There's plenty to love on Mystical Weapons, but it's not a casual listen, and it's best not to expect one.

A narrative concept album that runs a mere 29 minutes and is both more musically ornate yet somehow also slighter than anything Girls attempted, a deeply personal work whose arch presentation serves to keep you at an emotional distance.

To its credit, {Awayland} rarely comes across as false, but O'Brien's affinity for cleverness over clarity ensures it rarely comes across in any real way.

Light Up Gold finds Parquet Courts looking to breakout through any available means: intense reflection, resin hits, or rock'n'roll.

It may not herald another big day coming, but Fade is a thoroughly immersive dusk-to-dawn soundtrack to a dark night's passing.

["All Natural" is] the one song on the spotty, often comatose Selling My Soul that sounds like it needed to be made.

They still have the riffs, but without the snap of a snare drum to keep things in line, the chiming guitars become repetitive and amorphous.

If you've liked anything Toth has done in the past, whether that's the tunes he's written or the textures he's conjured, Blood Oaths offers both, perhaps better than ever before. If you've dismissed him, though, this is the sound of one musician's prolific and mercurial path, reaching delightful new highs.

Here, there's a sense of picking at a strand of inspiration and seeing how it flows toward a form of endgame, albeit one that still prickles with possibility.

Loyal is a hypnotic record, siphoning in and out of repeated, textured loops that soothingly chafe against each other like fingers performing a head massage.

LP is efficient, prickly, and noticeable, or not much like modern techno at all. That he is operating like this at the same time many others are is a boon, for us, so long as he keeps his blinders on.

Although Everything Touching is post-rock at its most winsome, and rarely unpleasant to listen to, closer "Murmurations" might be the key to understanding why several years of triumphant live shows hasn't translated into the ultimate debut album.

Trouble Man's scattershot approach makes it the realest album the guy could make in 2012, but that doesn't make it any good.

LongLiveA$AP delivers on and even exceeds the promise of LiveLoveA$AP. Like that mixtape, the album is a triumph of craft and curation, preserving Rocky's immaculate taste while smartly upgrading his sound

Muhly seems at home in this world, and part of the enjoyment of Drones is in how it seems to observe, from Muhly's serene remove, how others are not.

Explore suggests that while Park can produce listenable songs that do right by their influences, he's still an inexperienced talent in the process of finding his own voice.

What prevents Berberian Sound Studio from being a genre exercise is the care taken to paper over the cracks, to find some common ground between droney, Popol Vuh-type material ("Valeria's Burial (Under the Fort)") and more visceral horror soundtrack work (the positively seething "The Game's Up").

Like a lot of free internet mixtapes, The Narcissist II is compelling but ultimately shallow, and shallow is a fault, even if that's what Blunt was aiming for.

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

There are no extras, outtakes or re-anythinged. But taking these 10 records in a row, chronologically, it is a striking reminder no single artist has had a run like Joni,

The worst I can say about Dedication 4 is that there isn't one moment where I wouldn't rather be listening to the often mediocre originals. There are a dozen or so good punch lines scattered on D4, enough to make it fun enough for one listen

Finally Rich benefits from some professional tweaks in the mix, but otherwise leaves Keef's sound untouched. And in addition to succeeding on its own terms, it proves that Keef has a lot of potential-- much more than his detractors might have hoped.

Peter Buck is likely a fans-only effort, but one that showcases a low-stakes spontaneity and a renewed sense of possibility.

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

Nocturne is a richer, comparatively luxurious listening experience, but it doesn't sound flashy or ostentatious.

Staying on just this side of a Corona beer commercial, it sounds like a continuation of Bergsman's realizations carried over from East of Eden, in that a change in latitude brings about a change in attitude.

At the risk of overstating the case, Life Is People--the work of a 69-year-old family man, and the work of a lifetime--confirms its maker's own thesis.

A compact reminder of the overwhelming force carried by Antony's best music.

This is some outlandish stuff, to be sure, but in a sense-of-adventure kind of way that feels in keeping with the vague, in-title-only themes of futurism and space travel that Orbits centers around.

In open air, Sigha's systems are chaotic and threatening, but they have a habit of choking one another off over the course of an album. Ghosts still proves, though, over and over, that Sigha has a single, awesome skill--tunneling, perverse techno.

