Virtually every song enunciates its central joke, then repeats it and repeats it and repeats it. And repeats it. And repeats it. And so on, with the repeating. (And repeating.)

The resultant songs have a familiarity that aims them toward the back of your brain but an internal energy that prods them into prominence with repeated listens.

Crucially, with his beats less busy, it has left James more room to focus on spine-tinglingly rich tunings and timbres. And that’s where Cheetah really stands out: To sink into it, preferably on good headphones or better speakers, is to be immersed in woozy, viscous frequencies far more vivid than you’ll find almost anywhere else.

A few of the songs on The Dream of Delphi are a little too underdeveloped and end up dissipating into thin air. But it’s Khan’s lyrics, always so full of gravity and grace, that keep the album from stalling out.

No one should begrudge them their cleaner, smoother sound, but straight-laced songwriting has sapped the band's well-worn eccentricities. Tunng have outgrown and outlasted the restrictive genres they were once boxed into, but Saw Land struggles to find its place in a larger context.

Decent as these tracks are, the rest of the album never quite lives up to 'Shampoo's' potential.

If Sheezus was Allen at her most ironic, Allen’s new album marks a return to sincerity--and its assessments of motherhood, failing relationships, and infamy are penetrating. Sadly, these potent themes are often diluted by antiseptic production.

Even as the band sticks to the path of least resistance, it skirts the MOR sandtrap that sinks so many indie rock acts that manage to last a quarter century.

They worked on about 20 demos there, but none made the record. Shields: Expanded collects the best of these previously unheard Marfa tracks, which amount to captivating sketches, rather than scraps.

Maybe it only all coheres in flashes, but if Meek Mill works best in bursts, then so be it.

Created alongside a young producer and fellow Dallas denizen named Zach Witness in just 12 days, the tape feels off-the-cuff, yet also steeped in history and wisdom.

Thomas’ music is one long effort to reach across the void and connect. He’ll never reach everyone, but with every album he gets a little closer.

Everything Sucks was made primarily in the span of one intense week in New York, with friend and producer Chris Lare (aka owwwls), and that tight turnaround is evident. Its 10 songs are a locust swarm of angst, restless and frantic.

As is typical when Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas join forces, some of the project’s most exciting moments are snuck in the back door, laced into a dazzling breakdown or deep, hypnotic groove.

At its best, Only Up evokes a communal feeling of watching a band utterly locked-in, their intertwining parts echoing across a large, open space. Korody never quite conjures the chemistry necessary to transcend his influences, but, like a teenager decorating his bedroom wall with torn-out tabloid photos, he creates a messy, lovable collage.

There's little here that couldn't have been on previous albums; the difference is what's gone missing: the in-your-face homosexuality of Rough Trade debut The Smell of Our Own, the perverse grandiosity of 2004's Mississauga Goddam.

They manage to string a staggering number of tightly packed nuggets of melody and texture into 46 minutes.

Ghost is nowhere near his best, most consistent, or most durable album, but that's ultimately not even the right way to measure its modest accomplishment. Instead, it's a surprisingly upbeat retirement album, one that never stoops to self-pity and very modestly reminds you of past triumphs.

The album remains too small a platform for her tremendous vocal talent.

Even if those tracks ["Repeating Angel" and"We Have to Mask"] aren't great on their own, they don't nearly break the spell of Crush, whose combination of hard-charging energy and world-weary moods is less an unexpected curveball than a well-earned step forward.

They can be a bit one-note sometimes, but that doesn't make them any less beloved; without their ribaldness, the world of heavy music just wouldn't be as fun.

This record is the SoHo-boutique equivalent of a Thanksgiving dinner: it tastes all right, but good luck staying awake 'til dessert.

10 Summers closes with four R&B tracks—two songs and two interludes, all of which act almost as palette cleansers after the unrelenting hardness of the previous eight numbers.

Kiri Variations feels like an album that has lost its way: a soundtrack (though most of the music never appeared on the show) that shoots for terror but settles for unease; an “anti-muso” work that is far too conventionally musical

The record is more interesting when the Herculean feats of lyricism take a back seat to introspection.

As a collective, the Impossible Truth maintains the spiritual minimalism of Tyler’s solo work while expanding the sound.

We toggle across this record between the same core sounds—crisp acoustic guitar, modular synths, analog drum machines, and Margaret’s alto. In some instances, these ingredients render a feast, and in others, barely a 7/11 haul.

Where on the first listen I found it merely okay, it's a record that reveals itself as a work of surprising depth and detail when you give it multiple spins.

It's a record so enjoyable and expertly sequenced that it demands repeat listens before it's even over.

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.

There is zero daylight between the artist and his vision, as he pounds tirelessly away at one very specific idea. It is less an album than a set of 15 variations upon a single theme. It is the Rustiest album possible, and you have to respect that kind of doggedness.

“True Love,” “Up,” “Everybody’s Saying That,” and “Love Is Enough” bob to the same Chic formula: skanking guitar, twangy bass, canned strings. It’s a solid formula, but the textural sameness makes more idiosyncratic tracks like “Give Me Your Love” stand out.

