You could reasonably argue that this is Fake's most well-rounded record to date; the bigger question is whether such small refinements to such an established, well-trodden genre should merit attention from anyone other than diehards at this stage in the game.

Throwing discordant elements into the mix to see what comes out is firmly in keeping with the spirit of the times, but the desire to create another fork in the road, to not just slavishly replicate what came before, is what makes this album (and post-punk as a genre) such a consistently fascinating area to re-explore.

Bubu music is ancient; En Yay Sah offers a powerfully modern, cosmopolitan introduction to its complex and vibrant rhythms.

Listening to Grace & Lies can be taxing; it feels at moments like succumbing slowly to emotional frostbite. But Krans and Ollsin stir in a few furtive warm pockets to keep their record from freezing over.

A complex, even contradictory record, not just the Black Swans' best but one of the most incisive and moving mediations on life and the loss of it in recent memory.

Redd Kross sound tighter and more energetic, even though their guitar tones have mellowed a little.

Devotion marries her natural gift with throbbing instrumentation that breathes life into every single turn of phrase or sensitive vocal embellishment.

The elements of pastiche are woven smoothly into her sound, which dances gracefully on the edges of past and present, of waking life and dreams.

Fragrant World is curiously thin.

Sun God is an unapologetic, all-or-nothing proposal.

Foxygen haven't so much produced memorable songs as much as cool, disembodied sonic layers that might one day coalesce into memorable songs in your head if you listen to it enough.

Sure, maybe Eremita is sometimes awkward, chintzy, or melodramatic, but for 52 minutes, Ihsahn mostly allows the listener to have a blast, if occasionally and arguably at his own expense.

The original is a seduction; this [album] is food-court flirtation.

There will be an audience for bands like Jukebox the Ghost, who at least do this unoffensive brand of power-pap serviceably. But if you're too much of a realist to believe in trick lighting, happy endings or choreographed emotion, Safe Travels will probably leave you wishing for riskier terrain.

Raw Money Raps is immaculately constructed as identity crises go, and there's an uncontrived honesty that feels more like someone working through a multifaceted outlook on life than testing his options for which crowd to play to.

There's something about the visceral, elemental nature of Niki and the Dove's production that takes you right there, shivering and pulling the collar of your coat close as wind whips under the viaduct.

The fundamental Gatekeeper template has been stretched and tweaked, putting one tentative foot forward into the future while the other remains firmly rooted in the past.

Compelling... [Yet] Forever So's resolutely overcast vibe grows a touch dreary around the three-quarter mark; Husky's tempos tend toward the deliberate, and they're most comfortable hanging out in a minor key, but after nine or 10 fairly maudlin affairs in a row, you may find yourself longing for a little respite.

Way's most compelling moments on Sorry are those in which she's particularly hellish, strong, and lyrically bold.

What hits quickest yet lasts longest are his more wistful, sentimental tunes.

C.A.R. is an excellent, devastating record, a chronicle of the amiable pessimism and occasional nihilism of a rapping Bukowski who can't seem to find a way out of the condition in which he finds himself.

The seven songs on In Motion #1 were commissioned as alternate scores to seven short avant-garde films, and without those inspirations unspooling in front of the listener, there's a strange incompleteness to most of them.

Though often disjointed, when some of these fragments manage to really connect, it's hard not to imagine Supreme Cuts as being able to hit a decent stride in the future.

Even when they're digging into the grit of a country's flaws or society's problems, the synth-driven hooks can be outright jovial.

[Graceland] was unique in its total, and totally natural, synthesis of musical strains that turned out to be not nearly as different from each other as its listeners might have expected, and the result resonated strongly around the world and across generations.

It's nice to see that a band can organically develop its sound while still maintaining a home-grown sensibility.

When they wanted, Múm could already do abstractly affecting without also tipping into cloying sentimentality. But since the bulk of the compilation is so second-rate and saccharine, an obvious learning experience put on tape, Early Birds is inessential.

For its breadth and complexity, [Blur 21] actually tells a simple story: Blur are a band that did an astonishing amount of different things really, really well.

[The Merge reissues of Copper, Beaster, and FU:EL] are a wonderfully presented document of a punk legend [Bob Mould], starting over creatively and emotionally in a brief window he helped open, and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations.

