These are talented musicians-- and Vol. 2 is superior to the first disc-- but that development hardly merits owning two full albums of indifferent collaboration.

There are, almost out of obligation, some unimaginative pairings....Other pairings are much less obvious and either more satisfying or more puzzling.

Alligator Bites makes Doechii’s stance clear: Nobody puts Doechii in a corner. But if this is the sound of Doechii pushing against constraints, a little friction might not be the worst thing.

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

Weiss and Takahashi lay out their visions in purely instrumental terms, and the production is sumptuous and beautifully tactile. This is what Teengirl Fantasy do best: They craft immaculate headphones music, full of enveloping small details.

Hymn to the Immortal Wind has probably caused floods of tears. That's a description, not a dis. The melodies are more sure-handed than ever. They are like missiles locked onto emotional buttons. More independence in the guitars helps sharpen this aim.

The result is Manchester Orchestra’s most confounding, thrilling, and unintentionally loopy album yet.

Friendship do not engage in world-building, instead calling greater attention to the world in which we’re all just passing through. While always endearing, over the course of Love the Stranger, they can just as often feel constrained by a documentarian approach.

It's a contemplative work setting the stage for Mould's upcoming memoir, whose hooks will for once have to connect without the almost comforting bark of his vocals or buzz of his guitar behind them.

FM Sushi, then, is a stepping stone for a group suddenly poised to do great things, things their debut never even suggested.

Jason Collett isn't going to blow you away with his imagery, and his voice--while sturdy and appealing-- doesn't stand out from the alt-troubadour pack. What Collett does know, however, is craftsmanship.

It sounds uninviting on paper, but there's frustrating murk and there's haunting murk, and Growing Seeds is the second kind.

Romantic Music is at its best when its core sound inches into the ’90s and decks itself out in greyscale paisley, as if the Cure revisited their Faith-era gloom while trying to reckon with the melon-twisting rhythms of Madchester.

It’s a slightly deflating end to an album that succeeds through its unnerving, unflinching personality. By now, the most interesting characters in Bridgers’ story are the ones she puts on the page herself.

It's an interesting middle ground the band reach here, touching upon many previous bases while not favoring entirely the guitar tomfoolery or the smirking electro-rock.

Every track is given space to unfold, building into a record that feels deeply thoughtful and unified, in step with her contemporaries yet detached from any particular scene.

The album is more a warm remembrance than a full-blown celebration.

Throughout Static, Big Ups come across as a band in complete command of their sound, fronted by a guy on the verge of losing it.

There are few standout tracks; instead, the most arresting moments emerge out of layers of increasingly damaged sounds that set an uncompromisingly bleak mood.... It doesn't quite work as a standalone experience.

While the composition of Bad News Boys adheres to a tried ‘n’ true formula, the songs here consistently yield charming little details.

As the band’s tightest, most approachable album, Standards feels like Into It. Over It.’s answer to Transatlanticism, a record that, while not quite a commercial crossover, feels like a trial run for one.

Some of the songs may even leave you thinking they could use another element, but in the end, it's nice that they remain as spare as they do, the edges left soft and fuzzy, the way you see things in the dark.

In a way, it's a shame that Third Time to Harm came out in 2014: in 1980, this thing would've been a mainstay in teen boys' tape decks everywhere.

Here A-Frames teeter on the line between consistency and monotony, falling mostly on the former side-- their endless doomsaying can grow tiresome but more often it's fun to play along.

The album’s most interesting stretch is a risky three-track run that begins with the playful outro of “Outlandish,” builds into the Baltimore club-referencing “Keep It Going” and crests with the lusty “‘Flawless’ Do It Well, Pt. 3,” featuring Summer Walker in the role of an unflappable stripper. ... Even though there are songs with infinite replay value, the album doesn’t quite have the depth, either.

The broader fault of Ten is that it isn't the ABBA Gold-caliber wonder that Girls Aloud deserves as a greatest hits collection.

