Tillman varies things up on Fear Fun, reveals an adventurous palette, and makes what may be his best album to date.

Prophet's widescreen music is wonderful to listen to; it's just hard to really feel.

"Bloom" is also what these 10 songs do, each one starting with the sizzle of a lit fuse and at some fine moment exploding like a firework in slow motion.

Urban Turban feels especially emblematic of a band that's fully liberated itself from any commercial or audience expectations and shifted its experimental ethos into overdrive.

Hoyas, sounds like a soundtrack for an ice-slicked, insomniac winter drive. Blending mumbled folk and bleary-eyed blips, lead-off track "Two Angles" sounds like the Postal Service might have if Jimmy Tamborello's tapes had gotten lost in the mail and accidentally ended up on Phil Elverum's doorstep.

Essentially perfect... It remains a landmark that hasn't aged a day.

Presley finds melodic inspiration in classic rock, but blurs his reference points toward punk by coating the music in lo-fi grit. His third proper album, Family Perfume, doubles down on those zonked out inclinations.

It's an impeccably polished and careful record. But like a shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck, sophistication can wear a guy out.

While OFF! may not have the shock of the new (or, at least, the revitalized) on its side, it still gets in, gets angry, and gets moving in a skull-crackingly satisfying fashion.

Spontaneity is woven into the fiber of every track; it's easy to hear how some of them may have begun with the same sounds and patterns before the musicians' hands worked their magic on the filters, EQ, and delay, rendering each take unique and unrepeatable.

His new EP, Meantime, is an unabashedly beautiful, even sensuous 17 minutes of music.

Oh Holy Molar, Felix's second album, recalls the starkness and exaggerated intimacy of records by Cat Power and Scout Niblett, but Chua is a far more reserved and poised individual... [Yet some songs] reveal the limits of Chua's voice and aesthetic.

[Galaxy Garden is] a wonder, his most complete statement yet, both a refinement and an expansion of the genre-of-one he's been perfecting over the last few years.

The Narrow Garden features some of the most sunny and flowering music that Kang has created, seamlessly joined with a couple of sinister threnodies.

All the more for you to swim around in. And those peaks certainly take you higher when the builds have been teased out to the limit.

Death Dreams might be equally strong [as predecessor, Muster Station], but its inability to step things up can come off like a retreat in light of how much tuneful, wooly garage rock has come out since.

[With Memory] they've developed the approach of making high-energy tracks with subdued and subtle components-- beats that move with grace instead of brute force.

If not always up to their previous heights, Mohn highlights why these guys are still the masters, while so many of Kompakt's new-school driftologists are still students at best.

The Dr Dee soundtrack is a deeply felt but difficult to love entry into Albarn's entirely singular discography.

If guitar-based music is still your source of shameless pop, you'll probably enjoy In the Belly more than most records that actually aspire for art.

What makes this, if not the most fully realized, then the most rewarding entry in RVNG's already ambitious FRKWYS series is that it doesn't sound like noise dudes just trying to make the simulacra of a dub reggae album.

Whilst there's no getting past some of the duller and more unbearable material on this record ... if she'd made a record full of songs as unaffected as these four ["Lies," "Starring Role," "Power & Control," "Living Dead"], Electra Heart could be one of the year's most acclaimed pop albums.

A cautionary tale of what happens when a "hit record" forgets to actually include hits.

[The songs] are peculiarly absorbing, and they only grow more so with repeated listening.

Modern Jester is Dilloway's War and Peace. It covers practically all of his sonic obsessions, stretching them to lengths at which he can explore every detail and tangent. The result-- seven pieces encompassing four sides of vinyl-- feels like a major statement, even if it's made of wordless, sometimes harsh noise.

The record feels wholly substantial and satisfying in its own right, and even those with no prior knowledge of YT//ST's history and elaborate intentions can just enjoy it for what it is: volcanic prog-rock colored with equal parts post-punk urgency, stoner-metal heft, and psychedelic pop whimsy.

Newcombe is a master at turning the minimal into maximal, layering myriad swirling textures into a dizzying head-rush of a tune (see: "Seven Kinds of Wonderful"), but crafty production only takes him so far.

World, You Need a Change of Mind certainly isn't a bad album, and the technical execution is first-rate. Its failure is ultimately one of ambition. This is music to be enjoyed while doing something else, not something you fall in love with.

Exercises is chilly, spacious, and oddly out of time.

Part of what makes listening to Light Asylum so frustrating is a nagging want to see her talent mobilized to the fullest, to roll up your sleeves and try to make a Light Asylum in your own image.

What Schaff's everyloner routine lacks in subtlety, it makes up in a certain fraught, occasionally uncomfortable relatability.