Much of this material is short and fragmented, creating moments that flicker into life then vanish before achieving full impact.

Parklive showcases Blur in top form, but live albums are about a little more than a band; they document a moment too.

O.N.I.F.C., his second major label album, is a resounding misstep, and it's the first sign that Khalifa's unwavering focus may be getting swallowed up by the haze.

Where Desertshore and The Final Report connect is through a fascination with reaching the point where beauty gets tangled up with ugliness.

It's more focused than he's been in awhile, and while you couldn't call an album featuring 2Chainz, Rick Ross, Meek Mill, Lil Wayne (twice), Future, Young Jeezy, Chris Brown, Common, Pusha T, Jamie Foxx, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and more "lean," Jesus Piece is less all-over-the-place than The R.E.D. Album.

On Diamond in the Ruff, he sounds more than ever like he's the ultimate good soldier, one desperately in need of a general.

The versions of Winehouse's repertoire that turn up on At the BBC's audio disc, though, are almost all sloppier than their studio counterparts, and she rarely manages to reveal anything we didn't already know about her songs.

Bastards does little to counteract the sensation that latter-day Björk records are more fulfilling to read about than listen to.

Mars is both refined and easygoing, if not a bit aloof at times.

It's not that these 40 minutes are too extreme or overly dependent on too many ideas; it's that Dragged into Sunlight haven't found out how to synthesize their best impulses and broad ambitions into a whole.

They don't sound like a mélange of other bands anymore; they sound like Early Graves, and that's a damn good band to sound like in 2012.

Read is full of great, idiosyncratic house tracks and Jummy is packed with them.

Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors is on the one hand a genre-busting statement of artistic restlessness but it's also a mess.

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.

It has a facing-the-beast quality of a punishing spiritual quest, as if Elverum steeled himself and left his house at midnight, barefoot, and just kept walking.

At its best, this music feeds into a similar sentiment, pushing close to the kind of deep introspection at the heart of Jarmusch's films.

On the whole, it's more entertaining than resonant.

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

For contemporary metal fans, Lights Out might sound more like Wolfmother--or a supercharged version of the Black Crowes--than an actual metal record.

With Lovelessness, Bison B.C. prove that rudimentary doesn't mean uninteresting or trendy.

It all sounds so serious without any real reason for it.

While Grace/Confusion may lean too heavily on Hawk's production, it's a hair better than Player Piano. But it's hard to call it an "improvement" or "progression" considering it's hardly outside the scope of what Memory Tapes has done so far.

Shifty Adventures feels more like a collection of gadgets than songs.

Kin is not an assertive album, nor is it surprising, but it's as solid an aesthetic as you can expect of two artists mostly new to this genre.

Mellon Collie is a Smashing Pumpkins record that just so happens to be 28 songs in length, stunning in both its stylistic range and overall excellence.

Connected is far from being the first record to make a virtue out of spinning in place, but there's a discipline and control here that's rarely heard, a feeling of two musicians utterly dominating their craft.

If Butler falls slightly short of convincing that this particular brand of old will be made new again, it remains hard to find fault with his survey of all the fun we could have had.

Everyone on the album sounds engaged and happy to be in the room.

"New Day" has a transformative effect within the album, whose middle is as strong as any sequence of songs Keys has recorded.

The question that all improvisers have to answer is whether something you play once can be worth listening to more than once. Experience and forethought ease the answer toward yes, and Drumm has both at his command.

While Pangaea and Hessle's peers have resorted to mealy, house-music gruel (Hotflush) and thinly veiled populism (Hyperdub), Release offers willful, self-conscious antagonism of the purest variety.

As much as it can sound like it stands alone, Bish Bosch is part of a tradition of music that tried to find new ways to articulate that same old misery.

These are dance songs so strident that no one could ever hope to move to them, pop songs so thin that no one could choose lines worth singing along to, rap verses so fumbly that practically anyone could rewrite them and make them better.

While each song could pass for a portion of a larger jam, they all get to the point rapidly.

A lot of what's here doesn't really demonstrate what they can do to Philip Glass, but what Philip Glass has already done to them.

Allah-Las are ultimately preoccupied with sound above all else. So long as there are 12-string guitars, four-piece drumkits, and lots and lots of reverb, the rest of the world can go away.

