Much like footwork, you get the impression his music evolved to cater to the demands of athletic dancing bodies. Consequently, it makes a certain sense that attempts here to temper Shangaan Electro’s frenetic pace don’t always come off.

The uneven second half of Love’s Last Chance fails to match the charms of the first. But by trimming the guest list and writing lyrics inspired by personal experience, McFerrin has found a clearer sense of purpose.

The other half of The False Alarms, while not a complete wash, finds the band sounding lost.

Hurricane Bar has diluted the two things that made Mando Diao's first album distinct: immediacy and a sense of fun.

Although The Information contains some of his most aware, intriguing lyrical head-scratchers yet, the familiar musical settings are something of a letdown from an artist famous for complete reinvention.

The occasional sense of compositional confusion makes sense: even if it doesn't always result in a thrilling listen, Seek Warmer Climes captures a promising band in transition.

In My Feelings often feels as if its about to collapse under its own weight, which is doubly frustrating when you consider it clocks in at a slight 34 minutes.

It's generally a meditative set, and only on the album's final track, "Exit the Acropolis", does Dozzy return to the sound with which he's most closely affiliated: Tapping out clicks like 808 hi-hats, and weaving three or four layers of mouth harp into enveloping contrapuntal pulses, it's the perfect approximation of Berghain-styled techno.

The high points of the album are the tracks that feature Todd by herself either on guitar or piano, filling the song with the trembling strength of her singing.

Finn sounds best when Dizzy Heights is at its dizziest, when he has to completely rethink how his voice fits a song. On the other hand, he sounds slightly less engaged on the more straightforward tunes, which perhaps don’t offer the same heady challenges.

The Cliff's Notes of classic rock.

There’s no question he can put a good tune together; what’s less clear is whether he can interpret those tunes as well as he writes them, and breathe a little flesh-and-blood human messiness into them in the process.

For the most part, Fortuna projects a confidence and self-belief that wasn’t all that perceptible on the rough-hewn Antipodes.

As violent, plaintive, and ultimately conflicted as anything she's already written ("I know how to kill but I hate how it feels."), many of Powell's lyrical sketches are of the blood red, open-heart-surgery variety, a word set her producer knows well.

These are novel variations on the familiar Clinic sound. Some, like the queasy synth refrain in “Rubber Bullets,” work less well than others. And some of the melodies seem rather thin, considering the band had six years to generate them (looking at you, “Mirage” and “Rejoice!”). That’s an ancient weakness of the group, and Wheeltappers and Shunters is nothing if not steeped in the past.

As good as "Cable TV" and "Winter, That's All" sound, John Shade's main weakness was supposed to be its strength-- during the points where the tempo dies down and the songwriting hues closer to traditional forms, there's not enough personality or character in the vocals to compensate, leading to stretches of indie promo-pile filler.

Fortunately, Body Complex never gets bogged down by ambient music's wallpaper associations. This isn't music for living rooms; it's music for living in.

This tune-up album, at the very least, restores the underlying feeling of his signature stuff. But there, too, lies its flaw: it’s a hollow effort lacking in any real distinguishing characteristics. The album never becomes more than the sum of its sounds.

The disc feels more like an Insomniac Records sampler featuring Viktor Vaughn than a proper Vaughn release.

Compared to the darkly mesmerizing dread of records past, here Lopatin practically kicks off his shoes and settles in for a comfy night on the couch, flipping channels through one distorted display after another. Without a clear framework tying it all together, Lopatin’s logic itself becomes the album’s defining quality.

Every element on Springtime-- the relaxed tempos, fluid arrangements, dark moods, unobtrusive instrumentation-- is deployed in service to Holland's decidedly eccentric voice.

Forever requires sieving through plates of glinting sediment before discovering treasure. The album is best when luxuriating in its own divine intensity, when an earnest Popcaan reconciles the hunger of his past with the feasting of his present, hands clasped in grace.

The frequent spoken-word interludes would feel less performative at a live show, but often take you out of the moment on the record. It seems RAYE is unwilling to leave anything on the cutting room floor, even if dialing back the razzle-dazzle could forge closer connection to the music. But the peaks often justify the adventure.

Even if Burning Daylight occasionally slips into shtick, Cowgill is still a good songwriter who can evoke a dark mood and the big, warm, beating heart underneath it.

Unfortunately, as with music that draws from familiar musical influences, White Whale occasionally lapse into more predictable territory.

It's a little disappointing that none of the band's stylistic shifts have let them bloom into much more, but as furrows for ploughing go, this one's still pretty fascinating, and still all theirs.

Deja Entendu, while a football field short of groundbreaking, has an air of substance and maturity.

Beak> is as full of odd, compulsive energy as you'd expect from something cranked out in two weeks, made by a guy who probably had creative fuel to burn, considering that his day job took 11 years between their second and third albums.

A Hundred Days Off is enjoyably uninspired; it defines both "pleasant" and "unremarkable".

The problem with Asleep at Heaven's Gate is that the second half isn't nearly as strong as the first.