A diverted and shapeless album that only hints at what they're capable of accomplishing.

On Good Thing, Bridges has kept his heart on his sleeve but updated his parlance to something a little less affected, a little more believable.

Darnielle's characters are back where they know best.

In truth, Discovery rarely invokes its predecessor's slap-bass funk, and few other tracks resemble the obviously single-designed "One More Time." Instead, Daft Punk focus on fusing mid-80's Kool and the Gang R&B beats with post-millennial prog flourishes and more vocoders than you can shake at Herbie Hancock.

One key difference, though, is in Tindersticks’ fondness for taking small moments and blowing them up big. Here, they turn that method inside out, starting with a huge, globe changing event and working something humble around it, making it feel like they’re respectfully cowering in its shadow.

Telas is not a culmination for Jaar, even if it brings his ambient strains closer than ever to the more crowd-pleasing facets of his work.

That it still sounds mischievous and human through the band's studious chops and omnivorous listening habits is no small feat, as these qualities have eluded them for quite a while.

The result of so much suspicion is an album that’s somehow both loud and timid--all clamor and no soul.

It's an accomplished sound, one that may not immediately dispense with the comparisons that have dogged the band, but one that does suggest a group more than capable of outgrowing the associations.

On an album that otherwise counts as the Foos’ leanest and meanest since their 1995 debut, the closing “Asking for a Friend” is a lumbering, melodramatic power ballad better suited to a latter-day Metallica album. However, Your Favorite Toy strikes a harmonious balance between the Foos’ punk-muckraker and arena-crowd-pleaser sides on “Unconditional.”

Swift has figured out how to make pretty music, but he hasn't found anything compelling to say through it.

Zoo Psychology's refrains are faster, shorter, and more efficient than ever.

No matter your feelings on the mic work, though, you can't help but notice the musical talent at play here, be it in the unusual song structures or the unobtrusive, color-adding use of the organ behind Dante DeCaro's unpredictable chords.

The further away from the 'Lab and into a more organic sound the band goes, the more satisfying their music is becoming.

Chat and Business won't bring you down, nor will it kick your ass. It's the kind of album that's never better than its last single.

At best begs to be a fan-club download, since it offers so little to anyone not Eef's bride or offspring.

It's the kind of meet-you-halfway hipster party record the Dismemberment Plan has decided they don't want to make anymore.

Meatbodies don't just blindly hit peak after peak, shredding toward the high heavens uninterrupted for a full album. They pull back and indulge their more psychedelic inclinations, letting Ubovich's voice shine, lilt, and echo over steady acoustic strumming.

Garbers Days Revisited transcends novelty status here, reconnecting not only to Inter Arma’s past but to our present.

Bills & Aches & Blues is a frequently impressive assemblage of extraordinary artists running amok through a trove of extraordinary songs, with occasionally uneven results.

The album works best when the technology evokes abject isolation. ... Despite the complexity and insight it offers in its lyrics, the jumbled rhythms on “$$$ Huntin’” trip up any groove the song might otherwise achieve. Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune often loses its footing at moments like this, when the tempo picks up.

Challengers tracks end with uncharacteristic whimpers instead of bangs.

Serpentine Path is an unapologetically straightforward statement, one that's either going to sound awesomely monolithic or numbingly monotonous depending on the listener's appetite for extreme doom. But on its own terms, the album is highly successful.

Manic as the source material may be, Lopatin’s score remains entirely surprising, which doesn’t mean shocking, per se. It’s more that it has a large blast radius in the movie, itself a funny character in an ensemble of unintentionally funny characters. Lopatin is brazenly and consistently there.

Even after a six-year siesta, the Notwist's approach to pop music-- exploiting both its formal properties and endless possibilities-- is no less captivating and visionary than before.

The question, going into this album, was whether he could give them purpose and meaning--whether he could put his technical mastery into the service of music at once experimental and lyrical. Where All Is Fled answers resoundingly in the affirmative.

On Multi-task they’ve honed their sound to the point where it’s hard to imagine them playing anything that doesn’t take sharp turns or hit abrupt stops.

Armonico casts the molten steel of meaningless syllables into machine-gun bursts, sonar echoes, radioactive dirges, and girl-group coos of the group's best work.

Although the sensitive side it reveals is less developed than their established one, it's just as intriguing.

A polished assortment of tidily global-sounding, mid-tempo pop tunes that seem to end before they ever kick off, strung together by a checklist of semi-impassioned capital-K Keywords: Youth, Machine, Riot, Fame, Freak, Pirate, Keepers.

Lost in Space leaves you feeling that she's already covered this terrain.

It just feels like empty tribute, lip service for someone who really does deserve something more: the dignity of being left alone.

You get the sense that pretty much any style could be Ware’s if she commits to it, but for now it’s nice to hear her explore a level of sophistication as her star continues to rise.

