The soundtrack album Les Revenants contains not a shred of the terror Mogwai is capable of wreaking, and it works terrifically--it rarely comes off overly dramatic or leading, and matches the unsettling feel of the show.

Homosapien's constant fluctuations between styles means it's a mercurial and somewhat uneven listen.

Privilege is an assured, musically accomplished work, but all the aesthetic homework Pennington’s done to refine his persona is still visible, pointing directly back to the influences and forebears he’s inspired by.

Some of its songs deserve to be cut into halves, while others should have been chopped wholesale. With those snips, Exai would be a really good Autechre album that summarizes the various successes of their career in an hour or so. As is, it's as much a frustrating obstacle course as it is a grueling marathon.

Despite a couple of intriguing, spaced-out interludes that have much in common with Boards of Canada's inky psychedelia, the album carries on predictably, checking off boxes: punishing banger ("Extrusion"), acid workout ("Spirals"), piano-led stomper ("0I0x").

The details of Kavinsky's intended narrative are blurry, and possibly nonsensical, but he succeeds in making an album that suggests that it's the soundtrack to something, and at least making it clear that it has to do with cars and the 1980s.

Songs build and build and build and then die, gazing longingly at exhilarating emotional peaks just outside their reach.

The rest of the band obviously knows that McEntire is the showpiece--songs like "Those Girls" show that they do, setting up her big moments with subtlety and understatement--reminding us that the real power is in restraint.

Much like its predecessor, Optica's pervasive mildness doesn't give you much to latch onto.

Long rows of evenly pulsing notes paired with streaming harmonies make for a low-stakes default mode. But when an album's mild downsides are all relative to its overwhelming strengths, it's hard to complain.

An album where Ashin fearlessly reveals himself as a person and an artist and dares you to open up in the same way.

For all the rhythmic chicanery at play, AMOK feels strangely static and contained, giving a perpetual sense of jogging in place.

Rough Carpenters sounds vibrant and enveloping, an old-time feat for these mercurial times.

Streten explores his sonic palette with varying degrees of success on Flume.

The Marriage of True Minds hits harder and feels more joyfully physical than anything Matmos has done in years.

The shame of it is that somewhere in here there's an album that could've done more to revive the mostly moribund idea of 80s pop tropes in contemporary music.

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 deeply satisfying, constantly rewarding, and I'm not entirely sure what I was doing before it came into my life.

Often he feels like a genre director hired for his reliability rather than excelling in his field. Still, there are advances here, a sense that Hill's VHS collection may have expanded beyond the horror section, a step up from pan-and-scan into something approaching widescreen.

Woo is more or less an extension of--and improvement on--the ideas explored on Field-Pickering's debut, 2010's Cool Water.

If these 35 minutes feel like twice that, it's because Portal thought through every step, packed all of its ideas as tightly as possible, and left it for you to decode.

Feeding People's energy is abundant and undeniable, but all over the place on Island Universe.

Long Island probably isn't going to win any new fans for Endless Boogie, but their strengths are on display regardless.

Like Cunningham's entire oeuvre, each track unwinds into a tapestry of intense sonic detail if you just give it a little time to recline.

The Messenger won't be included in the body of work that made Marr great, but it's a solid approximation of his strengths.

What was once alienating and difficult in Eat Skull’s music now reads as interesting quirks attached to pleasing packages. With III, Eat Skull is willing to be loved--and be loveable, too.

Ultimately, What the Brothers Sang is a tribute to what the brothers sang, not necessarily how they sang it.

Considering the band's taste for zoning out to infinity, One Track Mind really needed a harsher edit. With some tightening and pruning, it could have burst into bloom.

Any record that emphasizes variety will have a few tracks that fall just outside the artist's reach; not everything works quite so well, although that has more to do with song choice than execution.

It's possible that the cumulative deadening effect of Miracle Mile is intentional, or that the contrast between the vacuous music and the spiritual ennui of the lyrics is supposed to be ironic. But Miracle Mile doesn't seem smart enough, musically or lyrically, for that to be the case.

A passive-aggressive album like Clash the Truth, which just sounds kind of confused.

inc. is both faithful to its source material and clever enough to twist it into new shapes, but at least for the time being, no world is unlikely to bring the Ageds out of the shadows.

