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.

The sharply differentiated genre experiments become less well-defined in the home stretch, but the sound design stays immersive, with pleasant little things to listen to festooned in every niche.

Electric Cables is the sort of album whose deceptively placid presentation belies the richness of detail and sense of purpose at work here.

Their weakest record to date, one that lacks the subtle power and distinctive personality of their best work.

Whatever Other People's Problems is trying to say is lost beneath the fact that it's so sonically muddled and abrasive, and lyrically imprecise.

Listen to all of The Aberrant Years, and you'll probably get too caught up in feedtime's bracing songs to think much about bands that came after them.

Young Man in America, is just as ambitious [as her last release, Hadestown], but it's more intimate and accessible than its predecessor, focused on the textures of everyday life and the odd, stirring power of Mitchell's voice.

It's one of the strongest indie rock records of the year so far.

Wonky has the one-jolt-after-another vibe of a great collection of familiar hits but without the disconnected feeling you get when a bunch of obviously Big Moment singles are slapped together and called an album, rather seamlessly covering a whole lot of musical ground without sacrificing concision or intensity

Flat, rather forced attempts at oddballery give Mouseman a scattered, self-conscious feel it never quite shakes for more than a couple of minutes at a time.

This album still stands out among his recent work, not so much for the leap of faith he took collaborating with Auerbach but because it turned out so damn well.

It's one of her most captivating and immediate front-to-back statements of purpose as a singer.

A little like a greatest hits, a little like a soundtrack, and a little like a collaborative art project, Black Mountain's 51 minutes of music for Year Zero serve as a reminder of how good this band has sometimes been and as a tease of the music they might still make.

Even if Folila is less surprising than the two albums that came before it, it still makes me look forward to seeing where they'll take this fusion next.

Both Lights may be plenty gorgeous, but in Wyland's never-idle hands, that beauty proves fleeting.

While Acousmatic Sorcery is interesting and occasionally even great on its own, it ultimately it feels very much like a hyper-creative and gifted artist trying to figure out what he's doing.

As a benefit for earthquake victims and as an outlet for Batoh's grief and fear, there's plenty to recommend. As a pure sonic experience, it is a very novel, very undeveloped idea mingling with some very old ones.

Earth Has Doors feels like the diametric opposite of "fiddling around."

A lot of the music on Happy To You, their second full-length, sounds excellent. Beats sparkle, synths crest and unfurl with purpose, horns come in at just exact right moment.... [Yet] too much of the time, too much is missing.

Choreography stands as a most impressive debut: one that captures a young rock 'n' roll band buzzing with raw energy and inspiration, while already displaying the sort of rapidly sophisticating songcraft you expect to hear on a sophomore release.

Subject: Matter might be Sandman's best work yet.

Mini departures aside, Wreck is simply another strong Unsane album and another wrench thrown in the idea that an enduring band needs an arc.

awE naturalE, like Black Up, is a pleasantly surprising resurrection of the Pacific Northwest-via-Brooklyn hippie-hop that we never might have anticipated a few years ago.

Best Behavior is a strong record on its own merits, perhaps more so if you feel a sort of investment in Dinowalrus after hearing %, but it leaves something to the listener's imagination in order to make it truly exciting in addition to something sturdy to build upon.

For the most part, though, King Con's an enjoyable collection, one that presents Winston as an artist with a strong enough personality to overcome that dip and to stand out in a scene where it can be hard to make an impression.

Bands like this often aren't lucky enough to find singers this subtle, striking, and strong.

it's more like an endpoint for devoted fans looking to connect the dots. As such, it provides a fascinating coming-of-age story of an artist who came into his own playing styles he knew he loved and others he only thought he hated.

Like all great live albums (Live at the Apollo, Double Live, After Dark), it will make you eternally thankful that someone had the foresight to hit the record button.

Into the Waves is stylized, but its presentation still manages to suit its content.

Howard's Brainfeeder debut shatters expectations, offering an always shifting balance of alien and familiar. [But] It's not perfect.

It's a series of vignettes and at its best it reminds me of amorphous copy/paste artists like Prefuse 73, musicians who wormed their way into a genre by nibbling at its edges.

Mirel Wagner possesses a curious physicality both in her lyrical conjurings and in the confident agility of her guitar playing, which together sound distinctive, specific, and personal even when considered against the decades of acoustic folk music that has come before.

Most of these songs are really pretty damn good. Tanlines have never had a problem with the set-up, but it's in the delivery where the occasionally falter.

Sonik Kicks is a good record, but it doesn't have the songwriting depth and range of its two predecessors, and as admirable as it is that Weller is still playing with his formula and searching for something new to do with it, the electronics here do the songs few favors.

Large chunks of MDNA are shockingly banal, coming across not so much as bad pop songs per se, but as drably competent tunes better suited to D-list Madonna wannabes.

Queen of the Wave just makes you lay prostrate at the feet of Pepe Deluxé in the hopes that you won't mind them relentlessly hammering you with tacky quirks and leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination.

While Ice Level's an awful lot to process, it's the finest sort of overload; listen closely enough, and you can almost hear your circuits being rewired.

In a world that is newly full of "content" at every turn, it can be refreshing to find an uncompromising record that exists so honestly on its own.

If there's anything that keeps Faithful Man from equaling My World, aside from the occasional orchestral overkill, it's that the songwriting overall isn't quite as strong.