A polished assortment of tidily global-sounding, mid-tempo pop tunes that seem to end before they ever kick off, strung together by a checklist of semi-impassioned capital-K Keywords: Youth, Machine, Riot, Fame, Freak, Pirate, Keepers.

There's a natural path forged between all the shifts, a sense that the abstraction feeds off the structure and vice versa. As such, Black Is Beautiful nears something that could readily be branded as Blunt and Copeland's aesthetic.

As a once-in-a-half-decade demonstration of Talbot's vital signs, The Ghost isn't necessarily compelling enough to make you want to hang around for a follow-up, but the vitriol of a line like, "If you let them burn books, you'll let them burn bodies," is a strong sign of life at least.

This is one of those albums that creates its own little sound world, and a lot of its appeal has to do with qualities like texture and atmosphere.

Pluto is Future's album and no one else's, and though it will sound instantly recognizable, his personality, voice, and skewed take on pop-rap make it instantly different. No Stargate beats necessary.

By presenting a more rounded portrait of Guthrie in which politics is only one subject among so many, The Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions shows just what Guthrie was fighting for and provides a persuasive rebuke to anyone who might whittle the man down to just one dimension.

It might not be perfect, but "chamber techno" probably shouldn't work as well as it does on the best moments here.

Horse Feathers are quick to set a mood and diligent in sustaining it, but it's pretty much the same mood they've struck on all their albums.

The production on The Block Brochure series roams a little wider and farther than the Revenue Retrievin series did, which helps when approaching such a seemingly undigestible block of music.

The production on The Block Brochure series roams a little wider and farther than the Revenue Retrievin series did, which helps when approaching such a seemingly undigestible block of music.

The production on The Block Brochure series roams a little wider and farther than the Revenue Retrievin series did, which helps when approaching such a seemingly undigestible block of music.

The innovation on R.I.P. is to put as much effort into making things clean as making them dirty, and the result is a sense of contrast: Fog gives way to clarity; fat, puffy synthesizer sounds play off pinprick-sharp ones. Like all good contrasts, it's simple and eureka-like.

The richly produced, melodically generous Candy Salad is plenty to chew on, but one can't help wishing its songs could be as vibrant as its sounds.

Throughout, the much-improved vocalist Neil McAdams leads plenty of shout-along choruses.

If any Screaming Females record has suggested they may someday become a group worthy of cataloging in a book like Azerrad's, Ugly is it, igniting a classic punk sound with a friction that falls somewhere between SST and PJ Harvey's Rid of Me.

It's not just a collection of hits; it's an album, one that gives the project's familiar nocturnal foreboding a new sense of grandeur.

There's no getting around the fact that June 2009 acquires most of its value, if not all of it, in context with Causers of This and Underneath the Pine.

The machines on 120 Days II are so holographically vivid that the human element can't help but seem wan.

Death Grips appeals to the knuckle-dragging troglodyte and the smirking smart kid in us: thick-headed goonery and bookish, viscera-free nerdiness, making beautifully misanthropic music together.

For an EP as flat and, well, just plain stuck as Our Love Is Hurting Us sounds, playing catch-up would've been preferable to taking a promising but not wholly memorable debut and simply offering it up a second time

On Rock and Roll Night Club, he gets weirder and churns out an unsettling brand of soft rock.

Let the People Speak feels utterly passionless and perfunctory.

Largely devoid of lyrical texture and detail, the universe conjured by World often feels bland to a fault.

There's enough of a sweet spot in the clean, backward-leaning production and offbeat samples to allow the record to distinguish itself as more than a sum of disparate parts.

Meluch and Irisarri have crafted a genuine, coherent album that conjures immense shadows and immense depths worthy of its namesake.

Harmonicraft is not without its moments; its just that, sometimes, spans of monotony and predictably make remembering or caring for those moments more work than they're worth.

The Shadow Gallery hits so strong and so true, staying this particular course for a little while longer shouldn't bother anyone.

In theory, Diamond Rugs should prove extremely comforting, a celebration of rawk and male friendship in the face of vaguely rendered but all-consuming sexual denial. And yet, there's no catharsis or viscera.

Da Mind of Traxman is notable in part because it's an album more concerned with footwork's past than its future.

At the outset, This Machine seems like an apt title for a record that surges forth with a wiry, motorik momentum; by the end, it becomes an all-too-fitting descriptor of a band going through the motions.

Backed by locals like Highlife's Doug Shaw and the band Skeletons, An Letah follows 2010's Bubu King EP with a whiplash 14 minutes of electrified bubu that presage what will no doubt be a watermark year for Nabay.

It's got some of his best pure songwriting yet, but no earth-cracking riffs. Still, as a treatise on loss and its schizophrenic aftermath, Blunderbuss is a purposeful success.

