MellowHigh is not disorienting but rather frighteningly familiar.

Nothing much happens in The Soul Is Quick--it's possible to wander in and out, picking up a thread you left dangling a few minutes before. That's where Willner excels, in creating these supple moments where you can get totally enveloped in what he's doing, or check out from the world for a while, or just leave him running in the background and marvel at how slowly he moves through time when your focus returns to him.

Most of the time, they do a pretty good job.

At its best, Love Hates What You Become rattles with perfect intensity. Roberts’ sawtooth snarl is commanding, while John Congleton’s production is hyper-attentive to shifting moods, pulling back to sparse piano or pushing into total distortion as needed.

This is pop music made with synthesizers, but it's not what you'd call normally synth-pop--even when Diamonds builds his minimalist beats into proper grooves, the songs are tense and twitchy.

The four songs are pleasant enough, but in comparison to the unruly sounds on Live in San Francisco, it feels like a bit of an afterthought.

There's a sharp contrast between the twin peaks of Coracle and the rest of its material, especially when they try to pointlessly channel Spacemen 3 circa "Honey" and shackle that sound to some perfunctory beats on "Ecstatic Truth".

So it's not the jaw-dropping affirmation of the Posies' non-break-up that we might have hoped for, but Every Kind of Light is ultimately a decent record spiked with a few classic moments of patent posies pop ecstasy.

How can I is not as thematically coherent or straight-up enjoyable as IF U WANT IT, but it is considerably more inspiring in its experimentation—a challenge, perhaps, to a house-music scene too happy in stasis.

The Century of Self turns out to be every bit as stubborn as its predecessors, even as it goes a certain way towards justifying them.

One could hardly expect a three-disc set of Low's castoffs, demos and flipsides to dazzle.

This is an album's album, magnetic over the long haul, as Raposa's careful, nuanced tension between placidity and chaos accrues force.

Had Cult of Luna attempted to make the same record six times during the last decade, maybe they would have condensed it into a tight 30 minutes by now. That would be neither captivating nor interesting, though, and Vertikal is quite often both.

Its introspection and chest-thumping are just enough to keep the stakes reasonably high.

Sundark and Riverlight is like the thumbnail version: everything compressed, details lost.

Joey too often comes out looking like someone who’s already grown weary of the system, an 18-year-old curmudgeon, a sharp contrast with the energy that 1999 promised.

When the production is as over the top as Peck himself, it can be easy to excuse—if not quite ignore—these affectations, but whenever he’s relatively unadorned, as on “Let Me Drown” and “City of Gold,” his unsteady, amelodic quaver is difficult to ignore. All these tics were on Pony, too, yet there they added to the charm. Here, as part of a grander spectacle, they become a distraction—a nagging element that keeps Bronco feeling earthbound.

NY's Finest, Pete Rock's fourth proper solo album since 1998, has just enough comfortable tricks for the one of the grand old men of 1990s New York production to maintain warm feelings.

The consistency of Solex material is potentially the agent of its own downfall. Play Solex vs. the Hitmeister after Low Kick and Hard Bop and you might think that they were recorded at the same time, rather than four years apart.

If Magic revisits the subject matter of previous career crests, it unfortunately recalls "The Rising" in its sound: Brendan O'Brien returns to the producer's seat, once again shuffling most of the E Street Band to the music's margins and focusing his attention squarely on the Boss.

If you've ever wanted to hear classic cuts from the dawn of hip hop turned into hallucinogenic setpieces that knock and clang like glitched-up King Tubby, Echo Party should justify whatever the hell it is Edan's been doing with his time over the past four years.

The Love Invention introduces “Alison Goldfrapp, house diva,” a pivot she doesn’t totally sell. ... The record’s best moments are its quietest.

The artistry of her voice lies in those moments of versatility and charisma, but they’re too isolated across Joyride to land with the kind of impact they deserve.

Plants and Animals have created something beautiful, even if it's not wholly original.

Planet’s Mad careens through its bungled cyber narrative, tingling and whirring, daring you not to take it seriously. The planet warms, the pop stars reel, and we’re still trying to dance.

