In fact, despite the thoughtfulness of the arrangements, it quickly becomes clear that nothing truly surprising will ever happen.

It's here we enter the world of the tame, a land where Sting is king and Phil Collins is raucous.

On My Way is a far less goofy effort than 2002's Sha Sha, and suffers remarkably for its comparable lack of inanity-- no longer powered by the youthful glee of his solo debut, Kweller's hooks sag and fade, contrived and loose.

Good as some of these songs are... they're not quite enough to foment a revolution

Phantom Island is freewheeling and ambitious, and mostly admirable for it. Pared back slightly, it might have been truly absorbing.

None of the songs are simple, and they mostly all build to surprising and surprisingly weird heights.

Beats-first, lyrics-second people have enough here to return to, and lyric freaks know there's plenty here to unpack.

Unfortunately, The Art of Hustle is mostly forgettable as a major-label rap record, but it bears out a teachable truth about Gotti's career: sometimes showing up is more than half the battle.

Mergia’s power to transfix seems to grow with the more collaborators he has, and their addition does not detract from his resolute sound.

You Can’t Kill Me is at its best when it offers surprising, welcome wrinkles to Shake’s sound.

When No One Is Lost tries to blend in with the youth, Stars sound like professors rather than participants.

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

Life & Livin’ It signs off with a stiff jab to the nose, hinting at what could be if Sinkane’s next journey takes them deeper into the mud.

While Blue is thoughtful and beautiful, it’s a drag to sit through. The interludes have more personality than the full-length songs.

Rain Before Seven… is designed to feel hopeful and positive, reassuring rather than challenging: music for the world that should or could be, rather than the grim reality. But it’s ultimately a vision of a heaven where nothing much happens.

Antenna to the Afterworld may have all the dressings of science fiction and fantasy, but like many great works in those genres, it's a strong, emotive character study.

An album this guileless is bound to be polarizing, for the very fact that it resolutely resists the urge to provoke.

Whether the album achieves its titular synesthesia is debatable, but Bell Orchestre tap into a wide, mesmerizing range of the spectrum.

That the least interesting material falls to the back is unfortunate, because most of the album is engaging.

On Asking for Flowers, she sounds better than her peers for being so much braver.

Though Lamkin's monotone voice is not the most expressive instrument--it barely wavers whether the occasion calls for a Monks-style organ vamp ("Move Along") or a prom-night embrace ("Mexico")--each album side gradually ratchets up the tension and releases it through a raucous rave-up ("Pull Out" on side A, "Parasites" on side B) that successfully bridges the Soft Pack's Nuggets-schooled ethos with the modern-day discord of San Diegan patron saints Hot Snakes.

II is just about perfectly synchronized with the zeitgeist, and if it’s not a flawlessly executed record, it still seems capable of making the most out of its moment.

Chorus, Herndon’s new two-song EP, essentially amplifies the extremes of her musical personality and pushes the tension almost to the breaking point.

There’s no laundry list of injustices or outrages to be found here: just an uber-compressed pop rune that muses on the sheer, disorienting helplessness that results from realizing that we’ll never be able to help everyone. Maybe, just maybe, stolid songcraft can be rescue enough.

The album’s first half sounds relatively strong. ... But No_One Ever Really Dies runs into a wall midway through, as old ideas rear their heads like those nobbly-headed creatures in Whac-a-Mole.

Despite some interesting accoutrements (tasteful trumpets yay, bombastic strings meh) and some game attempts at eclecticism (acoustic pluck wicked, piano ballad oh geez), Stars of CCTV is of a part with the varied guitar-driven stuff that their fellow Mercury nominees-- Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs, etc.,-- have offered folks this past year.

While its standout tracks are strong enough to ensure Phantogram maintains its current altitude, there are a lot of places to turn to for this sort of thing these days, and this album ultimately underwhelms next to the pure-pop punch of Haim, the cutting lyricism of Lorde, or the radiant grandeur of Chvrches.

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

Captures a portion of the wispy bedsit magic that used to mark some of The Field Mice's best work and boosts it with the lush, "Hazey Jane II"-like chamber-pop of Belle & Sebastian's first flourishes of glory.

On Around, Whirr don’t elevate themselves beyond the level of a listener; instead, they remain supplicant to their influences.

In its endless, flavorless drift, the album amounts to little more than a modern-day take on easy listening, with all the signifiers of lush, aesthetic experience and none of the stakes.

These songs are great showcases for the group’s range. Though they seem to have settled squarely in the neon haze of the dancefloor, they’re more truly in their wheelhouse in these mellower moments. Sequencing, though, is a problem. Too often, the record plummets from a sugary adrenaline high to a last-call ballad.

New York City is less a reflection of the sanitized, hyper-gentrified New York of today than a reaction against it—sneering from the paint-peeling dive bars, flipping off the real-estate vultures, and summoning the snottiest ghosts of the city’s punk past.

