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.

Maximo Park so often sound on The National Health like they're trying too hard, struggling to find a sound that once came naturally.

Doused in interminable glimmering drones and wimpers, spending 45 minutes in its company feels like being smothered inside a snowglobe.

Drawbar Organ / Quiet Hour takes that fascination [with dub] and grinds it in the back molars, spitting out something lumpy, infirm, and wonderfully transformed.

Digital Native is harmless analog tapestry, but it wilts under too much attention, unable to conjure the vivid scenes to which it was undoubtedly conceived.

Like that high-pitched whistle that SonicScreens play outside corner shops, there'll come a time when what DZ Deathrays are doing no longer resonates with you. But for now, it's more than worth going deaf to.

Where the experimentation often succeeds, the editing fails.

Falling Off the Sky misses the opportunity to explore that fear of obsolescence too deeply.

As a solo artist, Tomas Barfod's a few steps away from achieving sweet and total bliss, but Salton Sea is plenty evidence that every step taken in the future will be worth documenting.

More than just a forgettable pit stop in two wildly careening careers, The Cherry Thing captures some kind of fleeting magic.

All Hell is a subtly clever record that pits one type of music that strongly evokes one era--here, country music--against another, namely this decade's sample-heavy culture.

This is a merely pleasant album, and especially after 11 long years, pleasant is a low hurdle for such an inimitable singer.

His new band might not question him very much, and they may play better or more professionally, than his old crew. But Oceania suffers a kind of rock-star-dictator airlessness.

Lucifer is just their third album, and yet it's unmistakably drenched in their specific brand of patience and calm.

"Left Alone" is nothing short of a vocal masterclass. It has the singer going from the verses' rap-like cadence to the hook's curlicue jazz stylings to the operatic long notes of the bridge-- notes that slowly curdle underneath their own exasperated weariness.

The pity of The Lost Tapes' overambition is that it could easily be condensed to a single, first-rate album of genuinely new-to-record material.

This sh*t is intended to be the soundtrack to fun, and listening to the individual tracks is indeed a lot of fun. Color bursts from the edges of every track, and most carry no interest in subtlety or dynamic range. The production pops like a seismic charge.

It's just satisfying to see a band trim the fat and wind up even bigger.

I'm hard-pressed to find a song that's more interesting at its three-minute mark than it is after 10 seconds: 2:54 exposes a band that knows how to make a good first impression but not a lasting one.

The productions shine, mixing taut electro rhythms with those swirling strings. There's a sense of scale to the album that is really attractive.

These 12 songs feel like whimsical larks, and Jackson's considerable charm should be able to put them over just fine in a live setting. But the record can also be too whimsical for its own good, and for most listeners, Jackson's Belle and Sebastian songs will be enough.

While Womack does his best to step up to his alien surroundings, he can't help but sound like an out-of-place guest on his own album.

There's a lack of thought and care, a feeling that this band is still figuring out what it wants to be while not treading on too many toes in the process.

The three slick, glitchy tracks on You Know You Like It also pull from the left-field sounds associated with the LA label Brainfeeder and the Knife's creepily synthetic vibe, but a large part of their appeal comes from their glistening pop sensibility.

Bint's mostly relaxed and easy approach teases out enough pleasant moments on Into the Trees but rarely offers a resolution.

It offers no new narrative or stated focus and thus represents nothing more than the second gleaning of tracks from the cloistered minimal wave universe. Still, there's something undeniable here.

SGP's ability to create a quarantined universe explains why Mysterious is often absorbing rather than oppressive.

The fans who'll get the most from it emotionally will be those who are already invested in its singer and his honesty.

Freak Puke represents a band that's always in motion doing what it's always done: trying a crazy idea, releasing and reveling in the results and, before long, likely moving along to the next instantaneous notion. That's the spirit that's always made the Melvins great, just as it does on Freak Puke, if only in bits and pieces.

It's a pretty and intimately rendered collection of folk songs, but those moments of jarringly direct, piercing emotion are few.

Synthetica is something of a polemic, but Haines' moments of ambivalence are what make the record compelling.

The result is idiosyncratic pop-rock appealing to geeky outsiders and scene lifers that's perennially in short supply, largely by design.

That they don't treat ambient as empty-headed fluff for relaxation is laudable, but it also doesn't make Ursprung any less of a record for a self-selecting coterie of sound-art aficionados.

Under the cloak of Triple F's blatant crossover appeals, he slyly exceeds expectations by making a record better than it really needs to be.

The songwriting is as strong and intricate than on 2006's classic The Warning, even if it takes a few listens for the finer points to sink in.

There's a cocky strut to tracks like "Don't Hustle for Love" and "White Cloud" that suggest this is a band striving to make a connection with a far wider audience. On Dub Egg they fall just short of those ambitions, creating a transitory album that builds on what came before but doesn't feel like the finished product.

For all the good-natured vibes this record gives off, it's hard to ignore that Do Things is also a limited collection. It's easy to suspect Dent May's ambitions are as simple as to craft a record that finds itself endlessly stuffed into car stereos this summer.

Some of Banks' best lines are elegantly self-aggrandizing and enemy-deflating, but she's just as capable of executing those moves in more straightforward terms.

There's a gritty, lucid vein [in the album's songs] running just below the top layer of haze, the words' bite stinging all the more for their burial under all those dank guitar tones and harmonies as dark and delicate as black lace.