Harmonies for the Haunted seems as familiar as Stellastarr*'s 2003 debut, and that's at once its chief cincher and problem.

It walks the line between naive and savvy, between earnest and winking, confessional and oversharing, bratty and bold, experimental and inexperienced.

Waxing Gibbous is a good, if occasionally overdone, album that proves that his musical imagination is still a fertile one.

It’s the sound of a rapper more than happy to maintain his narrow lane after being burned by the industry, one who's lost the ambition to leave his comfort zone, at least for the time being.

The main drawback to Worlds’ sound, an impressionistic approach to mass-appeal fare, is that anyone with their ear to the (festival) ground might find these sounds to be relatively old-hat.

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.

Maybe some thought Busdriver sounded self-satisfied before, but he used to sound one step ahead of the listener instead of running to catch up.

There are moments when Every Loser’s carefree bravado degenerates into puerile silliness (amid the Stonesy trash of “All the Way Down,” you’ll find nuggets like “I’m gonna blow up a turd!”), but such outbursts are balanced by more nuanced, emotionally resonant performances.

Several tracks (“Curious,” “Ghosts”) rely on the tug of well-worn harmonic shapes and the weaving of legato lines to entrance rather than ideate, persuade, or startle. The standouts have more substance, musically and visually.

At times his extremely online subject matter takes the bloom off his writing. But his innate ability to shift between breakneck flows amid chaotic production buoys the album.

The aggressively banal orchestral arrangements and cornball baritone make Jacket Full of Danger something like a rakish Scott Walker for the post-Beck era.

It’s 46 songs of verbose, intricately delivered raps, spun from a story with enough character to have already made it a New York Times best-seller. There’s a lot of ground to cover regardless of medium.

The intensity rises and falls with the rolling hills, but the vistas remain the same, and the horizon never gets any closer. Despite the uniformity, there are clear highlights.

An album that emerges as a solid, infectious effort, but eventually collapses under its own weight, unable to keep all its stylistic efforts coherent.

Those great choruses? Still great, but not when songs are dragged out this long and the payoff arrives right on schedule, about four times a song. It's indulgent, but it's hard to make songs sound this big. Fortunately, it won't be enough to wring-out the magic found in a great many of these songs, and surely won't be able to stall Land of Talk who, with Cloak and Cipher, are progressing quite nicely.

Dosh has indeed graduated from the sketchbook-like arrangements that marked his earlier work-- but Tommy's occasional tedium is a reminder that there's nothing wrong with doodling in the margins, either.

While Flying Wig does indeed ascend, it never quite lands on solid ground—which feels like the whole point.

Where Walker sings more naturally, with easier tones, Cleaver's shy, young-old voice is a reassuring presence beneath the music’s astral blanket. That they both sound overwhelmed by Forever Sounds’ vast scale is in fact the record’s saving grace; as ever, Wussy’s proximity to ordinariness is precisely what makes them lovable.

Hammond's solo outing is a spry if unexceptional pop charmer, less supercilious than Is This It or Room on Fire but almost as cool.

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.

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.

Not only do Dayes and Misch offer an alluring marriage of virtuosity and pop, the album feels like the best recent example of Brian Eno’s theory of scenius as opposed to genius: the theory that it takes community and collaboration to spark something incredible, rather than the work of one gifted individual.

From Here On In is inches away from being a success. It's just that it's weighed down by so many repetitive textures and songs that fail to impact.

Fearless Movement’s first half is filled with guest vocalists delivering songs that attempt awkwardly to be soundtracks for both revelry and deep contemplation. The album gets better when it dispenses with its noncommittal relationship to party music, freeing Washington to pursue the heroic high drama that’s still his strong suit.

Like all of his albums, Major Key is a mixed bag, fitting for a maestro who traffics in a blend of chest-thumping and humility that’s both as comical as it is prophetic.

Super elaborates and intensifies Electric’s approach: Louder, brighter, more. It doesn’t have the sustained arc of that album, but Price specializes in renovating house and disco, modernizing with care, and his small details still beguile.