If you're willing to make the time, though, Blurry Blue Mountain will repay your attention.

In its winning attempt to paralyze you, Sway may have paralyzed itself.

Hope and intimacy can be relayed through lo-fi production that flirts with the grittiness of field recordings. Though in rare moments on Nevaeh, that style approaches detachment rather than transportation, as on the meandering, minimalist ballad “bbygurl.”

Post-rock's forte is letting instruments speak for vocals. Russian Circles speak articulately, but could stand to roar a bit.

They may have no trouble getting creative musically, but their lyrical content isn’t quite as inventive.

At 45 minutes it's shorter than Penance Soiree, but lacks its concision and punch, at times wading a little too deeply into the indulgent waters of burdened, discordant blooze.

Add it all up, and you get one of Tejada's most varied records to date.

Like many other major pop albums of the 2020s, it would have benefited from a careful edit and a more varied track order.

It’s clear that Lava La Rue’s ambition as an artist burns brightly. Right now, its light and heat is overflowing, a little messy and uncontained; but the stardust is unmistakable.

Marjorie Fair's shiny Beach Boys-meets-Pernice Brothers act suffers primarily from well-intentioned overproduction.

If anything, the four songs leave you wanting more from this collaboration, offering up brief, blurry glimpses of their Texas landscape rather than the expansive vistas that they might arrive at should they ride together a little longer.

GusGus's seventh album isn't quite a hangover, and there's still a party going on--but the party is somewhere far away.

Love and Its Opposite plays more like a conventional singer-songwriter album. The shift in gears isn't unwelcome: Thorn, as always, exercises that smoky voice to great effect.

It's tempting to write Stephens off as self-obsessed (which, in all fairness, places him in a long line of beloved singer-songwriters, from Bob Dylan on), but nonetheless, there are some compelling melodies here and more than enough commitment.

In the Rainbow Rain isn’t always this thematically dense, though, and its more laid-back songs help loosen the philosophical knots that tracks like “Human Being Song” tie.

A baseline of reliability can double as a cap on transcendent potential, and it’s those cap-rattling moments that make what’s otherwise simply another fine album from this duo worthwhile.

Just as Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay" was perfect for the suicide-attempt scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, any song on this album would complement a still-photo montage of a prolonged labor ending in a miscarriage.

Cash's renditions are often breathtaking in their simplicity, but rarely do they justify their presence among a dozen other similarly afflicted songs.

The Remainderer is an encouraging sign that stability has yet to ossify into stagnation with this ongoing iteration of the band, who formidably exercise their elasticity over the course of these six wildly divergent tracks.

He is fully equipped to construct bold new sonic edifices, but on New Pleasures, Georgopoulos too often settles for the skyscrapers we already know; shiny, but ordinary.

For decades, this kind of shambolic aesthetic has signified immediacy over virtuosity, heart over chops. But it’s hard not to be distracted by the moments when the lyrics fall flat or the singing goes awry. Their chord progressions are smart and the production is appealing, but neither is enough to carry the record on its own.

It’s not so much that no one else could make this ridiculous album, more that no one but the Orb would even think of it. Abolition of the Royal Familia is a testament to their sadly singular talent.

The Staves manage to overcome Congleton's production and mixing tics because their voices can cut through anything. ... It’s heartening to hear them turn their attention inward; maybe next time, they’ll trust that sound to do its work without the input—or intrusions—from a collaborator.

It's a pretty, well-thought out collection--but for all the ideas and layers, Heritage feels somewhat empty.

While these [linking tracks] suggest Schneider's appreciation for the short-form work of electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, they stop well short of giving Wonder the thematic consistency it seeks (and needs).

Is This the Life’s myriad sonic references to his work with Pink Floyd suggest that Waters is comfortable with his past. The more you accept how much his past reflects in his present, the more receptive you’ll be to this album’s charms.

End Times Undone neither elbows past nor dwells too much on Kilgour’s considerable legacy. It’s a frozen moment in a continuum, and it shines with suitable magic.

Spotty, strange, all short songs and shitty sound, it's got the collagist careen of Bee Thousand and Propeller and the tumbling tunecraft of Alien Lanes and Under the Bushes Under the Stars.

Ultimately, Terrestrials works as a likable listen, a liminal play concerning the push and pull between dusk and dawn. But it serves as a mere footnote or, at beast, an appealing redundancy for Sunn O))) and Ulver.

The album’s sound is sleek and full of grand, sweeping climaxes that occasionally oversell the songwriting. But if Unfollow the Rules is sometimes in want of a unifying idea or theme, Wainwright’s dreamy voice provides a throughline.

Versatility, it turns out, may not be Clams’ strong suit, though that’s hardly a problem; as the first half of 32 Levels demonstrates, there’s still plenty of room left for Clams Casino to grow into his own sound.

As If leans a little too heavily on the groove in the middle, with moments like "Funk (I Got This)" fading into the background, but it's reinvigorated towards the end by the riveting "Lucy Mongoosey", which uses another singalong chorus as an anchor, an introspective pause among all the dancing.

