It’s wish fulfillment as transportative as any of the prog fantasies White Reaper’s idols put to tape. On You Deserve Love, the risk and rewards are lower: White Reaper aspire to be a very good American band.

The run of “Milkweed,” “Detritivore,” and “Aqaba” is quintessential Shearwater in both their titles and the tendency to let the middle of their albums coast by like a warm, welcome breeze.

It's no great discredit to the album to say that Kaleide peaks with its first song. The remaining material rarely pushes Harkin to the dramatic heights of "Still Windmills", and the singer is guilty of leaning too heavily on vague metaphors. But Goodmanson's unfussy production is the ideal complement to this young band's fidgety energy.

At times the honesty on Watch This Liquid Pour Itself might be its worst fault, but it’s usually its finest quality.

The new songs, meanwhile, feature a return to form for Belle and Sebastian, whose more recent releases have ventured away from their trademark style of “puckishly depressed” and into explorations of the dancy, the jazzy, and, occasionally, the kinda bad.

That's ultimately what Stoltz brings to the table with Double Exposure--moments of pop greatness, but also overlong tracks and too-generic delivery.

Like the Blood Brothers, Take Me to the Sea is united by Whitney's voice, impossible to ignore as it slides between seemingly any style that could be described using the verb "wail."

The point where minimalist becomes ephemeral is a dangerously easy one to cross, and it's hard to think of a better line-straddling example than the Carbonated EP.

Human Voice gently nudges him back into the spotlight to speak his mind alone, and even if his voice isn't the most exciting and innovative one in today's electronic music landscape, it is unmistakably his own.

There’s a great lightness to each of Olsen’s covers, an attempt to abandon the feet she has planted on the ground. But the songs are rendered so fluffily that it’s hard to hear any of their structural elements; instead, the collection sounds more like a series of beautiful ooh-ing.

As a proper third album, Marci Beaucoup doesn't stack up to its precursors, but as an advertisement for Marciano's services as a beatsmith, it's much more successful.

The 35-song soundtrack runs to nearly two hours, and the very elements that make it work as a score—the repeating melodic motifs and moments of lingering disquiet—make it a difficult listening experience. Much like the film’s demonic dress, it feels at times like In Fabric owns you, more than you own it. Still, scattered throughout are numerous examples of the melodic dexterity, genre agnosticism, and rhythmic poise that made records like Hormone Lemonade and Emperor Tomato Ketchup such shape-shifting delights.

Even if his latest offering is considerably dimmer than his most golden works, it’s still a confident assertion that, even at 77 years old, his pursuit of the sun’s life-affirming light shows no signs of wavering.

It’s great the band was able to find a throughline between the comfortable and the experimental this time around, but on Nabuma Rubberband they let go of a little too much of themselves in the process.

Joli Mai is loaded with effusive energy and expertly executed ideas, but alongside the specifically tailored Fabriclive 93 mix, Daphni’s new album feels extraneous--an unnecessary step for a DJ quickly reaching the height of his powers.

The most sincere moments on Wild Wild East are the ones least weighed down with meaning.

Perceived loss of self is a risk Desveaux herself takes in making music so largely bereft of easy cultural or regional signifiers, yet the keenness of her songcraft makes these hard-won, universal sentiments far more rewarding than most lazy splashes of local color.

The band’s most streamlined, expansive, and melodically sharp release yet.

Since Vitriola is meant as a soundtrack to the horror show of daily life, much of it sounds like a second-wave emo band falling down a flight of stairs and hitting every one. And it’s not just the violence of Cursive’s early years that returns—their softer moments have never sounded so beautiful or vulnerable.

So The Floodlight Collective is a mostly elegant listen, and one whose failings are part of its theme: Like a vague recollection, it's still a little hard to hold onto after it's over-- pretty albeit somewhat ephemeral.

Although it's unlikely that Stuart David will ever become as gifted a songwriter as Stuart Murdoch, he's crafted a distinctive sound with this band. The Geometrid serves as a charming, if slight, pleasure, but with more time to devote to the project, Looper may yet create a more substantial sound.

