in his element, tackling issues of alienation, global corruption, and urban squalor and decay with potent, more succinct lyrics and some of his most affecting melodies in ages.

Everyone needs to have a doomed romantic stage, but Lloyd's is going on twenty years.... The lyrical juvenilia is a bit of a shame, because this is a solid collection of pop songs otherwise.

Diamonds on the Inside's breathless Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock whirlwind is tiring, at best.

[An] album that, like its predecessors, is as accomplished as it is stunted, waddling wadlessly towards its intentional exile on Cute Island.

Song in the Air is a far more dynamic and internally cohesive record than any of the band's previous efforts.

A batch of songs guaranteed to be huge hits as soon as we're all sucked into a giant time warp and plunked back down in 1974.

With every album, the Foos get slicker than before; the passion behind their songs waxed off by an ever-thickening veneer of overproduction. Right now, the Foos are so polished you can see right through them.

There's an undercurrent of darkness on this record-- particularly in Olsen's on-the-verge voice and lyrics-- that ultimately prevents the band from ever wheeling too far out of reach.

Sadly, the album is a few years too late in coming. As an example, the guys, while opening for Lou Reed sometime back in 1996, pulled off an amazing rendition of the Velvets' "Ride into the Sun" with Reed and Wareham handling the vocals together. Where were all the tape recorders back then?

Rejoicer is a quality album with some especially strong tracks, but as much as it is refreshing to hear a relatively young band nail sounds from a previous era, the record is more enjoyable than it is interesting.

Hill's work is steadily gaining its own hue, and this album is a step toward a recognizable Umberto sound that won't instantly be tagged with all the influences he so adores.

That sense of being loosely unanchored from the world gives Cloud Room its alien appeal, making its instrumental drift ripe for personal interpretation.

If they've managed to brainwash their listeners, they've done it by making a record that's hard to tune out.

Despite the noise and murk, it's easy to listen to—once you're a minute into one of Risveglio's songs, you pretty much know what it is and where it's going. It's music that is alien and strange, but also familiar.

[A] muddled, occasionally fascinating album.

Yet for all its controlled chaos, The Long Walk is Uniform’s most stylistically consistent record.

The Fifth Season is imbued with the tension and power of a live instrumental performance, at once intriguing and nerve-wracking. Throughout the album, Lafawndah embodies a purposeful fluidity of genre and role that makes her difficult to pin down.

Her musician friends help bring the songs to life, and the best guests are the singers that emphasize the emotion in West’s performance like actors sharing a scene.

Some of these big numbers, however, rely on cheesy tropes that lack a degree of empathy. ... That’s not to say that Bird isn’t powerful in more vulnerable moments.

The Cool Kids have now proven that they can make an album, but they haven't proven that they ever needed to make an album.

Joji sounds like a record made by mountains.

Proves a better retrospective than the equally matter-of-factly titled The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

A restful wash of clean, simple lines, unfractured beats, and neon-tinted melodies.

Her nervy assessments of the world are filled with equal parts suspense and heart, and beautifully zany riffs, where the feeling of being frayed by uncertainty comes together into a strangely comforting patchwork.

None of the songs on Shadow of the Sun sound new, but the familiar sounds create an atmosphere of safety that allows the more unexpected elements of the record all the more noteworthy.

Pool is an introspective record, tailormade for lonesome nights.

The subtlety of their music, and the underlying confidence that brings it forth, lies at the core of their appeal.

MTMTMK is more satisfying [than debut, Warm heart of Africa], but it's still a bit overworked in ways that undercut its strengths.

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.

Thomas glues the pretty (Garbus' vocals) and ugly (his own screeching, see also: his work singing in Witch) together with fantastic melodies, at times so plentiful they bury one another.

The diversity of sound the band rolls out on Pe’ahi is certainly refreshing, but it takes a chunk out of the foundation of their career.

Cronin’s music has always been ingratiating, but that quality works against his material here, which yearns for something deeper or darker. There are clear limits to the affability that makes some of his previous singles so winsome.

There seem to be so many questions stirring inside SOAK, and yet Before We Forgot How to Dream douses them in so much prettiness that they lose their spark.