There is still some great music on God Forgives, but it is somewhat overshadowed by higher-profile misfires.

Instead of justifying or summarizing two decades of work, Tyler and McDonnell set them aside and come up with a concise, lovely album that, like a gentle tourist, takes only pictures, leaves only footprints.

The paradox about them is this: With two people, Om sounded expansive; with more, they sound comparatively weak. The music is unmistakably theirs, but the intensity of it feels lost in the arrangements.

Hints of humor are often symbolized in Scholefield's artworks, but here they have an unbalancing effect, only serving to detract from the portentous musical renderings of the uneasy symbiosis between digital glitch and the natural world.

Country Funk re-creates this shift smartly, compiling songs by white artists playing with black sounds and black artists playing with white sounds, all without drawing neat parallels between these musical traditions.

If in the past [Fallon] managed to transform similar icons [Ginsberg, Van Morrison] into a communal mythology, here it too often sounds like regurgitation, as though the reference were an end in itself.

Even if this is an album that defies obvious lineage and needs a roadmap to uncover the specific sources from Joe Barrite's archive, there's an inescapable sense of emotional impact here.

Their self-titled debut EP for Warp and LuckyMe spans 16 minutes of some of the year's most brazen, positively huge hip-hop sounds.

In keeping with the album's title, Never is uncompromising and direct.

Tipped Bowls feels like a minor record, partially by design. It never grabs you by the throat. It never gives you something totally new to consider. It's also highly listenable, and has a way of slipping in through the side door that I admire.

Shrines is not about range, instead offering subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. You might think of the album as a sculpture, and each track offers a different vantage point... compulsively listenable.

Major's reliance on words rather than riffs doesn't quite feel as effective or unique in conveying its highness on life. It doesn't sound notably more polished or expensive than its predecessor, just more restrained.

The impeccable cool of Sadier's approach freezes out political engagement in lieu of a brand of fashionable leftism to match the sofa.

Anyone can manufacture hope through a slogan, but there's an empathy and humanity that simply can't be faked as Angelakos tries to figure out how to stay atop his life. It's hard to think of a more noble goal for a pop album.

The band acquits itself amazingly well, mixing in a few originals with a well-chosen selection of Golden Age songs, folk tunes, and Azmari troubadour songs.

It's hard not to think that Jackson would have made a better case for this music if he'd put together one blinding disc of stomping giants and polyrhythmic oddities, rather than padding things out with so many wannabes and never-could-bes.

It's best to turn off those imaginary filters when you pump Limbo, and just let it be as entertaining as it clearly wants to be.

The level on which Russian Roulette works best is experienced in a stoner's sound-design-obsessed bubble, where each crackle of a record and particular melodic line of a funk, fusion, soundtrack, or novelty sample seems to contain a cavernous importance simply for displacing air with sound.

This remastered Collection of Rarities is intriguing beyond its archival purposes, as it traces the evolution of an artist over the course of 11 years.

Woody at 100 may be the most successful attempt to capture Guthrie's sprawling essence, but it's hardly the first.

You can't recapture lightning in a bottle, or age backwards, but you can settle gracefully into strengths. Nas isn't back; he's just here.

It's this sense of fearless overreach that unites This Ain't Chicago's best moments, with producers capitalizing on house's additive structure by piling on every trick they can think of to create top-heavy epics of bristling sonics and contradictory moods.

[Icky Blossoms] alternates between caffeinated synth-pop, nocturnal bar crawls, and straight-up electroclash revival. But even if they're working in a genre that demands an icy façade, they fortunately can't hide the enthusiasm that often defines Pressnall's main gig.

A Shut-In's Prayer is arguably the strongest album of Owen Ashworth's career thus far, and it arrives at a time when the influence of his former project looms over specific spheres of indie music.

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

While Channel Orange is stuffed with one-of-a-kind details and characters, its overall scope is grand, as is Ocean's.

The music is for close listening or for nothing.

Hypnotic Nights continues with the Weezer worship introduced on 2011's We Are the Champions, but answers the fuzz-pop frivolity with equal doses of motorik groove and psychedelic drone.

Each disc stands on its own as a powerful document; together, they genuinely earn the word "epic.

Guitars, synths, and beats all sound crisp and glisten with a layer of cold condensation, but they come together in ways that don't necessarily make for memorable pop tunes.

