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.

Rocket Juice & the Moon feels like a decent record, but an unfocused, meandering one.

The tape incorporates all of Odd Future's members with surprising ease (not an easy task considering all the stylistic differences at play) and pieces together the first release in over a year that'll remind people why they liked the group so much in the first place.

Friendly and nondescript.

It's sort of campy stuff, but it's gripping in its willful oddity.

The Belbury Tales is stranded somewhere between the abstract work of Jupp's past and the fuller sound of the live instrumentation he is applying, making this feel like his most pleasingly open-ended release so far.

It feels like he's listening harder than ever to feel out new ways to move forward, causing him to quietly cleanse his vision in ever more compelling ways.

But for all of its immediate pleasure, In Ghostlike Fading feels slightly vacant, valuing tribute and stylization above personal expression.

As when the biggest guy in the bar has your back, Vee Vee is filled with extra spittle and bottomless bravado.

My only real complaint is that the physicality of the bass and drums could have been emphasized to an even greater degree-- while your ear is constantly drawn to the rhythm section's permutations, Leaneagh's voice sits perhaps a bit too prominently in the mix, and the exhilarating wildness of the drumming is often suggested rather than truly felt.

A motley assortment of Sonic Youth nods, acoustic entreaties, and cloying pop-rockers, Ranaldo's opportunity to step out of the Sonic Youth shadows and into his own proper spotlight is mostly a miss made of mediocrity.

For a band that's lyrically so devoted to upsetting the order, Goatwhore sound unequivocally content with replaying the past.

With their harmonies and swooning vocals, they're never quite Troggs-level elemental, but these guys clearly know how to wail.

Rossen brings to this EP the meticulous craftsmanship we've come to expect from his work, but in Silent Hour he's created something rare: a rendering of isolation that feels sincere but never maudlin.

One of the most inspired folk records I have heard in a long time.

Eternal Turn of the Wheel is as captivating as most any stretch of black metal you'll hear this year, even if it possesses a lifetime of questions that deserve to be asked.

Port of Morrow doesn't sound like it belongs to any particular decade or style, instead hopping around like some fully loaded AM radio dial that cranks out gem after gem.

Valentina is essentially Gedge and his current sidemen doing a very solid impression of the Wedding Present as they were circa 1990.

After spending 15 minutes sounding like preordained headliners, Tribes trudge through half an hour of perfunctorily composed and performed verses and choruses that are all too deniable.

Frying on This Rock mostly finds White Hills with their freak flags hoisted well above half mast, with any and all overtures toward coherence obscured by billowing clouds of feedback.

It's one of the least distinctive things he's put his name on, a step backward into Southern-rap exercises that point you away from K.R.I.T.'s music and toward his heroes.

Framing Pretty Ugly as a broken-beat album helps account for its pleasures, but can't entirely absolve its pitfalls, perhaps because much of what is true for funky remains true for broken beat, namely, that the flight into syncopation should not be heedless.

Form & Control immediately shows the band's strengths and their weakness: It's a smooth, utterly precise study of the formal elements that make disco and electro-pop tick, but with far too little of the body heat that actually gets that stuff going.

It is a wearying listen, overcrowded and too loud and too harsh, and to engage actively with it is to feel your knuckles whiten with effort.

Between the innocuously rambly music, Fite's toned-down vocal mannerisms, and this pencils-up-the-nose persona, Ain't is a record that's hard to dislike, but nearly impossible to imagine loving.

The record functions as a well-executed sampler of the magnified pain and horror we've come to expect from this band.

The Chap couch this darker subject matter in their sleekest, most elegantly crafted songs to date, wherein the influence of pop's reigning sardonicists, Steely Dan, becomes as much musical as it has always been spiritual.

Music that's both haunting and life-affirming, something to make you dream and think.

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.

10 tracks of the kind of fierce, instrumental, no-bullshit techno that was as left-field popular in 1988 as 1998 as 2008. It's often witty, with a kind of robots-running-amok charm, and always attention-grabbing, at least in small doses. But friendly it ain't.

Too much of it drifts into generic 1960s-nodding garage-rock territory.

