It's a record that marks the time when the "Gucci Gucci" rapper's homegirl became notorious enough to do an album with Gucci Mane, and when Gucci Mane had fallen far enough to decide to go along with it.

His new record is another collection of effortlessly gorgeous ruminations on hip-hop expressed through thermal updrafts, babbling brooks, and cracking twigs.

Like many spinoffs from the Odd Future machine, it's a small piece of a larger puzzle, useful for obsessives concerned with keeping their catalogs up to date.

More often than not, the contradictions between the band's knowing appropriations and its calls against jaded cynicism resolve themselves in the album's intricately rewarding attention to rich and unexpected sonic details.

Spotty, strange, all short songs and shitty sound, it's got the collagist careen of Bee Thousand and Propeller and the tumbling tunecraft of Alien Lanes and Under the Bushes Under the Stars.

A strong finish to Tesfaye's first trilogy, providing just enough closure to satisfy, and just enough mystery left to entice us back for the next round.

At times the music can get sentimental and even sappy, but it's never heavy-handed.

Thug Motivation somehow feels both airless and over-inflated, the sound of an artist trying to revisit something gone.

The new mastering job, by Frank Arkwright working with Marr, actually is really good: loud but not bomb-level loud, clear, and airy. (Hatful of Hollow, in particular, is dramatically improved from its previous incarnations.) On the other hand, Complete is a profoundly inaccurate description of this set.

Aside from one surprising flip of "Be My Baby", Papich doesn't seem as interested in transforming his source material as much as just presenting it.

Feels like music I've been subconsciously craving without even knowing it exists.

Even if the fusion initially seems unorthodox, LIVELOVEA$AP is exactly the sort of record you'd expect to hear in 2011 from a New Yorker who was 13 when "Big Pimpin'" came out.

Hazed Dream has some heady moments--the languid guitar intro to "Incense Head" and the head-nodding chords of "Mexican Wedding"--but the songs are just too mellow, understated, and lyrically anonymous to move the needle much.

Sometimes Wild One wears its influences a little too hard on its sleeve, or strives too hard to create something anthemic with across-the-board appeal.

As Sambol unravels that theme across these 14 songs, the album grows more endearing, if never quite exciting.

Fans of Stott's labelmates Demdike Stare, and all the other goth-n-screw artists out there at the moment, will be happy to gnaw on these bones.

It's a colossus of an album, the product of a band that was thinking huge, pushing itself to its limits, and devoted to breaking open its own understanding of what rock music could be.

(together) is borderline unlistenable taken as a whole.

There's little on Lioness: Hidden Treasures that sounds throwaway, or like it should have never been released; but there's equally little that sounds absolutely essential.

His art is 144,487 times less remarkable than his first week sales numbers would have you believe.

This is the product of a dynamic and assured vision, one that retains an alluring sense of mystery.

What makes Last Day of Summer engaging has as much to do with White Denim's potential future as it does its roots.

It's all lovely and certainly more immediately engaging and compact than Jónsi's mostly-instrumental Riceboy Sleeps multimedia project from 2009.

On the whole, Stage Whisper is enjoyable, but the live portion is dispensible, and the new studio tracks, which will likely please anyone taken with IRM, are the real draw.

When they go for manic instead of mellow, Canyons do bring something new, even if it's just intensity, to the 80s retro party.

Like their namesake, Quilt's music feels handmade and stitched-together, as though its creators were sifting through a collection of musical hand-me-downs and collating the bits that spoke to them into something new.

Tumble Bee is a welcome addition to contemporary children's music, not only because it's sufficiently involving to appeal to adults, but also because it further demonstrates that songs for kids don't have to be cloying or sanitized.

This isn't the Roots' most accessible album, and it's definitely their most downbeat, but it comes from a place that isn't always easy to dwell.

Ward's real saving grace on Parodia Flare is the guitar, which he utilizes in unexpectedly welcome ways to propel his compositions, keeping them from dissolving into murky keyboard washes.

Pinch & Shackleton is a welcome return to each artist's peculiar roots.

t's a strangely affecting synthesis of sounds and marks Holy Other's short debut out as a darkly oppressive but ultimately rewarding piece of work.

Radiant Door is exactly as its title suggests--the brighter side of one of America's best psych-pop bands.

The dense weight of verbiage on No Kings actually welcomes uninitiated listeners, rather than siphoning them out for not being advanced enough on some impenetrable ultra-battler s***.