A fine follow-up, Gentle Stream captures its namesake in soft, skilled hands.

There's not a weak second to be found.

Live From the Underground shows that not much has changed with Big K.R.I.T. over the past two years. He's still an exceptional rapper with a befitting production style who can make some very good music. It's just that, at this point, good isn't good enough.

These beats are bespoke. The rapping has never been better either, with the music tailored to wring maximum tension out of each bar.

Total Dust undeniably taps into the same raw-nerved emotion that defined Borcherdt's previous solo efforts, wrapping its cutting sentiments in a grotty guitar fuzz that sounds like it was scraped off the heads on Lou Barlow's old four-track.

There's power in pauses, silence, and empty space, these songs affirm, and small doesn't have to mean slight.

The band's least ornate batch of songs to date builds upon Longstreth's most direct and identifiable lyrics ever. Which means that Dirty Projectors have upped their emotional and structural accessibility all at once.

Whether it's the lush power-balladry of "Beg For the Night" and "Be Mine Tonight" or throttle-pushing rockers like "You Call Me On", Confess is defined by its melodic and emotional immediacy.

This is a solid debut album.

The inner-space exploration is enjoyable to a point, but it comes with an underlying claustrophobia and, at times, a weariness.

The record's easygoing pace, sturdy songwriting, and sunbaked production make it the third solid effort from the Sunsets.

[This collection] is too varied to be streamlined into a single influence-- but at least it transcends the nostalgic idea with which it starts, making the idea of the band taking these ideas and running with them a pleasingly feasible one.

[Self Made 2] exists to force-feed Hot 97 playlists.

Kelly seems to have breezed through the writing and recording process here, and there's a fine line between breezy and half-assed.

As far as bringing the goods on a sophomore release goes, well, the answer is mostly yeah.

Effortlessly fun.

It's as much heady, restive psychedelia as it is a punk rager.

Sky's Edge has some of the old Hawley magic in the form of "The Wood Collier's Grave"... But for the most part, it's an unwelcome return to a less distinguished period in Hawley's career, back before he knew how to make more beguiling music than this.

The Tarnished Gold is an impressively vital showing.

It's a document of what he needed to get out in that moment.

The coherence is most evident in the atmosphere Daniell and McCombs create.

Together, they have managed to build a livelier, more bustling version of Hauschka's winsome snowglobe universe.

Fewer generalities and a more interesting narrative would have gone a long way: For all the sharp, intriguing musical experimentation, the lyrics are too easy to forget.

Is the band's self-titled album under the new moniker a brave change-up? Sure. Is it any good? Not even a little.

An album that gleans from prog, noise, baroque, hip-hop and more at will.

BEAK>> retains the same eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere as its predecessor.

Gojira's best work to date.

Class Clown's odd-angled pop and jittery arena rock keeps the weirdness on par with its predecessor.

TEED's approach to dance-pop, much like Goddard's main act, sounds especially everyguy. The project's live show provides plenty of evidence that the stuff pleases crowds, but you get the feeling that he's doing this for himself more than anyone else.

A compelling debut.

The time-slowing, pulse-quelling Spirits is a good place to get some thinking done.

[The album has] overproduced but underwritten pieces that seek to create atmosphere but mostly leave empty spaces that the Hundred in the Hands aren't sure how to fill.

It starts to distinguish itself from its long-established template when the band gets less edgy.

It's one thing to be heavy, and it's another thing to be hooky, but Slaughterhouse is the rare garage-rock album to do both so well simultaneously.

While A Place to Bury Strangers take the brave step of allowing the distortion to dissipate, the unfettered view isn't always flattering: Ackermann's lyrics can sound like they were torn out of a bored, trench-coated high-school kid's notebook, with the cyber-punk fantasia of "Mind Control" and I-want-to-die miserablism.

Loud, mean, and complicated, this six-piece is an articulate goliath, capable of drowning out Gira in waves before disappearing into pools of silence without warning. Each piece of this unit deserves mention.

The lack of any clear direction is the most fascinating aspect of Occlusions.

The nine tracks that made up The Arizona Record are more satisfying on their own.

Many of the familiar sounds of ambient music are here, and Evans boldly breathes new life into them.