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.

This gripping chapter in his exploration might not quite be his definitive statement, but then definitive has never been of interest to Fernow.

The band's self-titled debut record is the heaviest, most dissonant music that Moore has put together in recent memory, easily out-skronking Sonic Youth's 2009 LP, The Eternal.

It's not terrible, just uninspired, and only goes to show that the disco romance formula is both harder to pull off and more singular than you'd think.

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.