The most satisfying songs on I'm Rich are the ones that adapt a bit to the fact that all six members, logistically speaking, cannot be present to scream every note in your face as you listen.

The album is best when it’s at its broadest.

The album-closing title track, which charts weird new territory not just for MGMT, but in some small sense, for pop itself. .... is, in other words, the perfect thematic conclusion to an imperfect album. And more to the point, it just hits.

The lack of anything like a pained or ecstatic voice in Call It Love can make its emotional core tricky to access. Instead of reading it in her voice, you have to read it in her lyrics and the environments in which she’s chosen to nestle them. That doesn’t detract from Call It Love’s prettiness.

Bills & Aches & Blues is a frequently impressive assemblage of extraordinary artists running amok through a trove of extraordinary songs, with occasionally uneven results.

While certainly not on the level of The Days of Wine and Roses, this reunion record could be considered that debut’s rightful follow-up, at least in spirit.

We All Raise Our Voices to the Air sounds less like a tour document than a greatest hits, struggling to sum up the band's career and find some new direction forward.

Judged on its own merits, A New Wave of Violence is a fine hardcore record, one that manages to balance chaotic intensity with a workmanlike precision that few punk bands can muster.

Secret South is a characteristically strong showing, but ultimately, it pales in comparison to its predecessors. The self-produced album retains the band's unique sound, but fails to measure up to the perfect match they found in guitarist John Parish for Low Estate's crisply rustic atmosphere. Even without any of the droning squeezebox ballads that accounted for Low Estate's few weak spots, it somehow lacks the momentum and fury that made that album such an engaging listen.

ARIZONA BABY’s strongest moments are when Abstract turns inwards, with reflective passages often sung in a pitch-shifted register.

What torpedoes Build a Nation is the heavy cream of reverb and echo that drowns the vocals.

Angels is a Marah album, which sort of sucks, but that 'Blue But Cool' and 'Santos De Madera' and the title track might still make you a little misty eyed and/or end up on a mixtape.

Commonwealth as a whole is that of a noble failure. It's an interesting experiment, albeit less fulfilling than the band's best and recent work--but quality and relative position within their deep catalog aside, the album's very existence is heartening.

The return of synths and disco-ish atmospherics serves, unsurprisingly, to obscure the fact that a nontrivial reinvention still eludes them. But to their credit, Franz Ferdinand are persistently resourceful, and in their theatrical suave and helter-skelter choruses there lingers an obvious knack for starting fires armed only with indie-pop panache.

Sunflower Bean are excellent song-crafters with a blurry point of view. But there’s some new dimension here that makes the band more than just parrots of politics and sound.

Wilson first walked away when he felt the band’s songwriting had become too formulaic. Closure/Continuation is admirable in its attempts to reject that formula, but in the end, it also proves just how good they were at it.

Clutch work best when they keep the pulley of punchlines and pummeling riffs running at max speed, and as a result, Psychic Warfare proves a tad too meandering to eclipse Earth Rocker or Blast Tyrant

2014 Forest Hills Drive is a decent album selling itself as great. It wraps itself in the garments of a classic, but you can see that the tailoring is off.

Both tracks feel like small pieces of a larger piece we don’t get to hear; there’s a wispy, vaporous, interlude quality to each, like we’re in a place where something just happened or something is about to happen but the present moment is all suggestion.

The Last Sucker isn't as huge as "Psalm 69," but it is Ministry's most exciting record since.

He has softened his electronic and industrial edges and folded in guitars laden with effects pedals; steeped in post-punk and even grunge, it frequently captures the energy of a band playing together in real time.

Sticking with him through the machinations of the music industry has never been more difficult than it is now, but IV Play still has its rewards.

Given the history he's forged with them and Ponytail, Wong likely won't sit still for long, and even the most rigid parts of Infinite Love suggest he's got a lot more ideas to draw on.

