It is the Knife's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal.

Victim of Love is ultimately a less successful record than No Time for Dreaming. For one, Bradley seems less connected with this set.

It's the first release for the band as an “all in” musical endeavor and it definitely feels that way.

By matching their ever-evolving, exploratory musical ethos with less eager-to-please, more confrontational modes of performance, the album marks the moment when the Flaming Lips become whole again.

Time is a delightfully shambling debut that succeeds in spite of obvious trappings.

Rkives is a full-sounding collection that reads like a long-lost Rilo Kiley album from the early-2000s.

If Fleetwood Mac shimmered more, rocked less and were organic without being raw, that might suggest the level of evocative language and romance The Lone Bellow exudes.

This is smart, well-plotted music, which makes its anger all the more effective.

This is Kinski’s most straightforward rock album, and certainly the Kinski album with the best, most concise vocal songs. If anything, the cranked-up, low-tempo instrumentals are now where the band fares worst.

At best, the verses, bridges, and instrumental passages feel custodial, doing little to disturb the flow so that the chorus can deliver a proper dynamic boost. Mostly, they just feel like Guards killing time, and Follin's power-pop Madlibs make the 45 minutes of In Guards We Trust feel significantly longer.

On their second album, Tales from Terra Firma, they continue to be almost crushingly dull, making well-appointed and cheerfully empty music that successfully communicates next to nothing.

Machineries of Joy lacks the kind of crucial equalizers that appeal to all levels of education--big hooks, convincing physicality, legible emotions.

Vanishing Point is both an anachronism and, if you’re on Mudhoney’s wavelength, a hilarious bulwark against everything that’s annoyingly ephemeral about contemporary underground culture.

Live at the Gluepot is more immediately impressive [than the new compilation], just in terms of sheer speed and momentum.

While their formerly peppy mode could be exhausting, it's difficult not to yearn for a bit more razzle-dazzle on Heza.

History and transformation are, understandably, recurring themes in the new lyrics on Change Becomes Us, and it's a treat to have this missing link in the Wire story repaired, even if it's as much an anomaly in the present moment as Document and Eyewitness was in its time.

It seems boring and a bit lazy to say that Wiley sounds best when he’s still offering up recognisable grime tunes, but it’s undeniable that on The Ascent the strongest of such efforts capture the rapper in his best light.

It’s a not a crime for a revivalist outfit like the Black Angels to occasionally lapse into flower-power corniness; if delivered with a little self-awareness, it adds to the appeal of the anachronistic package. What’s not forgivable on Indigo Meadow is the pretension.

Rarely does dark doubt sound quite so inviting.

What it lacks in traditional hooks, it compensates for with distinct and weighty gestures.

At its best, Wolf manages to make the inroads toward accessibility that Goblin wouldn’t and pulls it off without sacrificing too much of Tyler’s refreshing capriciousness.

Until in Excess rewards patience, but the roar of old is missed.

Though there's an electric current coursing through Ride Your Heart, it's too often wasted on mundane material--which is especially disappointing given how zany and lyrically imaginative their previous band was

Rainsbury, Bailey, and Law showed long ago that they could draw a crowd with a bold gesture, but Seabed's appeal after multiple listens is in its details.

There’s no question he can put a good tune together; what’s less clear is whether he can interpret those tunes as well as he writes them, and breathe a little flesh-and-blood human messiness into them in the process.

The only moments where Wayne sounds marginally interested in his own music come when he veers furthest away from rap.

As silly as the songs on an A.merican D.ream are, it is Gerner’s wincingly theatrical vocals that really take the album into the realm of unintentional comedy.

Keeping solidly in line with the Brainfeeder tradition, Nostalchic is a forward-looking album, warm and comfortable but never obvious.

There is not a single moment of shock or freshness on Delta Machine, and it's enormously frustrating to hear what was once a band of futurists so deeply mired in resisting change.

This version of NoYork! doesn’t offer any new revelations about the record, but as the physical document of that time a gifted rapper blew off a promising record deal to geek out in the studio with friends and then came out with one of the defining documents of his scene, it’s still a win.

Its visionary ambition recalls the fertile sprawl of Villalobos’ 2003 debut Alcachofa; baroque techno blessed with the carefree spirit of lounge music and Quiet Storm, dressed up in tie-dye, the music on Amygdala glows with an easy confidence.

Orange Juice's debut You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever is beautiful because of its innocence, whereas Understated is bruised by the many experiences that came afterward. It's no lesser record for it, just one that feels like a part in the purging process rather than a place where Collins feels fully at ease.

While there are no outright duds, the less memorable material can't quite measure up, lending the album a certain almost-there feel.

For now, Heterotic stands as a yet another promising venture from one of the most consistently surprising minds in electronic music.