At its very best, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love captures this feverish lightning-in-a-bottle energy. But where Kushner’s many moving parts lock into place, spurring each other on toward a harrowing, rapturous climax, the songs of Chris’s album never quite cohere.

Every track here has successful passages, but frustratingly, they too often turn out to be detours or trap doors. In general, the less cluttered and more focused their tracks are, the better they turn out.

The ease of his melody is matched by his own ideas. It might be a small notion, but that’s where Woods operate most efficiently, for a moment achieving the solidarity that Love Is Love desperately seeks.

Newman's melodic gifts continue to serve the emotional core of his songs well, but he pulls his punches with opaque lyrics and too many wheelhouse-sticking power-pop cuts that keep Streets from achieving the impact it could have had.

There are no obvious singles or earworms, but more so than Petals for Armor, FLOWERS for VASES takes a step closer to healing.

You may not feel pleasure all the way through And They Turned Not When They Went, but if you're drawn to the bizarre, inconstant emotional terrain of late-night wakefulness, you'll find something honest.

Throughout this album, the band generally keeps within its sweet spot of familiar, wistful progressions complemented by Kim’s interior detailing. But that’s not to say it’s without brave moments.

For fans who hopped off the bus, Come Ahead is interesting enough to hop back in. It’s also good enough for newcomers who may have discovered Primal Scream via Dua Lipa’s endorsement of “Loaded,” or Gillespie’s participation in one of the past decade’s better memes.

No No asks a lot of listeners, that we unpack all of these fun inferences even as we're being assaulted by the 143 different sounds Co La casted into the vestige of a snare drum. No No, on balance, is worth the effort.

Some Cold Rock Stuf makes more sense as a collection of scattered concept pieces than a unified statement.

The moments when the music matches the intensity of Lydon’s singing are exhilarating.... Other mid-tempo tunes on What the World Needs Now don’t fare as well.

Set Free is ultimately just another American Analog Set album-- and probably the least essential at that.

Most listeners with a soft spot for those early-90s Lemonheads records will get a good spin out of The Lemonheads.

Cults' sophomore album sidesteps presumptions about a rising, major-label band and admirably finds contentment not in what they could be, but what they are right now.

Distinguished by her sure-footed stride, Quit the Curse sounds like an album by an artist who at last knows where she’s going.

It's here, about halfway through this four-disc set, that most people will turn off Join the Dots.

This is a band whose effortlessness can misguide you into thinking they’re not trying. Don’t be fooled.

While the closer may not immediately resonate with a listener coming down from 25 minutes of introspection, it succeeds in ejecting you from the album, almost as if Slow Pulp is rolling the credits and yelling, “show’s over, folks.” It puts the preceding melancholia into perspective, no longer dire.

Beast is contemplative and forgiving, a means of burying one relationship to commit to another, and Ritter nicely evokes the excitement and resignation of such a transition. On the other hand, distance is distance, and much of the album is too cool, too levelheaded, too past tense.

This is rock music that has come almost completely unstuck from the blues, with a sleek, relentless drive subbing in for swing.

May stand as the band's most focused disc to date.

[No quote available.]

Ballads were a staple of H.E.R.’s initial five EPs, and she again uses them frequently on Back of My Mind, for better or worse. Nearly all of them are simple and pretty. ... The choices she makes—from the glossy R&B production to favoring vocal riffing over a good hook—feel altogether safe, like she’s protecting a legacy she was born into.

The strangeness and slightness of Instrumentals 2015 is admittedly refreshing in our age of overdoing it, and it does fit with the whisper that is Pearce's overall career arc, but when placed next to Flying Saucer Attack's best music, it still comes off like a faint echo.

It's not all great--'You Want History' can't overcome rhyming "mystery" with "history" or its leaden coda, for example--but it is at least as good as their debut, if not just a tick better for its relative dynamic and tonal variety.

White Rose Movement's "electro-clash" 80s sound basically candy-coats Nine Inch Nails industrial and metrosexualizes the lyrics, making Kick pretty redundant.

