An unhurried, casual nature is part of what makes Get There’s softer material pretty, but it could also be the thing holding Minor Alps back from writing truly great, uptempo rock songs.

A record whose middling between arena aspirations and headphones listening feels less of a fusion and more of a compromise.

Dereconstructed can be fiercely intelligent, but more often it is frustratingly blinkered; his lyrics can be defiantly blunt, but they’re often elbowed out by music that is dumbly bombastic.

On Singer’s Grave, Oldham tweaks the lyrics and song titles here and there to fit these new, peppier arrangements, but he doesn’t appear to be making any grand artistic statement in these re-dos other than making it clear, again, that he can reinvent himself and his songs in any way he so chooses.

With this album, they stake their claim to a musical inheritance left behind by predecessors who flouted boundaries and bastardized conventional notions of heaviness. Fittingly, they make the best of that inheritance by striking out on their own.

On Jettison, Tanton quietly sits down, picks up his guitar, and, without fuss or self-importance, transforms himself into a singer-songwriter. Surely that is a statement worth making.

Weaves is most compelling when it’s thrashing right along with Burke, giving into the urgent hunger for connection. It grates when the band is more intent on pleasing itself with quirk for quirk’s sake.

As Durk grapples with leaving his old life behind to create a better life for his sons, he creates his most gratifying and moving work yet. Lil Dirk 2X seeks rehabilitation but finds evolution.

One can imagine the project’s subject would have ultimately preferred the more understated tracks, concerted in their muted menace--focused on the task of creating a cinematic impression of the unknowable.

It makes you feel like you are in on a longstanding inside joke with an old friend. Even if the joke is super dumb and at times problematic, it is strangely comforting to know that the guy responsible hasn’t changed one iota.

Strength of a Woman finds its power in going back to basics. As a whole experience, it luxuriates within the magisterial hip-hop-soul queendom she formulated in the ’90s and the attendant themes that trace back to wronged-woman blues.

Morning After challenges listeners to assemble their own puzzle, pull fragments from it, and draw their own conclusions. Trust, aloneness, insecurity, hundreds of nights worth of feelings: dvsn puts them all in the air for you to grab at any moment.

Nothing on the EP would sound out of place amid the dreamy desert blues of the band’s 28-year-old debut album, She Hangs Brightly.

All the Things may only mark the first step in the Milk Carton Kids’ transformation--but, in eliminating so many of the constraints they once placed on their music, they have already crafted the richest, most accessible songs of their career.

It’s when Fujita moves unaccompanied that he ascends to a more contemplative and numinous realm.

The Anteroom is full of skittery electronics with hints of ambient and house textures that work as both as a marker for how outside of the margins Krell operates and how narrowly he deviates from his own previous innovations in the underground.

Molina's songwriting here is much stronger than on last year's Axxess and Ace, but he's abandoned some of the guests who helped make the album so affecting when he opted to record in Scotland, rather than the U.S. ... making The Lioness a decidedly more resigned and less passionate affair.

Their sound may be familiar by now, and their days as the poster children of L.A. DIY are more than a decade in the rearview. But at their most fearless, No Age can still make discord feel sound utopian.

Let the Festivities Begin! is music to dance to, to roll a joint to, to solve a decades-old mystery to, but it isn’t a masterwork that unfolds with multiple listens. It’s exactly what it promises, and that’s a party.

If it doesn’t achieve the long-promised outcome of “filler-free” Foals, Life Is Yours unexpectedly thrives when it reintegrates the studio trickery that used to weigh down previous side Bs.

Die Cut / City Planning feels like a record without a center of gravity, no matter how enjoyable the drifting may be.

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.

The production is more ambitious, the songwriting more accomplished. If JENNIE has the most robust individual musical identity of the quartet, it’s because her songs have a crucial element the others’ lack: They sound good.

Fancy Some More? feels like a rowdy, well-earned celebration and reaffirms the main ideas PinkPantheress has gestured toward for much of the year: Heavy reference doesn’t inherently go hand-in-hand with a lack of ingenuity.

DEADLINE achieves the bare minimum, but instead of being a show of style and substance, its music and credits—Diplo, Chris Martin, Dr. Luke—come across more like a demonstration of A-list power.

Without a singular narrative to tie it all together besides Hamilton's lovely but noncommital exhalations, it's a little too easy to lose interest.

While the best moments of his previous two solo albums felt like little more than stripped-back versions of solid Hold Steady songs, We All Want the Same Things is more subtle and strange.

It's one of his best, a mostly single-minded return to the on-the-mic fierceness and computers-go-tribal rhythms that first made his name.

God Help the Girl is a spirited expansion of some of Murdoch's best ideas, but until the film finishes shooting--set to start next year--we'll probably just have wild-ass guesses like mine as to the real story.

Few rappers could bring such an engaging sense of energy to a project so focused on preaching to the converted.

Its twelve songs–the vast majority of which extend well past the five-minute mark–fall into two categories: galloping nods to Ride the Lightning, of which the first disc is primarily composed, and doomier mid-tempo cuts à la Sabbath, which make up the bulk of the second. The LP’s highlights--“Hardwired,” “Moth Into Flame,” “Atlas, Rise!” all fall into the former camp, front-loading the record with fire. The second disc, by contrast, is a slog through nondescript, uniform chug, devoid of dynamics or instrumental nuance.

