It's respectful of tradition, quietly ambitious, and deeply personal, a wonderfully considered album from an artist who was starting to seem a lot like a forgotten gem in the wake of mishandled promotion.

Soft Fall just works, whether as a dazzling display of sumptuous synthetic ambience, rich, romantic pop, and quite a few points in between.

It's only when Apache Dropout indulge their pulpier interests too faithfully that they run into trouble.

[Circles] is an uncharacteristically varied, psych-y noise-pop record that just plain sounds and feels great.

There are no unexpected detours or superfluous tangents, just 10 songs of sweet resilience delivered by a voice of seemingly effortless expression.

The music is big but gentle, offered without tension or anger. When it is not big-- see the leaden sentiment of "You Make Me Feel" and "Delicately"-- it is laughably composed and calculating.

Darnielle finds equal grains of humanity and empathy in people crouched in the darkest corners and blinded by the brightest spotlights. It's not spirituality, escapism, or even optimism, exactly, that he's espousing--all you know is it's some kind of light.

Having seemingly mastered all modes of excess, you'd think The 2nd Law would be Muse's unimpeachable triumph. It's not, and the problem isn't that Muse have gone too far... they haven't gone far enough.

What feels missing from Heavy Mood is specificity: Where are the characters, and what became of those kids passed out on the lawn? The heart of Heavy Mood is lost its in own sloganeering.

The surface is a gorgeous invitation to return and see if you can figure out what it all means.

Don't Be a Stranger, American Music Club frontman Mark Eitzel's best record since 2001's The Invisible Man.

Bibio's [Ambivalence Avenue] had two things Look a Little Closer is missing, namely context and a true sense of discovery.

It's both overstuffed and messy, and so overworked that what life there may once have been now exists as a kind of primordial paste.

YOKOKIMTHURSTON is not so much a decibel-bursting showcase for the Queen of Noise and her unruly understudies as a conversation between intimates speaking in tongues and tangles-- a voyeuristic glimpse into a private, discomfiting exchange.

While State Hospital lacks for pure visceral pleasure, Hutchison can still convey such a deep, muscular ache in his vocals, indicating that Frightened Rabbit still know their strengths.

Sundowning is an empowering listen, and Lukic's roars force you to reckon with what's raw inside yourself.

Though this album is a beautiful, well-executed listen, Blu will only really be fulfilling his potential when he starts looking toward the future again.

These new songs are shadowy and spacy, a little bit lost, maybe even a tad sexy despite themselves--all brighter and richer than their predecessors.

It's true that destruction can be an act of creation, but the same goes the other way around: In building, Villalobos, with his big ideas and cheerful disposition, tears down.

Clark can, and hopefully will, do better. But for now he feels like a genuine talent unable to find a foothold.

Tennant's mature gift as a lyricist is for sentimentality tempered by slyness, and he pulls that off a few times... Too much of Elysium, though, misplaces its subtlety.

Lupe's dexterity remains his greatest asset.

For a collaboration between a songwriter and a producer who helped push her to the outer limits of her vision, Melody's Echo Chamber is an impressively immersive debut.

Though the album doesn't work in many places, it's a laudable attempt to mix together two styles which are, at first appearance, utterly alien to one another.

End of Daze is a confident and comprehensive showcase for everything Dum Dum Girls do well.

Long and lush isn't a bad look for the Soft Pack, so long as they're keeping the beat.

It is hard not to be a little dismayed to see that Efterklang have settled for what is likely the least daring--if perhaps not the least lucrative--path going forward.

All in all this is a kinder, gentler Dinosaur-- you won't have another "Severed Lips", sorry--making a very solid album, one that finds the band gelling with half the fuzz.

Stripped of the cut-and-paste studio trickery and celebrity cameos that defined the band's records from the mid-90s onward, the self-produced Meat and Bone boasts no ambition beyond capturing the Blues Explosion in straight-up, no-bullshit rock'n'soul mode.

Even as Sledge and Jessee work to add some rough edges to the music, their frontman keeps his distance on Sound of the Life of the Mind, as though he can't quite get outside his own mind. As a result, the album sounds barely able to polarize, like Folds is rockin' the suburbs gently to sleep.

The tracks feel like true collaborations rather than features. The energy exchange feels mutual. Sebenza feels like the future, now.

Minerva's music remains an acquired taste, and Will Happiness Find Me? is not a record to convert people who've been put off by her stuff in the past. Still, it's noticeably clearer in its vision than anything she's put out before.

Although Moms is the result of its two creators' putting themselves through the wringer, it never feels overshadowed by dread.