As so often when it comes to dance-music full-lengths, Bias' good ideas get lost in the sea of makeweight stuff, and his attempt to please just about everyone results in a frustratingly spotty album.

Bronson's biggest strengths are a goofy sense of humor and a refreshing lack of self-regard: at its best, Well-Done is like spending 45 minutes with the affable, roly-poly guy who cracked you up at your high school lunch table.

The second Bangs & Works is a marked improvement over its predecessor.

What makes Pan Am Stories worth returning to is the scope Knight works within, where elements of prog, folk, and psychedelia blur in and out of focus.

While Glover's exaggerated, cartoonish flow and overblown pop-rap production would be enough to make Camp one of the most uniquely unlikable rap records of this year (and most others), what's worse is how he uses heavy topics like race, masculinity, relationships, street cred, and "real hip-hop" as props to construct a false outsider persona.

The riffs are glam-nasty, the lyrics sublimely knuckleheaded, the basslines nimble and bombastic, the mood frivolous and fun and unabashedly corny.

For these 53 minutes, they also offer a barrage of the unexpected, relighting doom from the strangest corners.

These songs are fiercely internal, which also makes them remarkably hard to shake--here, Roberts is singing about the no-place of everyplace, the desolation we all know.

The most impressive aspect of 200 Years, especially considering it as the debut of a new collaboration, is its overall aura of cool confidence.

Outside the sagging middle section, the subject matter and production will be nothing new to those familiar with Yela's music; his voice and perspective remain sharp and unique, and he certainly hasn't lost any of his technical skill.

Ersatz G.B.'s abrasiveness, inscrutability, and tedium are increasingly tough to take with repeated close listening... a shabby, grueling album.

As pretty as it can be, New Album is another minor Boris album in a string of minor Boris albums.

Some of these feel like scraps and sketches, others like the B-sides they are--which is fine when the scraps are this frequently exciting--but given the range of his output so far, what would be most satisfying would be to get a glimpse of where MacLean's heading next.

For all its movement, GLAQJO XAACSSO feels a little frozen.

While it sounds like it was taken from the same creative burst that birthed London producer Zomby's recent LP Dedication, here that album's glum funereality gets an almost dance-friendly makeover.

Polymers isn't a total overhaul from the taut and punishing Travels, but it does dial back tempos and lean far more heavily on blaring arcade synthesizers.

Siamese Dream's songs don't blend into each other, but some transitions exist; each stands out in a brilliant sequence, forming perhaps the best concept album they ever made.

Taking the greatest-hits route through Gorillaz's career, it's impressive how few of the tracks sound dated.

These two releases [Gish and Siamese Dream] still resonate, as both a nostalgia fix underscoring how it was so easy to fall for Smashing Pumpkins in the first place, and as the best introductions to their music any newcomer could want.

Dive might not be the most ambitious instrumental record you hear all year, but it almost always sounds good.

Such dedication to an aesthetic means Far Side Virtual gets a little tedious: It's 16 songs that aren't all that catchy but aren't exactly ambient either.

On South Bank--the most vital and essential document of Reid and Hebden's five-year partnership--it feels clear that, at least onstage, they were finally able to go the distance.

There's more movement, more development, more variety; fitting for a trilogy's middle, it's where the sounds get thicker, where the possibilities simply become more intriguing.

Talk That Talk tries too hard to send a more one-dimensional message and ends up falling flat: Rihanna's obviously going for sexy here, but her music's at its most alluring when she's blissed out in her own reverie, not taking the time to spell it all out for us.

Unfortunately, Welcome to Condale is stylistically all over the place and, despite its generally upbeat tone, kind of a drag to listen to.

His admirers will find this record beautiful in the strangest places, while his detractors might choose to see its occasional impenetrable gloom as a kind of desertion in itself.

Bliss is eerie because it takes the seduction of those forms and turns it slightly askew; there's something unsettling about the musical equivalent of a permanent smile.

It's short and intense, and accordingly it hits hard and leaves enough of a lasting bruise on you that you can't help but touch it, just to feel the pain again.

In its pinnacles and pitfalls, Schlungs confirms that, even if the results can be cute, communicating with humans is usually the least impressive talent any alien has.

There are a few moments when all the backward glancing becomes a bit heavy-handed, but in their most inspired moments, Blouse find the connection between the limits of outdated technology and the terrible bliss of desiring something impermanent.

New York duo Sepalcure nimbly incorporate current trends but arrive at a sound-- politely mysterious rhythms put to life by haunted vocal samples-- that's familiar and rich.