Its best moments are stellar and exhilarating.

With Herbert, I've always been happy to consider the political content of the records to be a clever bonus, while the music as a purely sonic experience is allowed to stand on its own. I listened to Plat du Jour five or six times without paying attention to the song titles and not having read the online methodological descriptions, and this one didn't hold up quite so well.

So yes, on Minotaur they continue draw deeply from 60s soft-pop; if you've enjoyed the Clientele's last few albums, you're guaranteed to enjoy at least 6/8ths of this mini LP.

Unfortunately, Supergrass doesn't really ever harness any of the momentum they create on individual songs to make a truly great LP.

Young God's version is rattled and haunted, with guitars and voices that sound damaged and weary.

Ultimately, Caracal just doesn’t feel much fun, and even its highs are nowhere near Settle’s polished bliss.

Porcelain Raft borrows liberally from both the shoegaze and dream-pop playbooks, and so we get layers of sonic gauze shot through with delicately strummed acoustic guitar patterns and Remiddi's reedy, rather androgynous voice.

If the sheer enormity of Thee Oh Sees' dense discography has proven too forbidding for you to delve into, Putrifiers II is a convenient summary/gateway, opening with a killer shot of the band's patented echo-drenched fuzz-punk delirium ("Wax Face") and closing with a baroque, string-swept lullaby ("Wicked Park"), while traversing all points in between.

It's ultimately more memorable for the way it combines its sounds than for its songwriting, which is a criticism that applies to a fair amount of the record.

It’s all so easy to digest, so pitch-perfect, so safe. Let’s Start Here. clearly and badly wants to be hanging up on those dorm room walls with Currents and Blonde and IGOR.

The MUSIC that does exist is somewhere in between, a flawed, contradictory, inflated, loud, exciting, mainstream-ified, uncomfortable, nostalgic event, but one that is still fixated on the music above all. It might go down as the purest distillation of Playboi Carti.

180 is structured like a gig, with the attention-grabbing hit followed by fun but less memorable tracks that build gradually in excitement.

Peace Love Death Metal is at its best when the inside joke is buried deep in the music, but whenever the deathtongue is planted squarely in the deathcheek, the songs turn not just silly, but lumbering and self-indulgent, overburdened by the overriding concept.

The unusual dependence on space in the arrangements can make the interiors of Låpsley’s songs seem uncannily empty, glassy structures with their insides removed so all that’s left is angled crystal.... But in other instances her voice dissolves into an overabundance of negative space, and listening to the less-inspired sections of Long Way Home can feel like trying to remember something boring that happened to you once.

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.

Though there have always been plenty of bands mining the same era, with reverbed vocals and drummers that don't sit down, Stay Home captures attitude and devil-may-care confidence better than most of today's bands worth their weight in Nuggets compilations.

Only two things matter here: the production, which is masterful, and Beanie himself, a virtuoso of lonely, bitter desperation.

Erase Errata might not be as playful as they once were, but they're much better.

As rap music, The Doctor’s Advocate is good; as tangled psychodrama, it's better.

It may not seem like much, but 32 straight minutes of lyrics about rodents, dead bodies, and acid rain can get exhausting. But, however biting, the payoff is worth it with each individual song.

Every song on the record contributes to this air of reverie, a testament to Roosevelt’s strength as a producer, as one track languidly slips into the next. If anything, it can get a little too laid back--it’s the kind of record that's so uniform it ends before you realize it.

McCauley’s raspy crow often overwhelms the more delicate material, but throughout both albums, the band varies its rhythms and arrangements with surprising agility.

Even the more lighthearted moments are rich with subtext. Like a De La Soul project, ISTHISFORREAL? gestures at a running talk-show concept without really committing to the bit. Instead, KTO deploys a breadth of styles to match the record’s expansive themes.

This new record is a more favorable look at the 00s Chemical Brothers than its predecessor, and its 2xCD version features a better bonus disc than the 2003 model.

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.

Curren$y's lyrics drip with nice things, and the joy that comes from fondly describing them. But the language he brings to them exists in its own universe.

Get In was recorded last year, but it sounds like it could have been made at any time over the intervening decade.

The momentum generated by “Mirage” and the equally limber funk workouts that bookend Boo Boo end up compensating for the tedious midsection of neither-here-nor-there experimentation.

Escapades is entirely in line with this gleeful approach, guilelessly reaching beyond musical norms to seek out ecstasy in the patently absurd.

Leave the Light On often considers the toll of living up to expectations, in romantic, platonic, and societal terms. Unfortunately, you also sometimes get the sense of it with regards to following up a beloved album, with the band revealing a new inclination toward gravitas that smothers some of their fire.

Ironically, in its militaristic pursuit of fun, Some Like It Hot often winds up feeling deeply rigid—stripped of the spunk and nuance that once made Bar Italia so enchanting.