If It Feels So Good When I Stop expands his abilities as a writer, it'd be at least interesting to hear a record of his that does the same for his skills as a musician.

It's all terribly charming. Too bad lyrics are straight from soporific bio class margin-notes.

Some songs maintain the attraction of anticipation, hinting at where they might go without ever fully abandoning other options. But others feel more flat than ripe, not so much flirting with tense silence as drifting into empty inertia.

A lot of these songs didn't have hooks, per se, to start with. They expanded and contracted with a kind of cosmic swarm, the percussion providing a delicate skeleton. Loose as it was, without that punctuation, Vulnicura Strings can feel a little formless.

Even when it’s clumsy, Seeking Thrills never feels manufactured. It’s a passion project, a result of trial and error, the singular product of someone learning to write for her own voice.

Rome shows how precise the National’s alchemy is: If Devendorf is replaced with a drum machine, if Dessner confines himself to the piano or quiet noodling, if Berninger rambles too far afield, the whole thing falls apart. It’s Alligator deep cut “The Geese of Beverly Road” where Rome best demonstrates the band’s collective power. On record, it’s patient but stiff, held back by a lo-fi drum recording; live, it’s the massive, sweeping anthem early believers always hoped it would become.

It is a decent entry in her catalog, but by no means essential.

Tracey ensures the album links the UK urban music’s past and present. Which of the mixed bag of styles deployed on AJ Tracey will be further investigated in the future remains a mystery. What is clear is that he has talent and star power for days—talents that could have been better showcased here.

The level on which Russian Roulette works best is experienced in a stoner's sound-design-obsessed bubble, where each crackle of a record and particular melodic line of a funk, fusion, soundtrack, or novelty sample seems to contain a cavernous importance simply for displacing air with sound.

Ultimately, though, after making such an indelible and unique contribution to the language of modern heavy rock, Hamilton continues to show that he's hemmed-in by the style he invented.

Ens tables the queries, at least temporarily, for a strictly personal statement. However you approach its aesthetic beauty, that is a much less satisfying response.

Ignoring the shadow of its predecessor may be difficult, but Love Is Yours is still a compelling album of off-center power pop and is proof that the long-held bonds of Baker and Mulitz remain just as strong.

It might be too humble for its own good, but The Now Now is the rare commercial sojourn that feels like a product of real fascination.

Outside of its immediate context, Lights is a sometimes great, always promising debut. It's an album about leaving home, and it works best when the contrast between the folk singer and the pop production chimes with the tensions between the pull of home and the allure of the city.

The most immediately striking moments on Collapse Into Now are those that sound like explicit retreads of previous R.E.M. songs.

He’s found his voice as a musician, but he’s still searching as a writer, trying to find the sweet spot between autobiographer and novelist. It’s no slight to say that Ewald is still best at his most transparent, singing to the person right in front of him.

While none of these 13 songs attempt the subtle weirdness of “Bad Liar” and the emotional thesis—self-love!—can be a bit one-note, Rare is the 27-year-old’s most cohesive record to date. ... But it’s difficult to come away from Rare with any real perspective on who Gomez is other than that she doesn’t want to be the person she was, whoever that similarly mysterious shadow was.

Skifflin', an enjoyably low-stakes release, feels less like McCombs’ next frontier in tackling the Great American Folk Album than a leisurely sojourn.

With an album replete with Spanish guitar jams, wide-eyed hip-hop, and psychedelic rock k-holes, there isn't much ground left for Raury to cover. Now, he must figure out how to do it all just a little bit better.

Following the "haunted murk" of Amaranthine, Youngs takes a drastic turn on Summer Through My Mind, an album of slightly unhinged but almost relentlessly tuneful Americana songs.

The dynamic between the wobbly production and the sturdy songwriting defines Moon Tides, though I wouldn’t say it causes any tension. Conflict is clearly something avoided within the tenets of Pure Bathing Culture. But it does result in a listening experience that causes more ambivalence than it probably should.

In general-- and despite passages of extreme beauty-- something seems amiss on Exchange Session.