Plush's vision was obviously reaching beyond his abilities when making this album, and though that's commendable--better to try and fail than not try at all--sometimes you acheive less on the road to greatness.

Where Vu’s previous releases were vivid and tactile, Public Storage numbs out. But the music is potent.

On Building Something Beautiful, she appears more interested in weightless washes of tone, often drifting and beat-free, which is a curious approach for Eastman‘s work, particularly because it fails to illuminate much about what James found in it.

Vollebekk laces his capacious, meandering music with a ’60s folk-jazz sensibility. As with Twin Solitude, he recorded New Ways directly to tape, allowing each song’s mood to dictate its direction.

This is a record where inspired ideas are constantly battling for oxygen with dubious ones.

Though Wallen’s idea was to split the album according to theme, things aren’t quite as delineated as that. Even at his most boisterous, Wallen is given to introspection, and he can make the straightest love song gnarly.

Jessie Jones is a well-rounded introduction, one that holds little back.

Every Now & Then is often vivid and enjoyable, but after a few listens, you may find yourself switching back to one of the band’s predecessors. The former is a fun ride, but Screamadelica could still blow your mind.

Beautiful Despair is a rough sketch, and its worth extends only as far as one’s interest in such a document.

Neither stale tribute nor sloppy lovefest, Headspace aims for simple fun and hits it square, like a T-16 targeting womp rats back on Tatooine.

Lanois and Funk demonstrate that even the briefest pause can reveal a more becalmed state of being lying just beneath all the noise and bustle.

The result is a lot like Elvis Costello's periodic returns to rock territory: snappy genre exercises from a reliable songwriter, but not much more.

Breakers effectively conjures a space unto itself, but it's one that lacks an easy entry point.

Times is a pristine album of frictionless bangers, but these songs are so controlled that they never come close to catharsis.

At its best, Astrological Straits is a mashup of Liars tribalism, Boredoms bombast, Smell-scene art-punk, Lightning Bolt repeti-grooves, and Frank Zappa prog-overload. All this sonic hyperactivity can be exhausting, and Hill's fondness for effects, especially in his Vocoder-ish vocals, makes some tracks robotic, more like exercises than songs.

Bright Ideas is more pleasant than kick-ass or inspired. But for an album this deep into his career, at a time when he could start growing aesthetically antsy, McCaughan sticks to a blueprint that works best.

For all the rhythmic chicanery at play, AMOK feels strangely static and contained, giving a perpetual sense of jogging in place.

RAA don't have the element of surprise like they did on the originally self-released Hometowns, and it doesn't slowly ingratiate the way Departing did, but Mended With Gold proves Edenloff's songs of lost love can sneak up on you even when the music hits you square on the chin.

There is enjoyable music here, and I've no doubt that the Bibio project has plenty of life on it.

With Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, she invites an array of collaborators to help craft pensive songs that grow out of moments past. While her instrument’s luminous tone remains the music’s defining characteristic, she embraces a darker mood than before.

And Then You Pray for Me is not an extension of its predecessor but an explosion: a broad, loud, and messy exploration of Gunn’s vision for rap and art.

While Pale Young Gentlemen is frontloaded and slightly naïve like a record of this sort should be, there's more than enough reason to anticipate what they're capable of when they decide to get darker, older, and less gentle.

Teenager is gloomy without feeling fatalistic; melodic without feeling facile. For the Thrills, a quick locale change has managed to yield impressive results.

Despite its flaws, though, The Lost Tapes is nice. Not a return to form, per se, but possibly as close as we're likely to get.

Campaign outpaces his recent efforts like $ign Language and Airplane Mode but, still, mostly just preserve Ty’s musical bottom line.

Though they could still stand to pull back on the vocal fanfares, brushing away some of the gunk that mottled up their earlier records and doubling down on melody each open up new avenues in their sound, and Still Living finds Ganglians delivering on their early promise while stepping confidently toward whatever's next.

It's not terrible, just uninspired, and only goes to show that the disco romance formula is both harder to pull off and more singular than you'd think.

Here, as on Mutations, he confuses lyrical simplicity and standard-tuning, key-of-C songwriting with the unpretentious directness of his idols.

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.

Time is a delightfully shambling debut that succeeds in spite of obvious trappings.

Security Screenings is a marked improvement over last year's directionless Surrounded by Silence.

Some of Fair’s bug-eyed mantras feel even more impactful when the music can swell in tandem, but there’s also the threat of just sounding like a very good rock band than like the joyful mess that they can be.

As disjointed as that sounds on paper, The Long Shadow is the band's most focused and cohesive work. That's partly because it maintains a consistent mood, and partly because it maintains a danceable, frenetic pulse.

True shows that Elbrecht and his band are more than capable of recreating moments from the past in a way that is reverent and still provides pleasure to those who grew up listening to those past sounds and relative newbies alike. But I'm not so sure that they're good at doing much more than that.

Cabello has the juice to be her own artist and is more than capable as a writer, but the risks she takes are inherently safe when they’ve all been taken before.