Iceage write brilliant songs; on You're Nothing, they've found a way to clarify these compositional skills without stripping away their power.

Smith comes across similarly disenchanted and tempted by the prospect on Songs for Imaginative People, where he's torn between celebrating and bemoaning commercial excess.

For all the album's wandering spirit, the first eight tracks on Push the Sky Away are neatly structured into two complementary, four-song halves that mirror one another.

It walks the line between naive and savvy, between earnest and winking, confessional and oversharing, bratty and bold, experimental and inexperienced.

As one of classic rock's foundational albums, it holds up better than any other commercial smash of that ilk.

The fragmented texture of the songs doesn't allow it to slip into bland slickness, but it's clean, theatrical, and kookily conservatorial in a pretty satisfying fashion, if occasionally a little too keen to change tacks within a single song.

Off/On is a solid record that thrives on the idea of possibility and hedged optimism.

Pillowfight is technically flawless but thoroughly unexciting.

The samples and some of the lyrics feel a little too controlled, on-message, and conceptual, which is unusual since her songs often tease out the dark emotion in mundane, everyday moments. As a result, No Elephants often feels hermetic and occasionally impenetrably austere.

Taken apart from the high expectations set by their debut, Waiting is another strong collection of guitar pop gems from a band quickly proving itself to be a better, more elusive quantity than any easy genre tag might suggest.

Like Total Life Forever, Holy Fire threatens greatness, and whatever disappointment comes from missing the mark is mitigated by its scope: A bomb needs to be operational more than it needs to be accurate.

With previous releases, he's earned his heroic acclaim in the tough, tried-and-trusted lanes of contemporary jazz. With No Beginning No End, he's built his own road out.

Had Cult of Luna attempted to make the same record six times during the last decade, maybe they would have condensed it into a tight 30 minutes by now. That would be neither captivating nor interesting, though, and Vertikal is quite often both.

The cartoonish brutality of the music is fun as hell, and since Korvette is most often mocking himself during Honeys, it doesn't come off as hectoring.

Fall's worst moments are queasy and charmless.

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

Setting aside the occasional meandering instrumental break, there are enough genuinely charming and well-crafted songs here that you can sort of understand what they're aiming at.

It may not be an extreme reworking of song forms or a sudden return to action, perhaps simply another chapter in the various indulgences he enjoys, but in numerous ways, The Jazz Age is Ferry's most radical work yet.

The precise ecstasy of the production buoys the record through its few sluggish patches.

It's a real trove, and not just because this lineup is relatively obscure.

There's room for Smoke to grow into this new guise, but Wraetlic is too satisfied with its own dissatisfaction to serve as anything more than comfort food for those predisposed to melancholia.

You get lost in it, and if you're wired a certain way that mixture of desire and confusion is easy to map on to the wider world. For 22 years, the only way to get there was through Loveless and its associated EPs; now there's another path, one many of us never expected to find.

In a lot of ways, Country Sleep delivers while still making you feel like it's playing on your vulnerability.

Taken for what it is--a fluffy, animated unicorn flying joyfully to college-rock Pleasure Town--Out of View is a nice 40-minute respite from reality.

When it really hits, as it often does here, the music of Grouper creates a feeling that can only be defined as awe, an uncanny mixture of wonder and dread that nobody does better.

When II is truly on, it's proof that great albums aren't the sole measure of a great band, a subtle advance that puts Unknown Mortal Orchestra right back where they started: something of a mystery, but one that will certainly be interesting going forward.

We the Common's best songs are its most dynamic.

Good as these guys are at mashing up genres on the fly, there's no denying the straighter, fist-pumpier stuff here works best.

While addressing the same themes he's been tweaking for more than a decade now, James adds a new trick to his ever-expanding repertoire: transforming the boundless possibilities of solo creativity into a cohesive one-man show.

Juul's vocals and production are emotive and permeable, always trying to convey something without any sort of coercion as to what that feeling's supposed to be.

While the best work of the Clientele created worlds, The House at Sea charmingly aspires to being a photo album, something to inspire your own travels rather than serve as a substitute for them.

These aren't songs meant to jump out at you, but spend some time with them and little illuminations flicker to life.