For now, Heterotic stands as a yet another promising venture from one of the most consistently surprising minds in electronic music.

I’ve Been Trying to Tell You feels passive, lost in nostalgia for an age it hasn’t fully reckoned with. Bet it sounds gorgeous on the radio.

Despite the stumbles, Nights includes some of California X's best work, and these moments are so strong, it's impossible to write the band off.

Though the majority of B-Sides and Rarities can be easily found by those inclined to find it (the piano sketch “Rain in Numbers” is a hidden track at the end of Beach House’s self-titled debut, making it not much of a B-side or a rarity), the impulse to gather up loose ends into a cohesive package feels like a solid effort at future-proofing recordings peripheral to the band’s primary discography.

Chrissybaby is 16 songs long, which might be more of this particular pleasant, low-stakes mood than you need at one uninterrupted stretch.

For an album whose highlight is a song about the urge to extend beyond the limits of your own experience and find solace in collective acceptance, it all feels surprisingly timid. Apollo XXI is centered on the interior self, but it’s not self-centered--it just seems a little weighed down by Lacy’s still-palpable reluctance to claim the spotlight his talents warrant.

Action Adventure captures broad feelings of nostalgia from a POV enriched by decades of hindsight and experience; it’s a testament to DJ Shadow’s production skill and human touch. But where his last album used pointed commentary to communicate a clear concept, the new album’s instrumental abstraction is more elusive.

It’s fun and messy and you might forget it completely by the next day. No regrets, though.

Song in the Air is a far more dynamic and internally cohesive record than any of the band's previous efforts.

While Marble Skies doesn’t always quite get there, the planets it frantically orbits while awaiting touchdown are worth the journey.

One can't shake the feeling that formula is what's really at the heart of the record, and in light of the promise shown by their debut, that lack of fervor and off-the-cuff adventurousness is a difficult shortcoming to ignore.

Replaces the cheap sounds of their earlier records with more traditional sonics, which leave the often-clever lyrics feeling like an afterthought.

The reverence is understandable, but you’re left wondering if it stymied bolder invention.

Kings Ballad still doesn't meet all the expectations Muldrow may have initially inspired, but it's a positive, measured sign that there's more to come.

Hoop is an undeniably charismatic musician, but her music will benefit from a more natural and organic absorption of these impulses. In other words, she doesn't need to work so hard to prove anything.

While the J-Kwons and Juveniles enjoy the fruits of paradise and their Lexus helicopters, Shyne reminds us of the ones who didn't make it: the legions of his fellow Clinton inmates fighting to keep afloat under prison's psychic burden.

They sound twice as developed.

The individual performances are gut-punching in their potency. ... But the discrete presentation of the songs sucks them dry, with the abrupt fade-outs robbing the album of any in-the-room ambience and natural momentum.

'Rue the Blues' is easily the most euphoric thing here, with that banjo-tuned-guitar, um, pickin' up a storm, I guess, and Sullivan opening his throat when he sings.

Whether Wreckless Amy represents a one-off collaboration or the start of an ongoing project for both musicians remains to be seen, but they sound pretty happy together.

When Tremor holds your attention, it works—but sometimes Avery gets lost in his own trance, drifting away from the album’s rough pulse just as it begins to take hold.

Despite the pensive lean of Howerton’s lyrics, 90 in November is decidedly a pleasure listen.

While such transformations are pleasant, if not exactly commanding, they do manage to slyly deconstruct the "real" songs into the most basic building blocks, which are very specific to this setting.

How to Solve Our Human Problems, Part 1 is the sound of a band deploying its full arsenal of bells and whistles to seize your attention, even when the songs themselves aren’t always strong enough to retain the grip.

Joanne never reveals much of a narrative or stylistic through-line, and even her brief dips into indie-rock--her collaborations with Father John Misty on “Sinner’s Prayer” and “Come to Mama” (Misty is also credited as a writer on Beyonce’s Lemonade), and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on “Perfect Illusion” (Rihanna covered Parker’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” on Anti)--feel familiar.