It's easy to get the sense that the intent is to let the jangling shoegaze wash over you, and if some of the lyrics stick, that's fine. But that's the thing-- they rarely do, and neither do several of the songs.

The fact of the matter is that Lineage isn't the first record to sound like Lineage.

by focusing on the range of music inspired by this movement, Listen, Whitey! allows so much of the confusion, outrage, anger, emotion, humor, and even optimism of this music to resonate anew.

Their 2010 self-titled debut [was] all hummable melodies, clap-along rhythms, and poignantly turned phrases. Europe maintains these qualities and improves upon its predecessor in almost every way.

The individual entries on Grinderman 2 are all over the map quality-wise, from inert and utterly ignorable... to half-brilliant reframings of pretty singular material.

When Wainwright falters, it's for familiar reasons, usually some combination of overindulging and oversharing.

Like any poseur worth her salt, she can make a superficial costume seem compelling without drawing too much attention to the fact that the person inside of it may not have a whole lot to say.

It's a record so enjoyable and expertly sequenced that it demands repeat listens before it's even over.

It's a thrilling look inside his brain, a microcosmic version of this peep under the hood that Battles have allowed with Dross Glop, showing off the constituent parts that now make their machine a smooth, assured, and always giddily exciting ride.

Illusion is a slight effort by any standard, even the most fair: the bar set by the prior work of the band members themselves.

Whether or not they've produced anything that justifies the time away they could have spent producing something better, more consequential, by themselves? Well, the jury's still out there.

Imikuzushi feels like the work of artists looking down from a mountain rather than laboring to climb it.

There's a purposeful simplicity to its narrative approach and a concreteness to its imagery--even when our narrator sounds less than engaged.

This is probably the most uplifting album of his career... Exhilarating.

It's probably his most immersive single release--or album, or mixtape, or emanation, or whatever--in a year and a half, better than both Based God Velli and I'm Gay.

It displays the boundlessness of her vocal talent but finds her tethered to a frustratingly limited aesthetic.

On the evidence of Mr. Impossible, they still sound like no one else and they're still thinking hard about music and texture. When you're craving something trashy and tripped-out in this very particular way, they still deliver the properly damaged goods.

From the first shudder of the keyboard and crack of drums to that last, celebratory walk through the village of the virgins, Iyer, Crump and Gilmore keep things spellbinding.

Compared to the wool-sweater warmth of those early recordings ["Crocodile Rock", "Babies"] Oberhofer's sad-sack persona and yelping vocal ad libs come off here as less endearing and more desperate, like someone trying to oversell simple songs with eccentric affectation.

Quakers is kind of a mess, and odds are that a not-insignificant number of people are going to find the beats more consistently entertaining than the verses... But ambitious messes are the best kind, and riding out the less-interesting moments is worth it in the long run.

New Build's arrangements are impressive and uncomplicated throughout.

The band's debut was kind of a crumpled, nicotine-smudged affair, but Atlanta feels brighter, less muddled, not polished but certainly tidier around the edges. Smith's voice remains a friendly, mid-range yawp-- emotionally precise if not always entirely on-key.

Voices From the Lake is a triumph of care and exactitude, the kind of well-executed work of art that feels effortless despite its obvious complexity.

Listening to M. Ward is nowadays perhaps more deeply pleasurable than it ever has been, with glistening strings and big slabs of piano occupying more and more of the terrain once almost entirely populated by his nimble fingered guitar, trashcan percussion, and creaky room noises.

Even more so than their promising debut, Staring at the X proves them to be a commendably ambitious band with the chops to carry out even their most far-flung ideas.

A solid debut.

They've found a way to be ambitious while also elemental, a difficult trick that Sleep pulled off on Holy Mountain and Dopesmoker, and one that High on Fire have nailed here.

It is an album of well-portioned, difficult grooves that owe as much to craftsmanship as they do to scholarship, the sound of a chronic disciple slowing learning to make his influences work for him.

On all of these songs, Nicki is dartboard focused-- she's rapping harder here than on almost anything from Pink Friday... But much of Roman Reloaded sweats with a too-big-to-fail desperation.

The main issue with Songs is that, for an album of "songs," there are too few pop cuts to work well as a whole. It's more of a pick-and-choose affair where the modern ability to fast-forward to your favorite musical moments, down to the second, is crucial.

Despite its overall hazy, sun-lit-kaleidoscope feel, it's just too sonically scattershot to truly take in and enjoy as a body of work.

On good nights, the band conjures a singularly eerie vibe. But on Better Luck Next Life, it's not always coming through.

You're left wishing the album drew a little more blood.

Phédre is the sound of a band trying to do too many things at once in too short of a time.

I Love You, It's Cool is admirable in large part because its ambitions are every bit as subtle and difficult to quantify as its pleasures-- you don't have to call it "adult indie," but it feels like conflicted indie rock for adults.