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

MTMTMK is more satisfying [than debut, Warm heart of Africa], but it's still a bit overworked in ways that undercut its strengths.

The most impressive thing about the album is how death is gracefully absorbed into this long-running franchise to reinvigorate the band.

Wish Hotel might be ephemeral but it's ultimately pleasing, a cloud of scented smoke floating from your speakers to score an overcast day.

Markus Popp isn’t quite there yet, but Scis proves that he’s still following his own path.

The rhyme skills and lurid way with imagery that first brought the group to national attention remain on display throughout the album, but YRN's warring agendas suggest a few more tries are in order for the Migos to get their formula sorted.

Like Crazy For You before it, Honeymoon isn’t especially singular or groundbreaking—but Beach Bunny’s raucous spirit means it never goes stale, either. Trifilio excels in straightforward, recognizable experiences of heartache, while still leaving space for listeners to attach their own nuance.

I quit starts so strong. .... A brutally honest edit might have reconsidered the more stylistically anonymous or lyrically thin concepts.

All in all though, it's good to hear a new Os Mutantes record that carries forward the ideals and exploratory spirit that made us all love the band in the first place, even if it won't ever supplant those classic early albums.

Exquisite as a great deal of Lifetime of Love sounds, it is not an album especially rich in emotional depth or apparent meaning. Its merits, not to be shrugged off, are nevertheless mainly superficial—the slight but definite virtues of a decidedly minor record.

For all these experimental impulses, Crawler ultimately proves to be more a transitional album than a wholesale reinvention, and it’s not entirely clear if Idles have it in them to go full Kid A.

Filled with shimmering waves of pedal steel and slide guitar, these spare, gritty reenactments will surely please fans of his 2003 urban-folk platter Talkin' Honky Blues.... Underground hip-hop enthusiasts, however, might be put off by Buck's near-complete disregard for the rippling, sample-laden funk of his youth.

Witch is a solid record throughout, but it is one of those records that feels like a collection of songs--good songs!--rather than an actu

As good as these renditions are, the emotional heart of Georgia Blue lies in those alternative rock covers, songs where Isbell and the 400 Unit allow themselves some freedom of interpretation.

Thee Physical wants to mosh in the punk club as much as it wants to throw on some lip gloss and hit the town, and it's frustratingly enticing to imagine how the record would have turned out if Egedy had leaned on the gas towards the latter option.

His band is tight, but Oberst sounds a bit tense and weighed down on heavily embellished tracks like "At the Bottom of Everything" and Lua B-side "True Blue".

Their version of the band has a lot less boogie but a lot more swamp, a lot more Frank Frazetta fantasy, a lot more majestic doom.

Because of its indistinct nature, Equivalents feels infinitely deep, with details left undiscovered even after repeat listens. It is easy to get lost in its doldrums, and can sometimes feel inconspicuous to a fault.

Gaze into Smalltown Stardust’s airy arrangements and you might see a reverse image of previous King Tuff records. That was music made for the cold dark of night, or at least a dimly curtained bedroom; this is music made to be heard in the reassuring glow of sunshine.

We do get to glimpse novel facets of Iron & Wine, like “Milkweed,” whose melody seems to dissipate even as the words leave Beam’s mouth. On the other hand, we also get songs like “Last of Your Rock ‘n’ Roll Heroes,” whose folk-funk groove is an ungainly as its flippancy toward its titular subject.

She's onto some good shit here, but there's too much learning on the job.

The slightness of this album is hard to hold a grudge against, but ain't nothing oh-my-god necessary about it either.

Mia Gargaret’s patient pace and contemplative tone encapsulate these questions of existence, dissociation, and introspection.

Lindsey Buckingham manages to be his best solo effort since 1992’s Out of the Cradle. No dilution of his composing or his production sorcery here: Buckingham, all by his lonesome, has recorded an album whose insistent, almost irritating knack for melody suggests a resurgent talent for making his insularity accessible.

The beats are all quality, but without voices there's not much they can do in three-and-a-half minutes that they don't have the strength and presence to do in two.

There are bum notes, and rhythms that wander. But Eternal Tapestry and Sun Araw mesh well. When they hit a groove, they're a match made in a UV lamp-lit and sage-scented stoner-rock heaven.