Afraid of Heights is the first Wavves album longer than 40-minutes and sometimes it drags.... Still, Afraid of Heights provides plenty of bummed-out pleasures and Williams' obvious talent is easy to take for granted.

Lynch seems comfortable here, scattering out another set of question marks, his unassuming approach etched in just a little harder with every passing release.

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.

This foggy unease and blankness communicates itself everywhere on Sleeper, a frustratingly imperfect record that nonetheless holds onto the essential mystery that sparked my curiosity.

Bartos is one of the few people allowed to get away with such blatant mirroring of the past, but it's hard to escape the thought that he's done it all before, and better, and with a little more elegance and wit.

Miami shows Brandt Brauer Frick to have reached new heights of imagination and technical accomplishment, but it’s undeniably a challenging listen. Break through its forbidding surface, though, and the rewards can be considerable.

The deeply uncool Comedown Machine smacks of effort.... Still, the limitations of Comedown Machine's protracted diversity all come back to Casablancas, a man with wide range as a listener and extremely narrow range as a musician.

As ever, Zedek specializes in thorny songs that unflinchingly address adult topics and full-grown problems, with the malleable backing of her guitar and band providing either momentary refuge or sympathetic cries of exasperation.

Lady's is a well-trodden field and, at times, their lyrical tropes are overfamiliar to the point of feeling vague, if not downright lazy. So Wray and Walker distinguish themselves by amping up the charm and cheeriness to the max.

Throughout Bloodsports, Suede consistently strikes the balance between decadence and elegance that marked their signature work.

Impossible Truth is Tyler's second richly satisfying and absorbing record of solo guitar in three years.

This debut itself is compelling but because, at last, it represents a clear synthesis of so many of O’Malley’s activities.

The best songs here are all nearly seven minutes long, but their erratic structures make compelling stages to watch dueling tirades of emotion swarm around one another.

For now, Cully's another voice in the crowd in that regard, but his promising talent displayed elsewhere on The New Life suggests that he's one to keep your ears perked up for nonetheless.

The Stand-In is a gorgeous-sounding chronicle of such archetypal props, characters, and sounds, though the conceit does occasionally smother their narrator’s natural, vital wit.

The murk and sloppiness of the early records has been mostly swept away.

180 is structured like a gig, with the attention-grabbing hit followed by fun but less memorable tracks that build gradually in excitement.

Every sound is lovingly recorded and given a cradle of space.

Through Mitchell and Hamer, these characters, made flat by design and even more by time, spring into full dimension, ache and grieve and flirt, live and die and get born again.

Marnia isn't the single touch that shatters, it's the long, steady stare that gives way to embrace.

Taken as a whole, it’s a pretty, enveloping record that executes its modern influences with panache, though the intangible, purely aesthetic nature of Woolhouse’s vaguely downhearted emotional state makes it hard to appreciate Defo as anything other than luxurious ambient icing.

Nothing on these songs sounds the least bit rote or comfortable, and that’s remarkable for a band so far into an unlikely career.

Entrench is the work of veterans who earned the rare second chance to make a first impression. They do not waste the opportunity.

20/20 is akin to another recent album that successfully teased-out excitement from satisfaction, Beyoncé's 4.

The resulting sound feels neither modern nor particularly retro, although it's certainly arguable that the music's buffed up, high-gloss late night classicism resembles just a bit too strongly the kind of music that, say, Poker Flat label boss Steve Bug was playing nine years ago.

Given its relatively seamless mesh of spiky, aggro party music and the more contemplative electronic moments created by Martinez and Moore, Spring Breakers is the rare soundtrack that covers both extremes and makes it work as a whole.

The other half of The False Alarms, while not a complete wash, finds the band sounding lost.

All in all, Fly Zone is an epically audacious record, boiling down to essentially a 13-track demand from Le1f to be allowed access to a mainstream audience without sacrificing a shred of the identity that sets him apart from nearly every rapper a mainstream audience has been drawn to.

All My Relations makes a few nods to conventional songwriting, but, really, it’s just as dense and repetitive as anything the drummer has ever put out.

Invisible Life is the clearest and most dynamic Helado Negro record to date.

Anyone expecting a revival of the Delfonics sound we all know and love very well may walk away disappointed. Taken on its own terms, though, the record works.

It's boldly rendered, and somehow crafts a very human world from cartoon sonics.

Ring’s orchestral and electronic score communicates the narrative’s swing from complacent luxury to riveting despair, showing what happens when worlds collide.

An album about unfit enemies and deserved death that nevertheless delights in its own music-making élan.

All Velvet Changes creates is a disquieting malaise that deflects any attempt to penetrate its billowy, monochromatic, meaningless contours.