Indeed, there are lessons to be learned from Automato's debut, the foremost being that the golden touch of Mssrs. Murphy and Goldsworthy can't save a band from their own indie-rap dullness, horrible cybernetic-produce bandname, and absolutely atrocious MC.

Harness doesn't deliver many surprises or follow through on the promise of the debut; it simply refines the sounds they explored and digs its heels in a little deeper.

Thing of the Past is a perfectly pleasant, well-produced album that offers an authorized version of what Vetiver fans already unofficially know about the band.

Old Days features all the objective elements of useful rarities disc, but it's doubly valuable for reminding us of a Mirah that might've grown up too fast.

Clearly a children's song, it's an autobiographical account of the slowed process of overcoming loss--a big idea written for small people but, like a good portion of Tear the Fences Down, one that registers across the board.

Difficult, unapproachable, and gleefully abrasive, Verdonkermaan will be an addictive but acquired taste for those who seek out the horrendous, the inhumane, and the fucking brutal.

His vision of how to build bridges between his own music and the music others is already his own, and Mon Pays puts it on brilliant display.

In lieu of new Replacements, Anything Could Happen is a decent replacement.

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

Ritual holds down his rock-star impulses and ties the album to a specific time and place, settling for the merely pretty instead of the all-consuming. Richly textured and carefully composed, Ritual is an impressive composition, but for Hopkins it feels rote.

Instead of trying to rage against the machine, they're appealing to its intellectual nature. Unfortunately, this nuance is steamrolled by the group's need for fan-friendly riffage.

Tonally and instrumentally, the album is a change in style, but there is no moment of surprise; it still feels very predictable.

Still, overreaching is a forgivable flaw on an otherwise accomplished debut, which usually sounds so confident in its creator's insecurities.

No one's perfect, I guess, especially when they're trying to go from one-note to every note in the space of a single record. Sadly, though, that means that the dancier stuff, though I want to like it so much, is Wild's main casualty.

Lost Themes is plenty dark and heavy but shorter on inspiration.

Iit confirms anew that Big Business remain a band without comfortable genre quarters, as indebted to power pop and psychedelic rock as they to sludge or stoner metal.

A meticulous assemblage of sequencers and synthesizers, drum machines and aleatoric percussion, small beeps and tectonic booms, Light Divide refracts and then reorders moody electronic music, creating more of a mirage than a mere collage.

This is the sound of an ever-curious, shape-shifting band finally finding the confidence to tell us who they really are. But they are not telling us anything we didn’t already know.

Arca joins a long line of musical chameleons. The emancipatory promise of Arca’s project—a world beyond binaries, categories, and convention itself—remains thrilling, even when her tottering steps don’t quite reach that wished-for horizon.

Happy Birthday is strikingly raw. Moolchan’s refusal to bend to conventional song structure or recording techniques gives the music a sense of joyful rebellion. ... But as an artist whose defining quality is economy of language and texture, she falters when her songs are packed with too much sonic stimulation.

Recalling X's boisterous male/female mantras and careering boogie by way of Sonic Youth's frosty downtown cool, The Invisible Deck is a confident and polished record built of cavernous drums, simply slithering riffs, filthy bass grooves, and high-energy dynamics.

Murs for President is such a weird album to listen to in a strictly critical sense, where it stands as a more-or-less average release.

Putting aside musical intricacies, Inside the Rose just sounds amazing, conjuring a lustrous, lucid world shaken by distant explosions. The drones of strings, pianos, and electronics are offset by bright accents of tuned percussion, sustaining an atmosphere of anticipation and wonder.

While his songwriting remains funny and incisive at 45, ostensibly ballsier numbers like 'Fuckingsong' and 'Angela' veer dangerously close to bar-band boneheadedness.

Ministry of Love does come off like something of a fashion victim, sounding expensive but uncomfortable, looking good but doing little to stand out.

With this much creativity, it’s unfortunate that the band falls into predictable patterns on wordless bridges or codas that start to feel samey after 10 songs. The spidery instrumental “Singalong,” on the other hand, is a smart sequencing choice to mix up the album’s flow, while “Big Trouble” has the most notable tweaks to their formula.

It's all vaguely familiar, but Lytle's fine-grained production pops a freshmaker or two into the mix.

Following their first two crunching and careening albums, it may seem as if the M's have lowered the bar for themselves, but through all the detours they've made an album that sounds more like themselves than any previous work.

Banks could certainly go places--but Goddess doesn't, and instead seems content to wallow in the same depressive rut for an exhausting 59 minutes.

A worthy if not exactly earth-moving capstone to the band's career.

The album falters in spots because of the disparity of its urges. Age Against the Machine seems to want to ease Cee-Lo back into the Goodie Mob’s world while not-so-gently tugging them into his.

She commits to pop music’s campiness to convey the way love and heartache magnify even the most fleeting memories into heart-wrenching melodrama. It’s an interesting pivot, but much of the music feels too aimless to effectively deliver these intense emotions.

Habits has little to apologize for, no serious blemishes or ill-advised shifts in direction.