More often than not, listening to Songs for the General Public feels like watching the D’Addario brothers throw old ’45s at a brick wall to see what sticks, snickering all the while. They want you to have a good time, and they sound tighter than ever; they just need to figure out how to control the Frankenstein that they’ve made.

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

WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD has plenty of gorgeous moments. Those moments will inspire the most generous listeners to wonder what this record could have been, if Hakim had given it more time to gestate, and maybe edited himself more.

Ballads were a staple of H.E.R.’s initial five EPs, and she again uses them frequently on Back of My Mind, for better or worse. Nearly all of them are simple and pretty. ... The choices she makes—from the glossy R&B production to favoring vocal riffing over a good hook—feel altogether safe, like she’s protecting a legacy she was born into.

Though it is abstract, Old Punch Card is playful. It's like the sound of a guy bumping around in a room filled with weird noisemakers, trying out one and then another until he finds one that sounds especially interesting.

Smalhans is a reliably generous gesture from an artist that takes pleasure in indulging himself and his audience.

If The Way and Color is not all the way there yet you can hear it as a promising document of a formative period.

Stepping confidently into her “rock era,” Miley offers a genuinely pleasing, though sometimes hamfisted record that staves off the awkwardness and missteps that plagued her previous albums.

He sounds damn good over trashy, flashy electro that manages to keep pace with cadences as hyperactive as his own, and, above all, he's way more fun than he's often given credit for.

In its brief onslaught of sneery fun, Vicki Leekx only occasionally reaches the dizzy pop heights of Arular and Kala. But it does give us an M.I.A. who, once again, seems to be having a blast doing what she's doing.

They're still honing the edge that's going to set them apart. But for the time being, the hooks are enough to convert plenty of true believers.

There’s just enough to think about without getting fatigued, as the Strokes continue to toy with the sound of their late period.

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.

Hour of Green Evening might have benefited from more of that wilder teenage thrall, but for the most part, what the music lacks in rowdiness it makes up for in emotional complexity.

The result is a dance record that wears its political themes like a Halloween costume—great for cheap, campy thrills but falling short of striking any deeper, never mind radical, notes of terror.

One standout is “Ruins of a Lost Memory.” .... It’s a concrete, compelling closer to an album that otherwise slips from memory as swiftly as a dream.

With The Mountain, Heartless Bastards have shown that they have the tools and the talent to take at least tentative steps forward into a more ambitious and diverse sound. But it's surprising that they sound so introspective here when they could, and occasionally do, sound world-beating.

It's bound to ruffle feathers and turn off old fans, and in a way, going so outright "pop" is one of the gutsiest, risky things a pillar of the scene like Scuba could have done.

He's no longer hiding in clever loops or layering. This sensual album suggests a producer at the height of his powers.

As the band churn up sound and fury, we can hear the strident strains of Balliet’s cello, scribbling suicide notes in the background and lending some gravity to an album that sounds, tragically, weightless.

If the stories are slightly different, for better or worse, the song remains the same.

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.

Her fifth full-length Air Lows feels like a goth psychedelic ritual intended to plumb the depths of the listener’s unconscious; while the record doesn’t always hit its mark, the moments that do sustain momentum radiate a delectably gnostic hum.

Mosquito is not without highlights, but it requires some patience to unearth them, because when this record is bad, it's loudly, brazenly bad.

This turntable of pastiche never allows Grace and the Devouring Mothers to develop an identity beyond Against Me! side project or to scratch much more than the surface of these assorted styles. Owing in part to the trio’s shared experience and chemistry, this feels a lot like rock-band karaoke.

While OFF! may not have the shock of the new (or, at least, the revitalized) on its side, it still gets in, gets angry, and gets moving in a skull-crackingly satisfying fashion.

Though the majority of B-Sides and Rarities can be easily found by those inclined to find it (the piano sketch “Rain in Numbers” is a hidden track at the end of Beach House’s self-titled debut, making it not much of a B-side or a rarity), the impulse to gather up loose ends into a cohesive package feels like a solid effort at future-proofing recordings peripheral to the band’s primary discography.

The songs on Whole Lotta Red are urgent, immediate. While they seldom trade in anything like autobiography, they cut close to the bone all the same.