Heart's production work, again by Bilerman, isn't always successful....But the album shakes such shackles often enough to maintain an atmosphere of warm intimacy.

It's not innovative, but it's deliberate and economic, with no filler and an inviting dose of Sly Stone-derived soul.

Years in the making, a little death is rousay’s most polished and straightforward work, one that seeks to take her from collagist to capital-C Composer.

Their album is a celebration of harmless indulgences: dressing up, going out, getting swept into the drama of a song. In Painting the Roses’ one-stop discotheque of the mind, more will always be more.

As a sincere love letter to NOLA, new breed certainly succeeds. But as a further example of the kind of musically adventurous statement that Richard has already proven she’s capable of, it falls just shy.

Lange is clearly in the mood to experiment, letting more traditional instruments take a backseat while he fiddles with electronic equipment, peppering nearly every track with whirs, burrs, clicks, and clacks. He occasionally takes time to build distinct grooves from all these little pieces ("Cenar en La Manana"), but more often than not, his fiddling is distracting.

Whiteout doesn’t always sound like a revelation, but it allows Howard to open up, letting in new lyrical and musical ideas that complement his own without overwhelming them.

Father of 4 ultimately works as a solo outing because Offset is such a force of nature, but it’s too often cautious where it could be candid, or dull where it should be sharp. Still, the record is a progression for Offset and for Migos.

For the curious listener, the definitive nature of Illumination Ritual can cut both ways, as Appleseed Cast demonstrate their capabilities without having too many definitive strengths come to the fore, consolidating a decade and a half of intriguing, and occasionally compelling experimentation into a manageable 45 minutes.

The pirate-radio conceit simultaneously buoys and constrains an album bursting with ideas. Its themes help rapid-fire changes in direction cohere, but fully fleshed-out tracks sit awkwardly within a headlong spin across the radio dial.

The first third is playful if not quite memorable. ... But as “N” swoops down, with its slow, throbbing bassline, primitive drum machine pattern, echoing chimes, and flecks of flamenco guitar, you wonder if Lissvik might have pulled a fast one and gone back into an old hard drive to plunder some old Studio session, so dead-on is the sound.

Woke on a Whaleheart is a deceptively easy listen-- steady, lulling, and vehemently organic-- but consequently, it can begin to feel invisible.

While it’s a creative step forward for Kiwanuka, it’s still tough to get a sense of just who he is at times.

As a record, Eraser Stargazer is sometimes weirdly hookless and ponderous. There’s plenty of stoner fog, but not always much to grip. It is a forward move for the band, though.

While Ultima II Massage starts off with material that's heavier and meaner than anything he’s done previously, the lighter sound of the album's back half can't help but come across as a drop in ambition, turning down the volume on what could've been the most dynamic Tobacco record to date.

The band’s diverse influences sound best when Kivlen's voice serves as a darker echo of Cumming’s angelic optimism, especially in a call and response. But the band's hodgepodge approach doesn't always work.

Here, when everything's as clear as it is on Les Voyages de l'Âme, he feels almost too exposed, and the big climaxes he's reaching for don't arrive. There's no denying the beauty, but it feels weirdly muted-- or perhaps just unsurprising.

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.

Even in its most indulgent turns, Star Stuff serves its purpose: After making an overly disciplined live album for zero spectators, it’s refreshing to hear Bundick really jam like no one’s looking.

Wiley has kept his formula mostly intact: skittering, hiccuping bounce rhythms, synths that sound like a turbocharged Super Nintendo with a subwoofer attached, and a manic, borderline-toasting flow that plows through everything in its path.

While the record fails at living up to the hyperbolic critical proclamations of London Calling's second coming, it does make for a pretty decent, if somewhat unexpected, sweat-soaked finale for The Clash's legendary golden boy.

Sixteen Oceans is 16 tracks long, yet five of them are basically interludes—minute-or-two-long sketches made of watery synth pads, tape hiss, or rudimentary beats. Strangely, most of them fall toward the end of the album. ... The view’s lovely, but for the moment, it feels like Hebden is sailing in circles.

It's no slight to say the record's distinguishing quality is the one Elbow has had since the beginning, an honest humanity that's imperfect but can be appreciated if you live with it.