For those who missed Frightened Rabbit's last record, those who weren't already enthralled by these tuneful Scots, this album will really come alive.

This may be Herren's least accessible project to date.

Although Good Sad Happy Bad is certainly the band’s least polished-sounding record, the combination of the scattered arrangements and Levi’s ruminations on sadness shrewdly underline the topsy-turvy feeling suggested by the title. Even with the band’s music messily chopped, looped, and jangled, the emotional messages always ring clear.

It's difficult to overcome consistently lame, often meaningless lyrics-- especially with Suede's classic rock focus on singer and melody-- but they cope.

The Cool Kids have now proven that they can make an album, but they haven't proven that they ever needed to make an album.

As welcome as it is, the Party of Five disc winds up emphasizing the curious nature of Up, as the point where interpersonal tensions collided with broader cultural shifts.

The fearsome symmetry and formidable concision Owens attempts here is a high-risk, high-reward strategy, and while the first half of the album comes on strong, the second half is a little more prone to interrupting itself.

For all its minor stylistic differences, Ripe is very much forged in their image. But if any traditions in British indie rock are worth perpetuating right now, this inventive, engaged stable is the one to back.

With the exception of the lone cover in "Gypsy Davy", Perkins has assembled a small sampling of songs here all with their own very healthy set of bones.

It feels labored over, and it sacrifices some of the form’s early magic But there's room for this, too, and we need look no farther than Jlin to see the potential in footwork as more heavily produced, personally expressive music.

Their catchier material that front-loads the record is so distinct and stunning, however, that it's hard not to be left wanting more after those opening tracks.

It is an album of quiet delights, but at times it feels like the songs are simply stretched too thin: three-star meals served with five-star service.

All the masks and cameos aside, this still feels like a Damon Albarn solo project, a place for him to treat the studio like the welcoming arms of oblivion, and for us to join him.

As an album, it feels complete but transient: True Romance has the capacity to lift and inspire, but that feeling doesn’t linger.

These ninety-second-ish ditties are too gaunt and echo-ridden to stand alone as memorable singles, but within the tempestuous framework of the album, their vulnerability hits like a late-summer thunderstorm.

Most rappers would sell their soul for his ability to shape his melody to latch onto any relevant sound, but everything here feels so safe.

The occasional clumsiness of ACR Loco is easy to forgive in light of the album’s musical pleasures. After a deep dive into their back pages, A Certain Ratio found a powerful formula: paying heed to where they came from while keeping the door open for more all night parties in their future.

She has a pleasant, lilting voice to listen to while resting your head against a window. But these slow-moving repetitions—a few plucked strings, a murmured confession—leave you hungry for grittier self-scrutiny.

While he's deeply indebted to traditional sounds and familiar structures, he comes alive most when he's sewing fissures into the forms he knows so well.

In its often inchoate roar, We Are Undone bears little resemblance to the laser-focus punk-blues of their earlier work. The songs just aren't as good. The most satisfying callback to Two Gallants' halcyon, mid-'00s prime comes in the album's second half.

This is road trip music for the new normal. Yet you might also hope the widespread devastation on the West Coast would inspire something more substantial than a strong offering by an artist coming up on 30 years of dauntless consistency. It’s hard to shake the feeling this porous music can soak up any context in which it’s presented.

The album’s open-door policy helps keep things fresh, and the band sounds more comfortable in their skin than they have since the ’90s. ... Jenkins’ swaggering vocals remain an acquired taste.

Significant artistic development of any kind probably would've been a bad idea for this band-- they were, as the saying goes, small but perfectly formed. Still, it's also not quite satisfying to hear 40-year-olds come back to what they were doing half their lifetime ago and approach it exactly the same way.

At a certain point the album's dynamics become routine, all of the energies produced by the band hit the ear neutrally, and Rot Forever begins to rot itself, softly melting into a background, not of its own accord but by something built into its nature.