Most of the songs on Mind Control are worth a few spins, but nothing on here quite matches “I'll Cut You Down” from Uncle Acid's 2011 album Bloodlust.

It is an alluring collection that hints at greatness but halts at achieving it, instead teasing listeners for its sequel.

Connected is far from being the first record to make a virtue out of spinning in place, but there's a discipline and control here that's rarely heard, a feeling of two musicians utterly dominating their craft.

Lupe's dexterity remains his greatest asset.

There are albums born of a burning need to create and express, and there are albums that exist simply because the artist had the spare time and inclination to make them. Magic Sign never pretends to be anything other than the latter.

Intellectually sophisticated but prone to using primitive musical effects to convey such messages, Warwick’s results vary wildly after that.

The fact of the matter is that Lineage isn't the first record to sound like Lineage.

Early Buck albums had all the professionalism of a late-night weed experiment, but Terfry is growin' up and it shows.

Luckily, you don't have to write genius lyrics to make reliable, stadium-ready rock. The tics of weirdness that made this band so initially affable may be gone, but they're now a cut-rate pop act instead. Nothing wrong with that.

It's not exactly Sic Alps Mk. II, but there are some clear similarities. The record's eerie psychedelic pop strikes a similar balance of order and chaos, with songs that rev up only to be subverted by detours into dissonance and static.

The first disc, a June 2005 concert at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, starts out lifeless, with little variety in Smith's voice or Shields' metronomic guitar. Halfway through the hour-long performance, things pick up, as Smith yells fervent imperatives over shimmering waves from Shields' amp.

Spanning an obnoxious 82 minutes, the record goes through several musical and thematic phases, but the overall atmosphere is bitter, petty, worn-down. It confuses loyalty and stagnation, wallowing in a sound that is starting to show its limits.

Another brisk half-hour of barbed power-pop tunes that sting so sweetly that it’s only after the fact you consider you might need a tetanus shot.

You'll find something to latch onto in every song, but you won't always walk away from Negotiations with its choruses in your head; it's a more consistent record than its predecessor, but more orderly, too, and the highs just aren't quite as high.

Japan had to go through the period of growth that resulted in Quiet Life, straining against the limits of their abilities as songwriters and musicians in order to move beyond them. As heard in the context of the group’s history, this album, however imperfect, feels rich with possibility and promise.

Dog Whistle functions best when Show Me the Body are able to capture the vitality of their live sets, as well as the sheer noisiness of New York itself.

Newman’s fastidious, occasionally fussy writing ensures a level of quality control as he tinkers around the margins, even if his bandmates never quite catch the spark.

Shine's lingering impression is that of several talented cooks crammed into a tiny kitchen, each crafting something delicious with little regard for the meal as a whole.

To Dreamers is one of Stoltz's most satisfying efforts to date, sounding bolder and more invigorated than nearly anything before it. Yet, when Stoltz sneers "Do you want to rock'n'roll with me?", exactly who's doing the asking gets a little lost in the tune's glammy shuffle.

Some of its songs are so intimate that their meanings seem all but impossible for an outsider to parse. But in the moments when he decides to push his music out into the light, Thorpe's self-searching takes on a shape we can all recognize.

She is at her most winning when she sounds like she is having fun.

On the new Party Store, the band leaps even further into uncharted territory, turning in a full hour of classic Detroit techno covers.

If the ambiguous quality of their sound sometimes makes it hard to become emotionally invested in Gardens & Villa, in Lynch, they're blessed with a singer who has remarkable presence and poise.

Everything is intricately wrought and calculated, perhaps in an overly accommodating response to fears of linearity. This fashionable awareness lends an almost palpable weight to the sound. It succeeds in adding depth and texture to the album, but sometimes overshoots the mark.

Despite the Album Leaf's studied textures and buoyant songcraft, there is a crippling lack of tension inherent within Into the Blue Again's careful constructions.