Sun June are interested in daydreams as both playground and prison, and about observing what happens when you collide with the borders of your own interiority. But even in this cloudy, circumscribed world of echoing instruments, where faking and fiction are not only indulged, but necessary, Sun June’s sincerity shines through.

True to its titular subject, Diver constitutes a daring leap for Lemonade, one that, at times, appears destined to result in a belly-flop, but recovers nicely in the end.

Maverick has a more consistent tone than either of Beans' previous records, but it also lacks the stand-outs of its predecessors, settling into bland production strokes that recede behind his always fascinating rhymes.

The move toward emotional exorcism on The Art of Forgetting is nearly as startling as Rose’s previous stylistic pivots. ... But individual songs, as carefully articulated as they are, tend to get swallowed up by the overarching psychological thrust of The Art of Forgetting: This is a mood piece capturing a specific frame of mind, even a particular era.

As an album, Lost Sirens isn't at all an embarrassment: it's a document of a band whose range and reach, rather than power, are what has been diminished.

While they're still a talented band, you can't help but wonder how much more memorable they'd be if they applied as broad a sense of dynamics to their albums as their labelmates.

In the end, though, it’s that feeling of disposability that makes the album’s title resonate more pointedly in the wrong way.

When Hughes tries out more rote pop songs, Cape God can get a little dry. ... Still, the sad world of Cape God is an alluring one, and Hughes’ vocal range is its unequivocal linchpin.

Camila shines when it’s light and breezy, giving Cabello the space she needs to cook.

Don’t Be Dumb is not a blockbuster, and it’s all the better for it.

The stylistic left-turns taken on Darker Days are more hit-or-miss than the songs that explicitly recall the band’s native origins. ... But it’s also surprising, and indicative of the fact that even Darker Days’ most glaring missteps go a long way towards renewing interest in what Peter Bjorn and John are up to these days.

Anno has the feel of a speed-dating workshop. You can’t deny anyone’s enthusiasm or ingenuity in the venture. But, looking at the results, you can’t help but wonder if everyone’s energy was best spent elsewhere.

Unclouded may not push her in a new direction, but it’s marked by a newfound grit and a palpable confidence.

Lean, at some point, gets lost in the wall of sound. And still it feels like the most essential music of his career: no longer an outsider looking in, but an artist fully embodying himself.

On a technical level, these songs offer the best performances of Sampa’s career, but in terms of style and emotion, they fall short. Despite the homecoming mood, Sampa often sounds distant, her rhymes functional and indistinct.

While if i could make it go quiet is an occasionally uneven listen, it’s a strong declaration of conviction. Although Ulven is still fine-tuning her approach, her eagerness to explore hints at promising potential.

Its demanding hour-and-a-half runtime never pushes Dawson’s music to places it hasn’t gone before, even if it’s all executed with his typically handwoven sense of craft. The insights feel slightly stunted, as Dawson trades out the pained, everyday compassion that he’s conveyed so deeply in his more earthbound music for dystopian scenarios that can’t quite settle on a clear premise.

Sadly the two best (read: different) tracks come at the end, a shame because you'll have probably put on something closer to actual music by then.

It's actually refreshing, then, to hear a record like Raphael Saadiq's unabashedly retro The Way I See It, which doesn't try to "update" old soul sounds to a hip-hop world and a white singer.

The band's self-titled debut record is the heaviest, most dissonant music that Moore has put together in recent memory, easily out-skronking Sonic Youth's 2009 LP, The Eternal.

He's a skilled enough songwriter that he could probably pull off an entire sobering album about this stuff. Instead he made a really fun, self-effacing one.

White Denim's inherent restlessness means that all the band's releases feel transitional to a degree, but D's measured restraint points toward the best possible direction for them.

Their second album, Rock Island, shows Palm working harder than ever to unburden themselves of the influences heard on those earlier releases, from Slint and Sonic Youth to Battles and Animal Collective.

On the closing title track, she attempts to wind her own emotional experiences together with her father’s. ... it introduces the album’s most interesting material right at the end. If she had threaded it more steadily throughout, the album would have been a more keen statement than the respectable pop offering that it is.