It's not a record that's going to hit you over the head-- it's almost fatally unassuming and more likely to meekly ask if you maybe wanted to spare a few seconds to listen-- but it's one that will offer a surprising amount of replay value if you accept its coy, hesitant invitation.

Regardless of his or his label’s intentions, it’s possible to hear Eight Gates as a fitting tribute. In its blank spaces, it reflects the spectral quality of his greatest music, albeit sometimes for different reasons.

As humble, tastefully appointed psych-pop goes, the Proper Ornaments surely have their hearts--and heads, wooden or not--in the right place.

Good record but not a great one.

While the loops and beats of 1988 are as hypnotic and outre as ever, other than the cleared samples and elevated sense of personality, there’s not enough about 1988 that distinguishes it from, say, WT15.8_, released a week before, or that rises to the devil-may-care attitude of Knxwledge’s Vimeo page.

While he obviously has good intentions, at times, Bridges can't help but come off as an imitator.

While some tracks unwisely try to replicate the source material's dystopian energy, the best moments come when remixers go blissfully off-script.

Like most records that lack a central stylistic thrust, Take Me to the Land of Hell often resembles a great collection of tracks instead of a coherent overall work.

Kiwanuka seems content to work in an uncharacteristically understated mode, and that’s part of the pleasure of Small Changes. It’s a record that gives the impression of an artist knowing who he is—and being happy with what he’s made.

It’s bolder and more intentional than her 2022 debut, Everything I Know About Love, which felt like a sketchbook compiling the artist’s assumptions and hesitations on the topic. Here, Laufey doesn’t simply let jazz inform the work; she uses it as a vehicle to enact fantasies and ambitions, lending her contemporary musings a misty, out-of-time quality.

A Beautiful Life is her best album as a vocalist, as she finds new ways to bend her voice to different styles and sounds.

Synthetica is something of a polemic, but Haines' moments of ambivalence are what make the record compelling.

Cookup soars when the players’ interpretations converge into new creations, and the source material becomes a portal to a new dimension. The vestiges of old melody may remain, but Gendel’s best reimaginings illuminate subtle resonances and hidden pleasures.

Like all of Teenage Fanclub’s albums, Endless Arcade reveals itself slowly, and much of the action takes place below the surface.

He's gradually but noticeably building up a real identity on record. But if that next level's within reach, there has to be one obstacle to overcome: Firsthand truths take longer to sink in when they're delivered with secondhand styles.

Fall Back Open is more reminiscent of the arid, slow-burning side of the debut ("With a Subtle Look" comes to mind) than its upbeat fare, a reverb-drenched cruise missile flying in relentless slow-motion, like Calla with a pulse and a cherubic blond singer who could have gone boy-band as easily as indie-land.

Whine of the Mystic is musically plainspoken and direct.

The Chemical Brothers tend to find the best results when they focus on atmospheric, buzzing instrumentals.

A Folk Set Apart is scattered by nature but it has some of these moments, too--moments in which some line or turn that at first sounds unnatural becomes a signal both of McCombs' quiet confidence and of his casual rebellion against the idea of how songs are supposed to go.

If this attempted reconciliation produces moments of both elation and frustration, well, the band's erratic track record gives us no real reason to expect otherwise.

The sound of Bar Scene is the most full-bodied of Bryan’s career, building upon the heartland rock that he explored in his 2022 major-label breakthrough American Heartbreak and the self-titled follow-up from last year.

As a stylistic culmination of sorts, Vanitas is a fine place to start.

Each song is well-structured and wise beyond its years while the messages are confused, delicate and very, very teenage. This is the sound of growing up smart.

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.

With its often effortless synthesis of funk and rap, Oxnard is a wide-angle portrait of Los Angeles’ hedonistic landscape--it’s just a little out of focus.

Ultimately the music becomes another mask, another thing Barnes is trying to untangle, in a great chapter in the lengthy, wonderfully ornate Of Montreal compendium.

The result is a meticulously crafted homage to the strobe-lit, chart-topping dance music of the 1990s and 2000s—though, at times, it misses some of the tension that made Romy’s songwriting with the xx so vital.