Frankly [add-ons would] just be a distraction from the underlying theme that becomes clear once you get absorbed into the music, which is that Blue Lines is still Blue Lines, and most of the world is still trying to catch up to it.

It's an enjoyable detour, one that affirms how well these producers have honed their approaches to sound.

The dozen takes are every bit as crafted as those on Kylesa's increasingly excellent five studio albums, with tones both enormous and exploratory and vocals both large and enthusiastic.

There is dark humor and interesting angles--even joy--to be found in basic realities and mundane commitments.

Though he's still not the best rapper (his refusal to abide by traditional rhyme schemes will be frustrating to purists) he's made great strides here and is helped along by a NYC underground producer showcase.

The key to Dagdrøm's daunting mystique: You're never really sure if what you're hearing is the calm before the storm or the storm before the calm.

Sloppiness has crept into their once-perfect attack, and there is a certain any-era-of-modern-rock, unstuck-in-time vibe to the production choices and songwriting.

True, a thematically consistent whole, sounds like the product of a lovingly forged artistic bond.

On Reservation, Angel Haze shows herself to be the rare rapper who has copped a great deal of contemporary popular hip-hop and R&B and come out the other side as purely herself.

Like Hardcore, A Wrenched Virile Lore features 10 tracks, though it only references eight of the originals. However, even the mixes that draw from the same songs are different enough in approach and sequenced in such a way that the reappearances feel like purposeful reprises.

Unlike the meticulously pleasant Songs for Christmas, which more or less sounds exactly like what a casual fan (or detractor) might expect a Sufjan Stevens Christmas box set to sound like, the music inside Silver & Gold can be as downright strange as its accompanying accessories.

The Alchemist's beats on Rare Chandeliers are perfectly good, but they do little to amplify Bronson's character.

The measurable failure is the album's music. On a track-by-track basis, the songs make for dull labor, not worth our time and not befitting Rihanna's talent.

There's a sense of discovery to Quarter Turns Over a Living Line, with Andrews and Halstead unveiling the slow evolution of their sound over its 40-minute runtime.

If you simply want a rap album that will inspire all-caps quote sprees on Twitter or hourlong Gchat exchanges with your fellow microphone fiends, it really doesn't get any better than Reloaded.

Times changed; Dntel, less so. Aimlessness, his third album of new material, arrives without context, scene, or convenient narrative.

For the second time in one year, both on a large label and on their own, they've released a record ruthless and rewarding enough to animate that image.

Feed Me Diamonds is best, though, when it gets emotionally heady.

Appropriately named, Movement feels like a progression and challenge from one of the year's most exciting new voices, producers, and composers.

The problem is that the strangely smug We Don't Even Live Here feels more like P.O.S. preaching to the converted than attempting to make a believer out of anyone, lacking any palpable resistance necessary to justify the constant underdog pose.

Ghost demonstrates well enough Ferreira's versatility, certainly her stylishness, but even more than those, it shows her empathy.

The Odds is, in every way, the product of scaling down operations rather than of giving up or throwing the fans a nostalgia trip. It's fair to say that the Evens have set their target low and close; you could also call that intimacy.

Pale Fire doesn't command your attention so much as wait patiently until it drifts into your view and then goes away.

Right now Sequitur feels like a step forward for a genre that could happily stay the same forever.

For all of the stylistic hopscotch being played, the individual songs on Nebula Dance cohere into an impressively solid whole.

As big and bold as it can sound, there's little here that's especially flashy or blatantly attention-seeking.

The group's first album since 1996 just sounds like the one they would've churned out in 1998.

Few can match their feel for arrangement or sense of structure.

The tracks themselves are, per Reznor and Ross's pedigrees, immaculately pieced together, richly detailed and suitably moody. Maandig, however, continues to stick out of this mix.... She still hits all the right notes, but brings a generic prettiness to her delivery that doesn't gel with the moody futurism going on around her.

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

Despite its three-disc bulk, it exhumes too few buried-but-necessary takes and does little to illuminate what Isis did, why they did it, and what it all means.

Though imperfect, Hill's intensifying sonic clarity presents the Babies as a group that still believes in rock'n'roll as a powerful language, one that can help sort out mortal complexities and say something about the way we live.