Delta Kream is best seen not as a retreat to the Black Keys’ beginnings but rather a signpost on their journey. By spending the time playing the blues that’s buried deep in their soul, the Black Keys reveal how far they’ve gone in a space of 20 years.

Good as some of these songs are... they're not quite enough to foment a revolution

Whether Herren is using Surrounded By Silence to spread the word about some of his favorite acts, or to insta-build a portfolio of outside production work, or a little of both, it's a much different-- and far more inconsistent-- affair than previous Prefuse efforts.

Solar Power sounds more interesting when it bottles the jasmine air of Laurel Canyon folk, less interesting when it emulates that sound’s descendants in early-2000s soft rock (Sheryl Crow, Jewel) without any of the hooks or energy of radio pop.

Call it retro in service of sweat and smiles, celebrating the ridiculousness of dance music at its loudest and most unmannered.

K.R.I.T. Iz Here captures K.R.I.T. the same as he always is: perfectly likable, admirably sincere, predictably dependable and dependably predictable.

Despite these moments when PE shows their age, they have largely prevailed with Revolverlution by revamping the very structure of how we digest music.

There is dark humor and interesting angles--even joy--to be found in basic realities and mundane commitments.

Ironically, if there is one thing holding these songs back, it's Lyrics Born himself. Shimura spits sparingly, often just to shake a little life into the imaginary crowd once the groove settles.

In fact, despite the thoughtfulness of the arrangements, it quickly becomes clear that nothing truly surprising will ever happen.

With Dawson, the focus is on the lyrics, with her music tending to serve as a mere platform for sprawling, humorous stories whose serious subject matter contradicts the childlike catchiness underpinning them.

Once the allure of hearing Grace so stripped down wears off, the record begins to sound like what it is: glorified demos for an Against Me! album we'll never get to hear. Even at its most vital, Stay Alive never escapes the sense that the pandemic has one again cheated us out of something better.

While Brettin’s singing is greatly improved--lazy but more present and self-assured--his lyrics are at best inscrutable and in general lacking in substance.

Dyer and Sanchez are the sort of artists who will continue to challenge themselves at every turn. As long as they can keep that boundless creativity from going in a million different directions at once, their listeners will reap plenty of rewards.

The sub-demo quality's most annoying attribute is the blocky digital clipping that happens whenever the voice recorder is overloaded, which is often. So if you don't have a tolerance for cut-rate sonics--and this isn't even the warm analog stuff--forget about it. But if you do, the best songs on BiRd-BrAiNs can sneak up on you.

The impeccable cool of Sadier's approach freezes out political engagement in lieu of a brand of fashionable leftism to match the sofa.

It’s the kind of record for the times when you’re lost in thought about someone you might’ve known for a little while, wondering where they are and if they ever think about you.

Glider 's derivativeness and inertia put a cap on its capacity to astonish, but it has a protracted shelf life. It's consummate mood music, which goes a long way toward compensating for its shortcomings.

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.

Every so often, the album strikes that tricky balance between queasy and cute.

Still, for an album that pushes the limits of how much you can say about so little, the stuff that's said rarely fails to be entertaining in the pure linguistically structural sense.

Get Up Sequences Part One is often sweet, but it only rarely breaks the skin.

Host proves the duo can reinvent themselves within a static framework; by revisiting the sounds of their ambitious, albeit thinly produced debut with bigger and bolder instrumentation, they’ve emerged from the afterglow of 2010s virality as a more robust and rooted ensemble.

Jaar and Harrington’s individual visions only grew more vast in the eight years leading up to Darkside’s return with Spiral, a work of unexpected and even unprecedented familiarity—less a portal than a kiosk existing entirely within the boundaries set by Psychic.

[Listening to the album is like] a reunion with an old friend, but not necessarily a close one. For half an hour, you think "why don't we do this more often?" until it ends and you remember how frustrating they can be.

Even at its prettiest and most accessible, The Western Lands is still a very insular, sometimes uncomfortably intimate album, and listening to it is akin to sharing a tiny but comfortable space in Talbot's closed little cocoon.