Though several of the songs on Care are extraordinary, others are superficial, failing to deliver on the depth that has been such an essential part of How to Dress Well’s appeal.

The campy flair, smirking irony, and deliberately "retrolicious" alliteration matches the scarecrow-genius of his new album, Pom Pom.

The economical use of space makes Widowspeak feel like a chance meeting with a pining stranger, one who spills their guts then vanishes from sight just as they're beginning to make an impression.

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.

The specter of mortality haunts the proceedings. Despite all of this, it's a testament to Chinx's still-growing pop smarts that Welcome to JFK is sometimes a lot of fun.

On top of polishing up the band’s sound, Guided by Voices’ TVT releases also showcased a newfound clarity and emotional candor in Pollard’s often obtuse, fantastical lyrics, and How Do You Spell Heaven gamely follows suit.

Until now, Okay Kaya records have often felt like a compelling viewpoint in search of a sound, but on SAP, Wilkins’ arrangements have finally caught up to her free-roaming mind.

There’s something curiously touching about these twitching, disembodied songs; you almost want to pick them up and try to put them back together again.

An occasional stab of synthesizer is the closest these songs come to pomp, and the production is still scruffy around the edges, hi-fi only by the standards of her early self-recordings. But the improved fidelity lets her words and voice come across clearer than they did from the bedroom, revealing how much more elegant Allison’s wordplay is than it can seem at first blush, and her gift for detailing conflict with the economy of a young adult novel.

No amount of boulder-sized low-end can disguise the fact that, even when these tracks work, they usually feel like they're missing something major. And that something is a vocalist.

On The Gathering, though, the sonic vista is flattened out, resulting in a dreary, grayscale trudge of an album.

So perhaps it's about time that we stop calling Cex a wunderkind: He may be barely 25 but with the introspective yet exuberant Maryland Mansions, he's officially grown up, establishing himself as a performer to be taken-- yikes!-- seriously.

Insanely catchy '60s- inspired pop music in addition to sound collages, field recordings, drony ambience, cathartic noise, and outlandish production that makes Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" look like a cubicle divider.

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

Together, this trio excels not just at the expected but also delights in the quest to find a common vernacular amid multiple musical languages. That’s the challenge and the charm of Shade Themes from Kairos, a record that minds borders only long enough to maneuver around them.

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 two musicians have tasked themselves with bridging generational and genre gaps between black music’s multitudes, but The Midnight Hour finds them still fiddling with how to do so.

The album is invigorating and repetitive in the way that walking is invigorating and repetitive.

Lina_Raül Refree is no Los Angeles clone. But it could be a long-lost, slightly weather-beaten cousin. Intimate, heartfelt, and solemnly inviting, it’s also a wonderful record in its own right.

The selections are eclectic, the tone is subdued, and there’s not a squalling whammy bar in sight. Only the obligatory new original—a fuzzy and indistinct mood piece called “Bleeding”—feels a bit slight. As for the rest of this 19-minute release, there’s nothing here that particularly surprises or reveals a new side of Yo La Tengo, but there’s nothing that could conceivably disappoint a fan of the group’s jukebox side, either.

The Rest closes its fist around the ideas that Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus have been reaching toward—that values are more worth living than dying for, that our feelings of difference and dysfunction can be fonts of power.

What could be a better way to blow off some grief than turning up the amps and howling out more Kimbrough deep cuts? It is perplexing, then, how staid and complacent Peaches! sounds, how the biggest eruption of the whole thing is right there in the title’s exclamation mark.

Unfortunately, Capture/Release might be the victim of bad timing: It's going to sound pretty rote to American audiences who've been steeped in this stuff for the past couple years, and while it's doubtful that the Rakes are overtly ripping off any of the bands they resemble, it scans as a failure of imagination on the listener's end.

Where the experimentation often succeeds, the editing fails.

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.

For a man who’s lived and breathed rave culture, his album about the experience is strangely lacking in highs.

Entergalactic is an unusual addition to Cudi’s discography, a small statement from a rapper who prides himself on big, aimless ones. It doesn’t wallow. It doesn’t rage. It just sort of lingers pleasantly. It’s the easy hang that Cudi usually works so hard to deny himself.