It’s the sound of Zach Bryan figuring out how to paint on a larger canvas, how to sound like the superstar he has become.

The album falters slightly when the music becomes more abstract and inscrutable, but on the whole it is not difficult to relate to Nagano or slip into the mood created by her bandmates.

It's a no-frills record that recedes into the background without much fuss, which works for and against the album's overall impact.

Lionheart is brought to life by McEntire’s soulful voice, by a sweeping Nashville sound, but more so by a deep sense of conviction.

Ultimately, Slime Language 2 is a label compilation and the usual caveats apply: it’s far too long, the back half is padded out with a few throwaways and hardly anyone is showing up with their best material. That said, Slime Language 2 succeeds as a survey of how pervasive Thug’s influence has become.

No song here is outright bad, and much of their best assets shine through the banalities, but Queendom feels like a signpost of Red Velvet’s former glory.

This music is demanding—of your patience, of your attention, of your tolerance for cacophony—but the reward is a fascinatingly confounding journey through the fragmented mirror world.

She and longtime producer King Ed are clearly drawn to shiny, uncynical pop, and out of the dozens of songs Latham recorded for Quarter Life Crisis, that’s largely what made the cut.

As much as Golden Teacher absorb the adventurous dub sounds of the past, their exuberance can’t quite make up for the fact that sometimes they still sound like students.

Mythologies sounds like the work of an artist stepping out of his comfort zone in search of personal creative fulfillment. It might be equally rewarding for the listener if only any of these pieces were as memorable as Daft Punk’s songs.

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

There’s no harm in taking inspiration from others. But here, it sounds like McRae and her writing team hopped on the left-of-center-pop bandwagon without building out something new and wholly Tate—and it’s hard to make leftovers taste as enticing as when they were first served hot and fresh.

With their boundaries and ambitions by now well established, on Tight Knit Cabic and company largely succeed in luring the listener hazily back in time and into Vetiver's comfort zone.

Between their respective spotlight turns, both musicians are on equal footing, challenging and surprising one another, and their listeners, with music that feels alive and wondrous.

Get Back still finds McBean trying to tap into something risky and surprising, even if the results are the sometimes-egregious misstep of a mid-40s rock musician obsessed with the letdown of aging.

Like Smashing Pumpkins did at their peak, Bully tease dimensionality out of their music by emphasizing the similarity, and then the space, between Bognanno’s voice and the guitars that squall around her.

Martsch continues the sub-greatness trend of his recent work, releasing another record that fails to carry the weight of the canonical two-fer that lies at the center of his career.

This is as close as Bowie has ever come to simply "pretty good" in his storied career.

The band has... streamlined their songwriting, whittling away the unconventional turns and multiple pre-choruses that made their earlier material more interesting, leaving emotionally aerodynamic compositions free of atonal snags or polyrhythmic left-turns.

Though the restless time changes and laser-show synth overtures betray prog-rock's ostentatious influence, the tightly constructed songs here (all but two of which stay under the five-minute mark) bristle with a passion and purpose that belongs only to the truly committed and composed.

While it might be oversimplifying matters to suggest that it splits the difference between the cute, poppy Royksopp and the darker, techno-friendly Royksopp, the most satisfying thing about Junior is how convincingly they've bridged that divide.

Although they've played and recorded together in the past, here they sound as though they're still finding out how to best combine their quirks.

Tumble Bee is a welcome addition to contemporary children's music, not only because it's sufficiently involving to appeal to adults, but also because it further demonstrates that songs for kids don't have to be cloying or sanitized.

On Tiden it's mostly pretty easy to pull apart tracks and figure out who did what, although there's never a feeling of two figures resting on their laurels.

Snow Bound is the Dunedin native’s most winning album since 1990’s Submarine Bells--brash, tensile, and enormously confident.

Rodriguez is an excellent songwriter when she’s on her game. ... It’s frustrating, really: a hugely talented songwriter and producer, thwarted by trends.

DJ-Kicks has long given reign to both dedicated DJs (Nina Kraviz, Seth Troxler) and artists who are better known as producers than disc jockeys (Nicolette, Erlend Øye), with frequently brilliant results. Vynehall’s mix sits firmly within the latter territory: more selector sensation than DJ spotlight, but still an impressive showcase of the producer’s ear.

To listen to any free improvised music is to hear another world, speaking its own spontaneous language. The Quickening comes from a place very nearby our own, now lost, but recoverable by listening.

[[Hafsol' is] ten minutes of bliss that should keep the faithful satisfied until the group reconvenes and produces something new, resuming the road to parts unknown instead of dusting off the path that leads back to where they came from.

Held in Splendor is a good example of a record that successfully executes the tropes of psych--it sounds like it could’ve been recorded in 1967 without directly ripping off any artist in particular--without every truly transcending them.