If your interest in Jamaican music is limited, then Duppy Writer will probably be of even less concern to you than the usual Roots Manuva album. But you also shouldn't dismiss an album this end-to-end pleasurable as some dry retro curio.

The album’s backward-gazing perspective doesn’t detract from the fact that Freedom Tower contains some of the Blues Explosion’s most inspired, vital music since their mid-'90s peak.

The result is an album defined largely by what it lacks compared to the band’s past work: a reduction rather than an expansion. Waiting Game proves the duo can conjure their trademark atmosphere without many of their usual tools, but it’s harder to identify what their music gains from losing them.

Sounding like a profane camp counselor telling stories by the fireside, Rollins' naturally animated raspy voice is the perfect chaperone through eleven tracks of commentary.

This album is more for Naeem himself than any listener. And when it hits a sweet spot, drifting somewhere between manic experimentation and somber fury, Startisha shines.

It’s hard to hold onto anything concrete, musically or lyrically, here. The album’s 10 songs are much more thematic, sensory, and impressionistic. ... [Vernon's] voice--one of the most expressive baritones in indie music--is the showpiece throughout.

The Sister ultimately comes across as, at best, a retread done well and, at worst, a retreat into previously approved territory by an artist who has noticeably improved as a tactician.

While the ground it covers is startling and often picturesque, Grapefruit is an album you feel led through, rather than being left to explore or inhabit.

At its best, Remember Her Name captures her steadfastness and grace in equal measure.

Now, you can only hear faint echoes of their past greatness underneath the lard-laden production; it’s something that will please the fanbase.

The fourth and final part of the EP is by far the darkest, with no respite or resolution. The chords loom uneasily throughout, because that’s how Ranaldo must have felt at the time. In moments like these, In Virus Times is best understood as a snapshot of a miserable year, and one person trying to work through it.

A more immediate, less cerebral album than you'd expect from such a green musician.

Plenty of these tracks keep feeling like exercises: too thick and melodic to work like dance music, but with melodies that refuse to stick as satisfyingly as pop.

Ultimately, Naked is not essential. Unlike scattered moments in the Anthology series, this music (though immaculately presented) doesn't really expand on either the music of Let It Be, or The Beatles' legacy.

If Ö sometimes sounds bored with itself anyway, it’s probably because Fcukers’ instincts are ultimately a variation on the nostalgia-baiting Y2K and bloghouse revivalism that surrounds them. It’s a simulacra of a simpler, grungier, more innocent time before high-speed internet, now wearing a tracksuit. Still: The fun is dumb and the night is young.

Sorceress is a mature and freeing record, one that celebrates meager triumphs of womanhood even as it mourns a loss of innocence.

There's a dark undercurrent of dispossession coursing through these songs, which sound measured and conflicted even as they grasp for meaning and import. That generosity of spirit suggests Geiger knows that everyone, even Canadian collectives and celebrity kids, is an outsider looking in.

It's a strong mode to be in, but 7 Days of Funk doesn't change or challenge things--it's a brief LP, even accounting for bonus tracks, and with everybody firmly in a comfortable lane there's not much surprise.

While it’s hard to imagine how anyone involved with the VU’s album would feel about this tasteful tribute, its very existence still speaks to the force of the original vision. After all this time, artists are still peeling back layers of the banana.

Like every Pumpkins reissue, Aeroplane is stocked with extras; the difference here is that they’re jammed onto each single seemingly at random, rather than separated into bonus discs. As a result, the tasteful and accessible arrangement of the original is compromised, negating one of its best qualities.

Acollection of songs that may not necessarily venture into any new sonic territory for the venerable band, but ultimately doesn’t really need to.

I find myself wishing Dicker had allowed himself to get just a little weirder in these more muted, more indistinguishable tracks. Nevertheless, The Work holds together elegantly, moving from pick-me-up to gentle comedown, and at its peak affording a keen-eyed glimpse of a better self, a brighter world.

This is a much leaner record that feels skillfully edited, with less use for indulgence and circular routes that don't lead anywhere.