After these frontloaded highlights [Andrew in Drag, God Wants Us to Wait], it doesn't take long for Love at the Bottom of the Sea to become a rain-boot-worthy slog through water-logged mid-tempo material.

Tyga isn't a gifted lyricist, but he has a few key things going in his favor: a workmanlike ability to ride a beat, a solid singing voice, and a great ear for melody.

Milk Famous falters by creating an Uncanny Valley effect by adopting the most easily replicable aspects [of Spoon's sound] without maintaining any sort of human element or offering anything that's identifiable as their own.

The Clearing feels lovingly erected, fashioned bit by bit.

The communal, freewheeling looseness is one of the album's greatest assets, as you feel as if you were a party to the making of the record in Eagle Bay, too.

The production isn't a disaster, but most of the stylistic flourishes can feel gimmicky or, at worst, like dry history lessons... There's also the tugging sense that Springsteen and Aniello are trying to cover up some of the album's lackluster songwriting.

Never Ending Nights contains just enough detail to save it from pastiche and in doing so offers a glimpse into Willner's influences.

A Victim of Stars doesn't offer much to anyone already immersed in that world. For everyone else this is an engaging scratch at the surface of a wide-open mind.

Most tracks here make no bones about aiming straight for the radio. Choruses are airy and open, melodies are sticky and straightforward and tend to lodge in your head with or without your approval.

It all amounts to a constructed world that sounds outré at first but winds up being a startlingly astute reflection of our own as you settle into it.

Open Your Heart is smartly sequenced to metabolize genre and morph like a masterful DJ mix, subtly rationing out its true peaks even while seemingly going full-throttle throughout.

In the end, One Second of Love is enjoyable but slight: its stronger moments render the weaker ones particularly forgettable.

Until that last song, fun persists in the album's absurdly infectious hooks without being marred by concepts or meaning.

It's bound to ruffle feathers and turn off old fans, and in a way, going so outright "pop" is one of the gutsiest, risky things a pillar of the scene like Scuba could have done.

This album feels more like a series of genre exercises, a place in which they occasionally work up a palpable tension, but never enough to make this more than an adequate diversion from the resources they're obviously sourcing.

Sounds From Nowheresville makes me want to buy chocolate, try on clothes, take a holiday--anything but listen to this record.

Ghostory is at its best a very pleasurable realization of niche.

This is a record with a handful of standout songs struggling and straining against one another after being crammed into the standard album format.

Corrosion of Conformity does overstay its welcome with a couple of second-rate tracks, but overall, the album manages to both recapture Animosity's feral energy and reach compositional peaks that the 1985 versions of Dean, Weatherman, and Mullin couldn't have accessed.

While the amount of raw material here may be daunting for some, there are plenty of surprising melodic moments to indulge in.

It's not a record that's going to hit you over the head-- it's almost fatally unassuming and more likely to meekly ask if you maybe wanted to spare a few seconds to listen-- but it's one that will offer a surprising amount of replay value if you accept its coy, hesitant invitation.

The lyrical coarseness serves an important function, reinforcing the urgency of O'Connor's performances and creating the impression that she has worked hard and fast to document her emotions at their rawest and wildest.

For a record that sounds like memories of better times, there's a disheartening shortage of hooks or melodies that aren't hitched to lyrics you'd rather forget.

After an iffy start, Toward the Low Sun thankfully picks up a head full of steam in its closing stretch--hopefully, this momentum won't dissipate over another seven-year layoff.

Memoryhouse have a ways to go before they're creating music with as much melodic power or depth of feeling as their dream-pop contemporaries.

They manage to string a staggering number of tightly packed nuggets of melody and texture into 46 minutes.

The music is pretty but still--without many shifts in color or tone, they sit there like flat, two-dimensional objects.

Arnalds' score ultimately isn't as satisfying [Trent Reznor's The Social Network or Cliff Martinez's on Drive], especially in the front half where he's excessively patient and slow to build momentum.

Whereas Too Young to Be in Love was the excited doodles of a crush's name in a notebook, Hairdresser Blues is the discarding of the love letters that came after.

1966 is one more piece to a puzzle that will never be complete--which is of course how Dalton herself would have had it.

For all its violence, Back radiates warmth. Much of the beauty is due to the expanded instrumentation.