On 'Electric Feel,' MGMT pull off lithe, falsetto electro-funk surprisingly well. There's not much to the song aside from a Barry Gibb vocal and limber bassline, but within the context of the rest of Spectacular, it makes perfect sense.

She commits to pop music’s campiness to convey the way love and heartache magnify even the most fleeting memories into heart-wrenching melodrama. It’s an interesting pivot, but much of the music feels too aimless to effectively deliver these intense emotions.

All this variety is to be commended, but a lot of the tracks here sound like unfinished sketches.

It would have been a lot more of an interesting listen, however, had he decided to really get his hands dirty in feedback and digital fuzz.

The key to enjoying an Aloha record is to hone in on the sounds and textures as much as the stories. With that in mind, Acres provides plenty of subtle rewards.

The result is idiosyncratic pop-rock appealing to geeky outsiders and scene lifers that's perennially in short supply, largely by design.

Damaged is lovely but dull in spots, lacking the fuck-all adventurousness of previous albums.

Real Emotional Trash is determinedly unified, even if it isn't always clear to what ends. At its best, the record hints at opening a whole new musical world for Malkmus--one in which his well-worn style is effectively played down in the service of a mighty rock'n'roll band.

Recurring Dream's a slinkier-sounding record than its predecessor: the songs are more spacious, less prone to snarling, and they've lowered the volume on Black Earth's stuck-between-stations fizz.

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.

Cry Cry Cry can be heard as an equal to At Mount Zoomer or Expo 86: a solid record, throwback indie rock by default, powered less by defiant belief than muted reliability.

Such frequent attempts to elevate the banal into the meaningful ultimately keep Release the Stars from achieving any significant momentum and only add weight to the notion that Wainwright's shaky aim-- rather than his lack of talent-- might be his biggest downfall.

Blumberg is a capable, if not particularly distinguished guitarist. He is also a songwriter with an unusual gift for sticky, familiar hooks and the issue here is that Unreal puts far more emphasis on the former.

While Waiting on a Song is casual in execution, it’s extremely intricate in construction, with each disco-string sweep, brass-section stab, and razor-sharp acoustic strum deployed with push-button precision. At times, the album feels less like a traditional singer/songwriter affair than a business card for Auerbach’s studio.

Even if the lame parts of BlakRoc are more noticeable than the enjoyable, what really sticks out is how easy this all feels--- not once does anything feel like awkward ambassadorship.

A strange, slow fog settles in over the course of the record, which comes to feel like an album-length exercise in torpor, clouding over some unabashedly gorgeous turns by Mockasin.

The album is also a much more modern-sounding pop project, though it similarly owes its success to the chemistry of its creators.

Nevertheless, as much as Bubblegum evidences a lot of thought and effort on the part of the band, it still has the sound of musicians going through the motions and sticking too close to their formulae.

When Kill Them With Kindness works it's because of Fein and Wraight's keen attention to melody and the way their voices complement one another and inject these songs with warmth and emotion.

“Violet” is one of a handful of moments where the comforting atmosphere starts to crack—it hints at a more compelling album actively at war with its own themes.

Speak isn’t exactly a step forward or a step back, but more to the side, onto a new path with plenty of potential, as well as room for future improvements.

Accelerate's broad strokes, big riffs, and beefy production (the album was reportedly recorded in "just" nine weeks) are admirable, as is the disc's concision, but its success is still more as a step forward than a slam dunk.

Martsch misses the opportunity to commune with Johnston’s music, or to do anything with it, really. On the 11 songs here, he resists the urge to plug in his distortion pedals and sail away.

It's a charming album from an artist with an obsessive/compulsive love for writing shambolic, vaguely psych-infused rock songs but it doesn’t, distinguish itself from any number of similar records from this sphere over the past few years.

There's something admirable about a record that proves it's possible to remove grit from adult contemporary pop.

Portions of Shame, Shame might prove to be just a little too effervescent--certainly not a bad thing for a band with a track record that usually ran contrary. The important thing is that these songs hit more than they miss, occasionally with shimmering resolve and a couple of really big choruses to back it all up, often quite memorably.