The lack of technique gives Reasons to Live an unfinished quality that suggests there's either more depth than there appears to be, or an underlying emptiness deriving from too much feral energy and not enough songwriting.

The guitars are buzzy and loud, the rhythms are quick, the drums crash, the lyrics are densely packed into a short span of time, and Boyer spits them out with punk rock confidence

Yeah Right has its charms, but they're echoes of a band Bleeding Rainbow used to be under a slightly different name.

Overall, General Dome's rewards are equal to its considerable demands, proving that there's more to Buke and Gase than a good story.

It's despairing and unfriendly, but it opens up an entire new world for Sweet to explore, and is richest and most surprising Boduf release yet.

More often than not, however, Mice Parade pushes these songs down paths that don't fit.

So really, it doesn't turn out all that different from the most recent Earlimart, Beachwood Sparks, or Jason Lytle records: perfectly okay, not pushy enough to be even remotely unpleasant, and in a way you're hoping it's better.

The relatively sumptuous presentation of The Flower Lane successfully separates it from the rest of Ducktails' discography. Unfortunately, a familiar emptiness remains.

The Roxette and Cyndi Lauper-referencing, soaring keyboard pop of Heartthrob is a welcome stylistic reconciliation, if one that sacrifices their sonic weirdness.

With Hummingbird, Local Natives have made a thoughtful, lovely album with small gestures that provide great rewards.

There are flashes of coherence and grace in all the furious noodling, but overall, you probably had to be there, bathed in the glory of mortal combat.

True Hallucinations is ultimately a triumph of focus and discipline.

Home is an ace of a second album, one which maintains the most important elements of Chung's painstakingly crafted sound while progressing nicely into a friendlier arena.

They've operated as FIDLAR since 2009, and released a couple of EPs prior to this collection. That time was spent honing a brand of hopped up, surfy garage punk that comes with more variety than you might expect.

The Joy Formidable might not have the most plausible ambitions for a 21st century rock band. But Wolf's Law offers enough thrills to suspend your disbelief.

The Ruby Suns quickly lose their nerve and hooks about halfway through Christopher, and it simply becomes a brighter, albeit favorable, take on Fight Softly's mushier innards.

while other young UK-based electronic experimentalists like Floating Points make it onto the mix, Thomson's heavy label love is a reminder that he's constantly one step ahead of the game.

Though it makes left turns and constantly tweaks its formulas, In Focus? is admirably coherent and cohesive, with each little pile-up of ideas finding its place in the big pile-up of ideas that comprises the album.

It's not perfect, but it's closer than you'd expect from someone who just a few years ago was a member of a C-list girl group.

Nightlands have created something that's utterly self-contained.

Without a singular narrative to tie it all together besides Hamilton's lovely but noncommital exhalations, it's a little too easy to lose interest.

Even if La Costa Perdida isn't a great Camper Van Beethoven record, it does illustrate how unique this band still is, 30 years after it formed.

The more time you spend with Ambassadors, the more clearly that commitment and joy comes through.

Ra Ra Riot are best when they stick with what they wanted to get away from.

Wash the Sins is not a logical, concrete progression from Violet Cries and the Hexagons EP, but a competent if ultimately unmemorable reiteration of a message that wasn't particularly strong in the first place.

Centralia is less severe than The Seer, but it's executed with the same unyielding desire to move and to feel.

For now, the musically and emotionally rewarding Anything in Return evokes the feeling of being young with options and in no hurry to figure it all out.

The Black Rock succeeds on occasion, but the weight of McCombs' past is a tough load to bear in situations like this.

Roberts' voice sounds in fine fettle as well, and his reedy, keening brogue is the type of immediately distinctive instrument that is virtually impossible to imagine any listener accidentally mistaking for someone else's.

The album simply flickers out like a candle, with the faint promise of another visit to this setting.

As an album, Lost Sirens isn't at all an embarrassment: it's a document of a band whose range and reach, rather than power, are what has been diminished.

The way that Everything Everything play against the macho, aggressive posturing of contemporaries who could care less about caring should be their strongest calling card.

Love Sign's belief in the righteousness of its intentionally big, dumb songs being big, dumb and nothing else ultimately sets Free Energy up to fail.

Django is perhaps the first Tarantino soundtrack that feels, uncharacteristically, a little too nail-on-the-head.