Short blasts of distortion leave their mark throughout the album, guitar tones evoking the image of exploding paint cans in a mid-size room, adding to the unruly spirit of the band's albums and live sets.

Basically, this is exciting, skilled, fist-pumping, true-to-life stuff made by good-seeming guys who, in the end, aren't afraid to laugh, goof around, or make fun of themselves.

The record also feels like an important moment in time marked on a door frame--it's an intriguing peek into the restless, youthful development of King Krule.

It might be just a mix CD, but Scuba's DJ-Kicks is a landmark both personal and scene-wide.

In his own dogged, idiosyncratic way, he's keeping a neglected strain of dance music alive here, and while the joys are subtle, the more attention you give the mix, the deeper they feel.

Her best music, this album included, has the effect of putting one in the kind of treasured, child-like space--not so much innocent as open to imagination--that never gets old.

It's not clear what Tanton wanted this album to be... It's a loose collection of whims and desires, unrolled over vast expanses of terrain that Tanton could survey for a while to see how they fit.

It's an album of quiet excellence, one that aims to soundtrack your most idle thoughts while romantically demanding your attention.

The Beets' newfound focus on recording quality could have easily highlighted shortcomings, but instead, the band found a way to broaden its sound by recruiting a member who exponentially adds to its worth.

While Milagres may sound like a lot of music fans' favorite bands, it's hard to imagine anyone preferring this record to the real deal.

Unto the Locust does fall off a bit toward the end, but that's largely because the first four tracks add up to just under 30 minutes of the most exciting metal you'll hear all year.

The record keeps moving. Sometimes it moves with warmth, and sometimes with motorik rhythm.

Though this EP plows a narrower row than Judges, Stetson still manages to show us two very different aspects of his visceral minimalism.

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.

Not everything here is as compelling, but the true takeaways (the first three cuts, including the outsized, life-affirming "16 Years") are well worth the misguided ambition and watered down moments that inhabit the EP's second half.

Thanks to Jónsi's impeccable vocals, a rare falsetto that loses none of its power in a live setting, everything remains indubitably the work of Sigur Rós.

Hello Sadness is their fourth straight great album.

Where club culture mythologizes a circuit of endless nights and after-parties, Passed Me By suggests physical and spiritual exhaustion, Sisyphus collapsing beneath the dead-eyed twinkle of the disco ball.

For a record fixated on personal nostalgia, Life Is Full of Possibilities still feels bright-eyed and forward-thinking.

Part Lies makes a good case that their later period has value too, and that the group had raised the bar so high for themselves that merely being very good could be interpreted as a failure.

Beyond the Lightless Sky doesn't meet recent high-water marks set by the Body, Rwake, Baroness, or Thou, but it does seem like the next stepping-stone for Hull.

It's their best release yet, but it it takes some time to sink in.

It's music pleasant enough to carry intergenerational appeal, characterized by a youthful spirit but rooted in a classic sound. Bad Penny, then, is ultimately a solid debut that is still surprisingly safe.

Fahey was a restless listener, tinkerer, thinker, and player--a combination that makes this set fascinating both as a history book and a lifetime listening indulgence.

At 15 songs, Severant is long and occasionally becomes drifty, but at its best, the album is a confident, even inspired, solo debut.

Just as his thematic concerns have become richer, so has the music backing them up.

Impossible Spaces isn't simply the most accessible and immediately rewarding album to bear Sandro Perri's name, it also serves as a handy musical roadmap to its maker's sinuous creative course.

If all of this sounds more geared toward Eno completists and poetry fans than the general listener, that's about right.

This is music that digs deeper and burrows beneath the level of shared associations to discover the sparkling emotional potential of carefully arranged vibrations moving through the air.

Bigger, stranger, and just plain heavier than any Circles disc before it, the first 35 minutes of Empros' empyrean, oblong alien-prog finds the band once again wrestling their grand ambitions into impossible shapes.

Its quality is mostly a testament to Pusha's connections and his ear for beats, but the rapping is sufficiently competent enough that the album never drags, which is less of a backhanded compliment than it might read.

His music nurses a profound ache, and he's now made enough of it that it's become a whole corner to visit, a unique transmission that feels like its own sentient being. As an artist, it's hard to aim higher than that.

The worthy additions in this "super deluxe edition" are nearly all visual.

There are a handful of solid songs on Humor Risk, though, without an outright dud in the bunch-- and if that represents a disappointment, then in the end, the joke might be on us.