Sonic Youth were always a very social band—supporting fellow musicians, self-releasing records with fans in mind, and generally making people feel part of an informal club that the four members provided a soundtrack for. In that sense, In/Out/In is as Sonic Youth as it gets.

There are glimmers, in the various half-ideas that surface throughout No Ghost, of a vision that the band could have taken and run with. Klausener's lyrics can be appealingly morbid.

Incidentally, this is what the title Innundir Skinni translates to loosely in English-- "under the skin"-- an apt description for Arnalds' gentle, peculiar and powerful music itself.

It may not rival his classic albums—and it never deludes itself into thinking it does—but Got To Be Tough captures Hibbert as committed as always, still giving it all he’s got.

Cohen's towering presence and deft songwriting breathe life into the lite-jazz arrangements.

While better than some of their previous releases, One Time Bells still isn't a mind-blowing album.

Trouble covers a lot of ground musically, moving through decades and subgenres of pop and rock with each track. But those who listen closely will find a few consistent points of imagery that loosely connect the work: locks and keys, bodies of water, and the telephone.

Is Rob in a Mellow Mood occasionally predictable? Sure, but there's nothing promised here that isn't delivered on, no premise underachieved.

Goldstein's voice could use a little shaking up. Even in the first-person stories Goldstein feels like an observer, albeit one with a negative bias. Still, ARMS makes for an interesting contrast to Harlem Shakes' eternal optimism.

Effortlessly fun.

Coming on the heels of 2011's stellar Cervantine, Other World feels like it might've been stronger had Trost and Barnes held a few more things back.

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.

Egypt Station reveals itself to be another well-crafted collection of confections, reminiscent of nothing so much as McCartney’s oft-maligned 1986 release Press to Play, another burnished recording pitched between modern and retro, where Paul couldn’t resist indulging in shiny new sounds or dirty jokes.

The stumbles keep Heart on My Sleeve from being truly exceptional, but Mai’s sumptuous voice and attention to detail make it a beguiling delight.

Little Red is not the best album it could have been--a few of the bonus tracks should have made the album proper--but Katy displays a vision for her career that suggests an exciting future.

Maddeningly inconsistent.

When Wallumrød emerges from the long shadows of her source material, elevate Go Dig My Grave beyond the beautifully rendered, if rather pointless, collection of covers it sometimes threatens to be.

It’s music to be escaped into, whether on dance floors or alone somewhere, filled with a little less despair.

After two albums that struggled with the growing divide between the serious band they seemingly longed to be and the bubblegum punk band listeners want them to be, The Thermals strike the right balance on We Disappear, an album that manages to satisfy both camps.

Break Up the Concrete seems a bit uneven: The faster numbers begin to sound the same after a while, and the album hits a slight lull halfway through.

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.

Heavy Trash never get too heavy on Midnight Soul Serenade. It might be Spencer's lightest and breeziest album to date, a testimony to his stick-to-it-iveness despite the advancing years and changing trends.

Quasi are more turbulent in spirit, especially here on Mole City, a wayward, asymmetrical double album that sees them returning to the two-piece format after a period with Jicks bassist Joanna Bolme.

Where the group excels at assembling all the bones of a good pop song, One's lyrical content is broad even by those same standards.

Across six tracks that clock in at over an hour in total, Long Trax 2 tends to melt in and out of the background, making it an ambient album that almost makes you want to wiggle a little, or a house album content to exist as wallpaper.

A wonderfully poignant album that leaves you wanting more, The Four Worlds is proof that restraint can sing louder than excess.

Smith’s voice is assured and grounded: She reaches far less frequently for belting high notes and runs than she did on Lost & Found, instead sitting back comfortably.

A good deal more Lange and a good deal less Muns would have brought out the best in Scott Herren.

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.

He sounded breezy and at ease [on 2014's "Good Kisser"], finally confident enough to date women his age. So it’s a little disappointing that on Hard II Love, Usher’s eighth studio album, he hasn’t managed to hang onto that effortlessness. But there’s plenty to like, starting with his voice, which sounds better than ever.

Bleed Out deconstructs the tropes of action movies just as it lovingly recreates them, letting us have our cake and bludgeon our enemies to death with it too.

The album's one redeeming element is the band itself, who-- over the course of one EP and two albums-- have improved tenfold.

Unfortunately, all this talent behind the boards often feels like a waste because of Spektor's inability to let her songs stand on their own merits without the persistent interjection of vocal curlicues or verbal flights of fancy.

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.

Ultraviolence finds one feeling--a seedy, desperate, hyper-romanticized sense of isolation and loss--and blows it up to drive-in screen proportions, saturating the color riding the blue crest of sadness for the better part of an hour. Whether or not you want to take this particular ride will largely depend on how much stock you put in “authenticity,” your tolerance for Del Rey’s vocal tics, and your reflexive response to her lyrics.