Total Loss uses the common tools of pop expression-- four-minute songs, autobiography, choruses, confession-- to create a work of poignant and devastating art.

The album starts strong, but is uneven, dragging toward the end.

Here Ambarchi shows how sharp about-turns and starkly dissimilar contrasts can be equally potent.

Mirage Rock is so lightweight and inconsequential that it really does seem more like an illusion than a record; it's wispy and indiscernible, as if the people who made it had no vision for what it should be.

It's a soft but sinister set of songs-- the Bay Area's answer to the Velvet Underground's self-titled record. Where Sic Alps were once wasted and wobbly, they are now stoned and serene.

Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color is more of a refinement than a deviation for Brother Ali, even though there's one prominent change that could set off questions.

Breakthrough-- which it is and isn't-- feels like the kind of record his adventurous precedent has made into a familiar signature. It's the album that gets at his recent creative mode most definitively, the one people might figure he had in him rather than the one that changed anybody's minds about him.

Woods' greatest strength has always been songwriting, and sharpening the focus and cleaning up the production has only enhanced the band's welcoming melodies.

Runner shakes out as one of this band's most subtly varied albums, and it can be an immersive listening experience if you give yourself over to it.

A handful of guests aside, though, none of G.O.O.D. Music's personalities do much to justify their newfound prominence. If Cruel Summer is meant to be an argument for the label's other talent, it makes a weak case.

The group's obvious enthusiasm for the project is contagious, and together they add another memorable benchmark to Chasny's formidable body of work, clearly having a fantastic time while doing so.

While there's no question that Grizzly Bear's last two records have sounded gorgeous, critics of the band have wondered if that's enough. Shields, the band's fourth and most compositionally adventurous record, should put those concerns to bed.

The result is an album that never sounds settled or still, defined not by one or another place but by the tumultuous spaces in between.

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.

Halstead's performing reinvents no wheels but never is anything less than well-done regardless, and the full performances can often find their own impact.

Mostly, Field Report sounds a lot like his old band.

By aiming for so many different styles, settling for subpar-at-best lyrics, and trying to pay the bills with rock'n'roll, they never find a sound that's fully captivating or convincing.

on Tempest, his latest album, Bob Dylan mostly sounds insane. That volatility can yield tremendous rewards-- on the ferocious "Pay in Blood", it clarifies his nihilism, his cruelty-- but it can also be distractingly unruly, inching toward self-mockery, all wild undulation and hairball-retch. Which would be okay-- embraced, even!-- if the rest of Tempest didn't feel so rote.

A song or two here and there might falter a bit, but taken as a whole, Mary's Voice is a minor triumph.

You'll find something to latch onto in every song, but you won't always walk away from Negotiations with its choruses in your head; it's a more consistent record than its predecessor, but more orderly, too, and the highs just aren't quite as high.

If the sheer enormity of Thee Oh Sees' dense discography has proven too forbidding for you to delve into, Putrifiers II is a convenient summary/gateway, opening with a killer shot of the band's patented echo-drenched fuzz-punk delirium ("Wax Face") and closing with a baroque, string-swept lullaby ("Wicked Park"), while traversing all points in between.

It's hard to shake the feeling that the album sounds too comfortable, too familiar: It's so deeply entrenched in their comfort zone that it sounds too easy-- not effortless, but automatic and rote.

As ever, Ragon's lyrics are highly evocative if not outright provocative.

In retrospect, it seems Giant will function less as a career highpoint for either artist, and more as a historical marker of the career trajectories of each participant.

It's a placeholder album from a man who has already written 20 songs that are better than the ones here.

Too many of the other songs feel starved of that love, though.

Too mushy and indistinguishable to wallop you in the gut and too cheesy to be taken seriously, the album feels, at its worst, like a series of power ballads with the choruses ripped out.

[Come of Age] is even more of a dystopian nightmare than Kid A or an El-P record: The Vaccines draw us into a universe that revolves entirely around Young, and if he's got nothing to say, his only possible conclusion is that nobody does.

The most appealing thing about this record is that this band, having created a brilliant and moving sound, returns to it again for another 38 minutes.

This album peaks when it finds room to tilt at larger topics and tinier ones within a few short seconds of one another.

One of the many great things about Liquid Swords is that while it's an unimpeachable work of lyrical mastery, of fierce intellect and sound morals, it's in no way a record for prudes.

Weiss and Takahashi lay out their visions in purely instrumental terms, and the production is sumptuous and beautifully tactile. This is what Teengirl Fantasy do best: They craft immaculate headphones music, full of enveloping small details.

All that is loveable or lamentable in Mungolian Jet Set's music is right here.