Eskimo Snow just feels like the right kind of album for an incredibly gifted and increasingly prolific band like WHY? to release as a quick palate cleanser, reaching an endpoint of a certain sound rather than trying to top its predecessor's unmatchable extremities.

The Bangs seem to place every drum stutter, keyboard whirr, and Schafer howl on equal footing, a nice testament to the tightness and democracy of their musical unit, so pushing the songwriting further to the forefront could come at the risk of toppling the delicate balance the not-so-delicate Flux Outside achieves. May they never learn to sit still.

Ramshackle, jumpy and curiously charming, Dead Man Shake is full of Westerberg's trademark spastic vocals and nimble guitar work, only now determinably fuzzed up and shrouded in Sun Records spunk.

The warmth emanating from the lyrics flows throughout Nothing Lasts Forever. Teenage Fanclub never quickens the pace or belabors the melodies, choosing to luxuriate in their twilight grooves.

We Shall All Be Healed is complacent, formulaic for a trailblazer, lapped by Destroyer, optimistic-but-joyless in that it is pessimistic-but-punchy, and gooped with the silly putty of vagueness and cliché.

As with their other work with Michio Kurihara, False Beats and True Hearts is a slow bloom, an album whose rewards can become fully apparent only through thoughtful immersion.

In its weaker moments, My Boy can feel like a collection of signifiers in search of meaning. ... Williams is at his best when he’s being gestural, as opposed to literal.

Mable might not be a knock out of the park—"Bench" sounds like lukewarm Weezer, and the five-minute "Out of Body" seems out of place--but it might be one the catchiest sets of pessimist punk songs since Fireworks’ Oh, Common Life.

If Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid has that lovable ten-solid-songs consistency, it's less a matter of lacking filler and more a matter of writing a lot of inoffensive but uninspiring tracks that all wander down the same avenues.

Villains isn’t always so smooth and several sections fall flat, like the staccato-spiked funk that surfaces midway through “The Evil Has Landed” or the melodically static refrains on “Fortress.” Nevertheless, the stalled moments don’t detract from the fun of the ride.

While I'd love to say this is the album that breaks the holding pattern, Last Night holds a palm full of surprises and otherwise stretches the underdog charm a little thin.

There’s no disco excursion on Daniel—they already pulled off that trick on 2020’s The Main Thing—but it’s the cleanest and leanest album they’ve ever made.

Without Panda Bear on board, Animal Collective lose the pop edge that has resulted in their most commercially successful music, but this isn’t a project for scoring hits. It’s a meditative, hypnotic experience, and it’s not without the sense of playfulness that has driven Animal Collective throughout their career.

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.

Though all the elements that make their music great are still present, never do they crystallize and come together quite like they have in the past.

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.”

His is the ambient music of someone else's party, happening far away from where you are, and the distance is part of the allure.

Valentina is essentially Gedge and his current sidemen doing a very solid impression of the Wedding Present as they were circa 1990.

On Fog, Arbouretum does well by both parties [his songwriting influences: singer Will Oldham, with whom he toured as a backing guitarist, and Baltimore punk-rock-Gnostics, Lungfish].

The music offers few surprises this go around, relying instead of the tried-and-true guitar arpeggios, atmospheric noises and orchestral, rainy-day crescendos.

This is sparse, windswept music, full of warm, circling guitar plucks, gathering echoes, and long, slow fades.

While [Matt Sharp] wisely defers to Wolfe and Laessig to deliver the album's biggest hooks, his unwavering wistfulness still has a way of flattening out Lost in Alphaville’s emotional terrain and lending the album a steady-to-a-fault temperament.

A quarter century later, her same old razzle-dazzle feels a little repetitive, yes. But it’s also an insistence that the room we found can swell even bigger, that even in these dark times there’s humanity and humor at the heart of it all. Can’t hear that enough.

Equally indebted to pioneering girl groups as well as her punk heroes, the album is a fiery and compelling—albeit slightly uneven—exploration of love, anger, and coming-of-age.

Much of Similes is more standard, wordless Eluvium fare: the rumbling piano-based "In Culmination", the slow-burning "Nightmare 5" and "Bending Dream", and most of all the long, flickering closer "Cease to Know".