A little more stylistic and structural variety could lead to something special.

It’s too bad that many of the other collaborations here feel as generic and laborious as a ProTools tutorial.

It's a wayward journey, which appears to be the intention of the piece, although at times it produces the kind of mixed results you get from opening a novel at a random page and trying to make sense of it.

The pacing is so languid, the dynamics so muted that I doubt this iteration of Son Volt would last very long in a real honkytonk.

He doesn’t appear interested in total formlessness, instead reaching a place that gets as close as he can to all-out loss of control then just about pulling back. Getting there is a thrilling white-knuckle ride, like peering over the ledge for 30 minutes but never jumping off.

Mala is Banhart's best record in nearly a decade--largely because it's his loosest and funniest.

The band’s songwriting chops are evident on Between Places, and it’s refreshing for a debut to err on the side of being too ambitious, when so many new indie bands nowadays suffer from the opposite problem. But the content of these songs doesn’t quite earn their epic execution.

Musically, The Next Day isn't as radical or dreary, as it bounces around from style to style, casually suggesting past greatness while rarely matching it. The production is clean and crisp, almost to a fault, leaving little room for the off-kilter spontaneity that highlights Bowie's best work.

Deathfix gets its expansive, laid-back feel from the relaxed conditions under which it came together, but that's also the source of its occasional directionlessness.

The bursts of bright energy and amateurish enthusiasm on Golden Grrrls shine on wondrously for several minutes, but after a while the limitations of stunted musicianship and repetitive songwriting take over.

New Moon follows through on that promise but inevitably discovers that, when you do open your heart, blood gets spilled.

Soft Opening maintains a sort of oddball consistency in this regard, but is ultimately so aimless, messy, and at times beyond tedious, it hardly matters how many hands were in its pot.

While the beauty doesn't flag in the second half, the forms do start to repeat, with "Edge" recapturing the wistful blur of "Wonder, Inc"; "Constant Apples" the regressing mirrors of "Goudanov". Even so, Sweat manages to glimpse some striking new vistas from within her familiar straits.

Too often Mowgli feels like a series of exercises, its mantra-like repetitions eventually rendering themselves somewhat directionless. Other times, things simply don't pan out at all.

2011's A Thousand Heys, was a solid take on 90s American indie, but a bit too beholden to its influences. Ores & Minerals fixes that and adds a lot more.

It’s that blazingly honest, hyper-personal quality that places Cerulean Salt in the tradition of Elliott Smith, early Cat Power, or Liz Phair's free-flowing Girlysound tapes--the work of a songwriter skilled enough to make introspection seem not self-centered, but generous.

It’s a little preachy and confessional, but there’s truth in most of what Nash sings about on Girl Talk, at least for the ladies in the room who are still figuring out how to be capital-A adults.

All the thick atmospheres and heavy sentiments have a gravity that's stronger than mere attitude. Yet despite that heft, Go Easy is pretty entertaining, too.

Vol. 3 is at its best when Smith is at his boldest.

It leaves Selected Studies in an odd place, one that doesn't feel like any kind of stretch for one of its participants, but is quite the opposite for the other.

A Love Surreal is short on big, arcing-rainbow melodies as a result, but one of its joys is watching Bilal warp his voice into improbable shapes.

Pretty much any way you slice it, Images Du Futur is just too clinical.

At its best, Welcome Oblivion is undecided and unfocused, with moments of intrigue scattered through songs that wander on an album that rambles. At its worst, Welcome Oblivion is passé and redundant, suggesting recent successes by Salem, Burial, Laurel Halo, Purity Ring, Gold Panda, and a litany of others without improving upon them.

It's obvious that Hi Beams was meant to be a candy-colored experience, but instead of inducing a sugar rush, it results in little more than a fitful stomach ache.

This record was inspired by Meluch taking up residency in the southeast of England, and his resultant exploration of the religious iconography he discovered both there and on mainland Europe. It lends Hymnal a ceremonial air, culminating in an imposing instrumental drone piece that blackens the center of the album.

Beast is contemplative and forgiving, a means of burying one relationship to commit to another, and Ritter nicely evokes the excitement and resignation of such a transition. On the other hand, distance is distance, and much of the album is too cool, too levelheaded, too past tense.

Rhye's music itself feels deeply intimate. Much of this comes from Hannibal and Milosh's deft arrangements--each of Woman's 10 songs makes its point with a bare minimum of moving parts.

Though the songs themselves are wonderful, that's the powerful source Powers taps into here: if you feel like the dark center of the universe or simply need a little space, Wondrous Bughouse obliges.

The problem with Untogether is that that Blue Hawaii occasionally get carried away with emphasizing and embracing disjointedness.