With its emphasis on traditional craft and instrumentation instead of brooding experimentation, 1968 finds Pajo fully inhabiting the rootsy folk-rock he's been warily circling for years.

Though Barnes and company fail to bring this bewildering array of streams into confluence, the album contains enough flashes of such melodic invention and daredevil instrumentation that armchair travelers can't help but be drawn to the group's exotic scrapbook.

Throughout Fin Eaves, the kaleidoscopic growth of the tracks feels both natural and chaotic, and you get a good sense of the sounds and patterns evolving. Sometimes the album's lo-fi and static-ridden production can induce a dulling sensation.

Civilization is a record that evokes so many eras and moods at once in parallel that there's a deliberate possibility of the listener losing track of all the sonic attributions.

Like the Luddite lover pining for old-school communication in a digital world, GUV II is the sound of a pop classicist forging his own singular path in a post-everything era.

The passionate vocals stand out from the rest of Believer, with its glassine pop-R&B delivery. Smerz’s usual brooding, dead-eyed vacancy, punctuated with mumbled interjections, has a magnetic pull in concentrated blasts, but it can also feel like a slight crutch when songs like “Flashing” and the album’s interludes prove they can go in different, evocative directions at a whim.

ANTI is a rich and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its most idiosyncratic.

The only problem is that Johnson's tales aren't all that hooky. At least, not enough to buoy Tripper's soft and moody music.

proVISIONS is no exception, its array of peyote rock, twilight ballads, space cowboy soundtracks, and spooky sidetracks off the beaten path on par with the band's best work.

As a whole, the record doesn't quite gel. The songs generally sound better out of context.

What makes the album so distinctive isn't just the sound of her voice, the quality of her songwriting, or even the resourcefulness of his arrangements, but their joint insistence that these old sounds have as much to say nowadays as they ever did.

There’s a familiar, overriding sense of a couple of guys reading something about history and having a lot to report. If you don’t mind the idea of These New Puritans as your dad after a Ken Burns binge, you’ll find signs of life and creativity within Making a New World’s overall confusion. If not, no one could blame you for moving on.

“Let’s Rock” is upfront about its meat-and-potatoes aspirations. This is an album by the Black Keys called “Let’s Rock.” It does.

It's the first good 2002 album I've heard.

The album is about a quarter filler, but the songs that hit on Too Late to Die Young make the tedium worth sitting out.

The pristine quality of Snow Patrol's music and Garret Lee's production, however, belies the rawness of Lightbody's words, and too often, the songs suffer from the contrast.

When the Neptunes step out of their accepted hip-hop box, they find their greatest success.

The Young Machines will rank among your favorite albums if you're someone's mortifyingly jaded ex, but if you come to it craving electronic vocal-pop keeping pace with anything north of Jimmy Tamborello's shoulders, you'll end up frustrated by the simple and repetitive violin bits that drive the big retro beats.

Average from beginning to end.

The Akrons' striking group harmonies are at a greater premium here than before, but the grainy, more intimate production retains a sense of communal participation.

Cohen might have made the album for himself as a keepsake, an antidote to the rest of life's pressing noise. It works that way for us, as well.

Syndrome Syndrome offers some rewards, but it may have been a fraction too soon for them to make their first move.

Taken as a whole, The Next Four Years moves like a piece of fine engineering—all curved lines, no wind resistance.

The Diary is notable for presenting an official release to his intended debut. And, just like any diamond unearthed after many years, The Diary is flawed, but still precious.

It’s a shame there’s no such thing as a subtitled listening experience because OUÏ is rich with brilliant, funny ideas about conception, nurture, and identity.

Listening to him navigate those raw emotions while staying the diamond-encrusted course makes for some of his messiest and most mature music yet.

Sub Verses proves we shouldn't take Akron/Family for granted; their restlessness is rare.

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

It doesn’t always reach the level of spiritual purity it could, but there’s a touch of steel and a sense of pacing that was missing from Föllakzoid’s prior work, positioning III as a gateway for a much a deeper dive into altered states.

A Folk Set Apart is scattered by nature but it has some of these moments, too--moments in which some line or turn that at first sounds unnatural becomes a signal both of McCombs' quiet confidence and of his casual rebellion against the idea of how songs are supposed to go.

Crazy Itch Radio isn't a bad album by any means; it just doesn't scream "best album of the year" from the moment you put it on.

Hopefully, Rolling Blackouts marks the moment in the Go! Team's career where the idea of moving forward becomes less of a literal concept and more an artistic one.

The record is an easy, pleasant listen, but it's not particularly compelling as a whole, occasionally falling into a pattern of contented stuffiness.

The debut Big Joanie LP, Sistahs, is an impressively woven tapestry of affirmational lyrics, girl-group chants, and deep, slashing guitars that would have sounded very at home on Kill Rock Stars in the 2000s.

Thanks to smart sequencing that balances bangers with pensive interludes, it feels less like a collection of club tracks than a suite broken into 10 interlocking movements.

No matter how much command and charisma Krauss brings to Texis, it still sounds quaint, not necessarily catchier than any number of contemporary bands who don’t face the same hang-ups from indie listeners.