Many tracks from these shows have been released before, but on this box you can listen to them bootleg-style, with all the repeated songs, tuning breaks, and banter with the audience.

The production is muted, minor-key, and consistently beautiful, conjuring the familiar Future Moods: rain-streaked neon signs, drug-induced stupors inside of clubs at 3 a.m. If you are content to live inside this lonely little world Future has made, he is still keeping it nice for you. What you won’t find on The WIZRD is the sound of Future stretching or surprising himself.

Whatever excitement this album lends is, for the most part, borrowed by its pre-existing audience, and it's clear the Kadanes aren't going to challenge us.

Avalanche’s obsessive squeaky cleanness keeps its audience at a distance. Coco might insist that she’s still looking for trouble, but there’s none to be found on Avalanche.

The Diet would benefit from more breezily subversive sing-alongs like that—as the album rolls on, Omori’s predilection for mid-tempo, mid-period Oasis starts to take over, and a certain uniformity of style, scale, and seriousness sets in.

What unfolds is a kind of Great American Songbook approach to Johnny Cash, traversing the country and western, mountain bluegrass, blues, and Scotch Irish balladeer range of his own work.

Trading the timbral menagerie of an expanded chamber ensemble for something more barren and monochromatic, Moore is occasionally forced out of his comfort zone into abstraction and dissonance. These forays can feel like a significant artistic leap, but complacency flattens some of this music.

Little Los Angeles illuminates the same pursuit that Morby sought on more fleshed-out albums like 2017’s City Music and 2019’s Oh My God: These are postcards that magnify the ephemeral, loving transmissions from a particular place and time.

Changes in Air neatly inverts the structure of its predecessor: where A Series of Actions strewed a sparing few twinkles across a vast empty space, here Coverdale throws open the blinds and floods every nook with light.

Flourishing in his own way outside the Walkmen, Bauer has found a method of combining two dissimilar passions into art that honors them both.

Though Modern Guilt is more direct and consistent than his last two scattershot LPs, it also finds the disillusioned L.A. hippie struggling to balance his deathly outlook with his more crowd-pleasing inclinations.

If you somehow like everything about early Bright Eyes’ music except for the lyrics, it’ll be your favorite record of theirs. If, more likely, you’re a hardcore fan that was somehow unaware of its existence or didn’t shell out for the 180g white vinyl in 2009, it equally balances Yuletide memories with nostalgia for a time when Saddle Creek’s roster was still operating as a vibrant, and prolific artistic community.

Sub Verses proves we shouldn't take Akron/Family for granted; their restlessness is rare.

Murderbot could conceivably do more to smooth out his productions, but what he wants to do is duct-tape his record collection together and find pleasure at the resulting contraption. If you share his obsessions--or are merely curious about them--you're invited to smile and dance with him.

Bain has crafted her share of evocative ballads, but the ones on In the End tend to zap the momentum. Bain is at her best when she’s embracing a sense of playfulness, winking as subtly as she cries, sashaying between humor and hurt.

You Can’t Kill Me is at its best when it offers surprising, welcome wrinkles to Shake’s sound.

Even for demos, they’re surprisingly rough, in a way that only sometimes breeds intimacy; most often, he bashes around on an acoustic guitar, both his verve and falsetto well into the red. Though Bowie’s folk period is ignored today by all but his diehards, it does offer some insight into the man’s mind, and Keyhole adds several moments to that discussion.

The band works much better when the material allows it to lean into its sleazy, session-pro sound.

We witness a more holistic and honest McGee, but it often comes at the expense of his gallows humor and it renders his narratives a bit tepid.

There is a ton of evidence of his genius at work here.... As an album, though, The Further Adventures of Lord Quas doesn't cut it.

Chimeric sounds like the product of less tense and more spacious recording sessions. The band considers the record raw, broken, and unpolished, but they have nothing to be apologetic about. By loosening up they sound invigorated.

Earth have seemed overdue for a change, and these songs collectively represent a promising half-step toward it.