The songs on Who's the Clown fittingly sound like an extension of Abrams’ world: verbose, conversational, unfiltered. .... But the album falters in its second half, where Hobert uses specificity as a crutch, struggling to transcend the biographical details of her own, quite exceptional, life.

Frusciante has finally harnessed the energy and unqualified honesty that pulsed underneath the wandering Syd Barrett-ness of his weird work, and applied them to a reedy, vaguely psychedelic, and consistently melodic collection of songs.

When moments like the funereal horn lines on “Vostok” break into the open after several tracks of frigid drones, the contrast is absolutely heart-rending. But these transcendent moments are few, and No. 2 could still use a little more of that drama.

Harmonics’ collection of relatable songs and interesting ideas could use a stronger hand on the tiller to reach its intended destination.

III/IV is a fine collection of outtakes, but chances are Adams' magnum opus is still forthcoming.

Evocative images recur throughout Time’s Arrow, which is full of flashing lights, water, and dreams that offer mesmerizing spaces for getting lost. ... Time’s Arrow’s consistency also works against it. The record’s more placid songs bleed together.

Another album of somewhat charming and unexceptional tunes.

Miller offers more than enough quality material here to justify stepping out on his own: what he's occasionally lacking in energy, he largely makes up for with craft.... That said, it's unlikely to instigate much beyond some afternoon head-nodding, and even some of Miller's fans will be somewhat put off by the album's borderline MOR sound.

Tillman's intimate, close-miced voice, does lend Year in the Kingdom a lonesome, somber tone, one Tillman-- a funny, amicable dude, if you've ever heard him clowning on himself at a Fleet Foxes gig-- would do well to shake on occasion. Next time, maybe; for now, the stout, supine Year in the Kingdom, Tillman's second fine record of the year, will certainly do.

This is deeply un-portable music: It either demands your complete attention or invites you to shut it off. Once through that opening stretch, your attention will frequently be rewarded. There is powerfully evocative, richly imagined music to be found here.

Paradigmes is a good time, but its intellectual merit is entirely surface level. It’s like watching the funniest person in a college philosophy seminar give a presentation they failed to prepare in advance: you laugh, but not because you learned anything.

At War With Reality is, above all else, an At the Gates album that feels like a pastiche of At the Gates. At least it’s a spirited one.

More often than not, listening to Songs for the General Public feels like watching the D’Addario brothers throw old ’45s at a brick wall to see what sticks, snickering all the while. They want you to have a good time, and they sound tighter than ever; they just need to figure out how to control the Frankenstein that they’ve made.

The momentum generated by “Mirage” and the equally limber funk workouts that bookend Boo Boo end up compensating for the tedious midsection of neither-here-nor-there experimentation.

Fortunately, there are a handful of transcendent moments to be found, provided you're willing to invest the time it takes to sniff them out-- which you should, since this is one of those records that matures with subsequent spins.

While not a record of cast-iron slam dunks, Welcome the Worms possesses enough raw power to cast Bleached in a completely different light, and one that is considerably more sustainable than their debut.

However well they reflect KIN’s mood and themes, these pieces don’t quite cohere into a proper stand-alone album. Independent of the film, they feel more like a series of impressionistic sketches that tease at the eruptions of Mogwai’s definitive work, yet stop short of hitting their maximalist potential.

In spite of its flaws, To the Races charms with its somber atmosphere.

Given the album’s length and density, it resists close reading; if there is an organizing logic here, it is not readily apparent, although brushed drums and choppy vocal effects provide thematic through lines, and the occasional recurring motif lends a sense of narrative cohesion. But the music often unspools with natural ease.

While the album introduces some intriguing new looks—like the Eastern-psych strut of “Cicada (Land on Your Back)”--the Joy Formidable still have a tendency to pummel their tunes into a modern-rock mush.

Wuthering Drum is a work seemingly unconcerned about giving you what you want, but what it does provide is almost enough.

The melodies for their slower and more winsome songs hit harder and soar higher than the power chord explosions, which can feel a little stale, like maybe someone forgot about that Schlitz can.

Paper Monsters succeeds in revealing the "new" Dave Gahan, and that's what makes it a faintly embarrassing listen.

Like all the best shoegaze records, Agitprop Alterna is a heady, inward-looking listen. But if you’re able to zone out, or simply to begin walking with no destination in mind, its oversized and introspective ideas make welcome company.