Even when he focuses his unflagging talents within fixed bounds, Lekman's still one of the most distinct and observant writers in indie rock today.

The songs are dense and trebly, swirling and mutating but rarely growing, and too often staying way past their welcome. There are plenty of worthwhile ideas, but a seasoned producer could strategically shave 20 minutes off the album while losing little.

As a showcase of a seasoned master in his element, Silver Age's bounty of direct, distorto-pop hits measures up to Mould's gold standard.

Most of the time, they do a pretty good job.

Rather than embalming past glories or forcing a big statement, the Orb sound like they're having fun on these jams, recorded quickly in Berlin, with pioneer Lee "Scratch" Perry.

un doesn't reach the heights (or more accurately, wallow in the depths) of Moon Pix, but more than anything else she's made, it feels like a companion piece to that record, a conversation with an older and wiser voice.

With Centipede Hz, Animal Collective have delivered a cluttered, abrasive album that confirms their naysayers' exaggerated perceptions of the band. But even a patchy Animal Collective album yields several exceptional songs.

A quick, pithy album, with 11 songs lasting just 30 minutes. There are patches of tedium, but the best moments are both surprising and engaging.

Despite the drama in the music, there's no sense of real people in these songs, not as artists in the here and now and not as subjects in the there and then.

There are still hints that Johnson still knows where his talents lie on Life Has Not Finished With Me Yet, but they're the faintest hints.

It unspools pleasantly and unhurriedly, possessing the sort of sparkly glow that often comes with rejuvenation.

One of the joys of Django Django is that even though it's rendered in two basic colors-- natural and synthetic-- the scenarios it conjures are significantly more multifaceted.

Mature Themes is as vital as anything he's ever recorded.

Remember the old Chris Rock bit where he ate broccoli and cheese for the first time as a kid and thought he'd want nothing but that for the rest of his life? Replace "broccoli" with "Jesus" and "cheese" with "Mary Chain" and you're getting close to the charmingly monomaniacal focus Stagnant Pools bring to their debut, Temporary Room.

They're the opening band you actually kinda enjoyed even though you showed up too early by mistake, the album you half remember liking when it was playing in a friend's car.

Believe You Me comes off as a collaboration between two dyed-in-the-wool daydreamers, finding both harmony and intriguing incongruity in their respective visions.

That first half [of the album] proves the less successful, though at the same time the opening three-song run may be the best thing Deacon's ever recorded... It's the second half of America that promises and more or less delivers something great and new for Deacon.

White's gift on Big Inner is taking sounds created by actual southerners and turning them into figments of his musical imagination, which he bends and shapes into bottomless columns of ethereal soul.

Even if it doesn't quite match the heights of Everyone Must Touch the Stove, Enterprising Sidewalks gestures towards the more obscure corners of the band's (and the label's) back catalog.

They click best as a mass of finely tuned parts. And in the latter three tracks... it really comes to the forefront, sounding so second-nature that you take the complex interplay in the underlying grooves for granted.

Despite his chart success with Drake, many of 2 Chainz' pop maneuvers feel tone-deaf.

As likeable as the album is, there's no saying it won't get out-maneuvered by the next garage band that bashes out a half-hour of blue-denim melodies.

Produced by Rancid's Tim Armstrong, the music here is predominantly a pitch-perfect versioning of 1970s reggae.

If there's anything wrong with Positive Force, it's that it's better suited as background music than bearing up to intense listening; while the guitar lines on most of the songs here are deliciously difficult to whistle, they're all essentially fairly similar.

Aside from the loose DOOM-in-England motif, there's not enough of an overarching theme that Jarel's serviceable-but-indistinct production can pull together.

Even with its generous supply of candy-coated riffs and easy-flowing melodies, Hot Cakes still goes down like lukewarm Eggo waffles: comfort-food familiar, but sapped of the frisson that made The Darkness special.

The split between Perry and Gerrard's singing parts remains distinct not only vocally, but for the different subjects each explores. That could be a stumbling block in other hands, but always seems to bring out the best where these two are concerned.

This Time mostly serves as a reminder of why he's troubled more than why he's great.

It's ultimately debatable whether or not Four is the "real" Bloc Party, but revisionist history isn't supposed to be a duller version of the real thing.

For 30 years Swans have challenged the boundaries between beauty and ugliness, music and noise, catharsis and abuse.... The Seer is the album that transcends them.

As a front-to-back experience, but album doesn't exactly stay with you.

Poor Moon turns out to be a wisp of a record, intentionally light and certainly promising but also oddly--and perhaps ironically--weightless.