It's a beautiful, heavily textured, highly sensual record, heady sugar on the tongue.

White Bird Release, while not as conceptual as For Waiting, For Chasing, almost by default flows as a sort of suite, with each track named after a fragment of this quotation.

We do get to glimpse novel facets of Iron & Wine, like “Milkweed,” whose melody seems to dissipate even as the words leave Beam’s mouth. On the other hand, we also get songs like “Last of Your Rock ‘n’ Roll Heroes,” whose folk-funk groove is an ungainly as its flippancy toward its titular subject.

The Giveon of Take Time experimented with melody and challenged himself vocally; Give or Take stunts that growth in favor of secluding himself in his comfort zone.

While Williams generally sticks to her strengths and suppresses most of her more unsavory musical habits, she maintains her curious reliance on tacky AABB rhyme schemes and lyrical clichés.

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.

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

The result is a sparkling debut for her and one of his most interesting collaborations.

As such, it's perhaps a little less satisfying and immediate than IV, which is still the band's finest album, but it seems to set them up to do anything they want on their next record. And it's also likely to help build their audience outward a bit.

There are moments on Gold and Stone when it seems like these songs long to wander off, to further explore some of these textures and moods, but not a single track extends past the four-minute mark, almost as if out of fear of throwing the album off its tight schedule.

Vermont have figured out how to make these comparatively short, sketch-like pieces work for them. They stretch out just long enough to draw you in and wrap you up in their atmospheres, but they never wear out their welcome.

The shimmering, rapturous hook of the title track, for example, packs a euphoric punch, though the song slightly overworks the objects-as-organs imagery. She has a lighter lyrical touch on opening track “Good Intentions,” a would-be John Hughes movie outro, and the pulsating “Every Ounce of Me,” an I-don't-want-to-fall-in-love banger with synths brighter than the sun. After the opening flush of these songs, the record’s remainder doesn’t quite reach the same highs.

Boeckner most excels when he works alongside someone who provides a stronger contrast. In Wolf Parade, Spencer Krug helps provide that balance; without Boeckner's typical foil, the results remain impressive, if not quite as compelling.

She is deft and adaptive, at once inspiring dancing and melancholy reflection: La Havas is always in motion.

But even as he’s singing his most accessible songs to date, Johnson’s voice remains a highly impressionistic instrument, his words wafting through like smoke rings, disappearing just as they seem to be acquiring definition.

Jason Collett isn't going to blow you away with his imagery, and his voice--while sturdy and appealing-- doesn't stand out from the alt-troubadour pack. What Collett does know, however, is craftsmanship.

Alternately inspired and frustrating, it addresses themes of lost love (and lost chicness) with Queen-size 70s-rock pomp, neoclassical interludes, and one ukulele-based chamber-pop song.

Down with Wilco shouldn't be purchased simply on the desire to hear new Wilco material, but would almost certainly appeal to fans of the Summerteeth era.

The lyrics to Mascis’ songs no longer resonate.

Whiskey Tango Ghosts stays satisfied, to the point of sounding undifferentiated.

Surprisingly personal and emotionally resonant, Ether Teeth is potent inspiration stretched perhaps too thin, but undeniably captivating in its moments of brilliance.

Fans of the mid-1970s lineup should find the most to enjoy on Power to Believe, as it not only finds King Crimson playing with muscular aggression similar to that period, but also revisiting the group improvisation that set them so far apart from other 70s prog bands.

Hotel Morgen may be beautifully produced, but despite its expert attention to detail, few of these tracks truly engage in the way they seem meant to.

Sounding like a profane camp counselor telling stories by the fireside, Rollins' naturally animated raspy voice is the perfect chaperone through eleven tracks of commentary.

It's Svanangen's record in miniature: It preserves what was fleetingly great about Loney, Noir while proving that Svanangen has more tricks in his bag than most people thought possible.

We Are the Champions might disappoint some diehard fans, but it's also proof positive that JEFF the Brotherhood can play with the big boys.

Concert albums never sound like the concerts they're supposed to capture, and with a band whose presence can stifle trite conversation like High on Fire's, it's a disservice.

Revealing Rattling Trees as a soundtrack from the jump puts the Llamas at an advantage and a disadvantage. It helps to explain the structure of the album, which kicks off with an overture that touches on all the melodic themes to be heard later, followed by quick instrumental bits that precede actual songs. But without the full text of the play or a chance to see it before hearing the music, these pleasant-but-slight songs become more negligible.

Many of the songs here sound not just derivative but generic. Compassion still feels like the album that Lust For Youth have been working toward this whole time--it just turns out that the journey may have been more rewarding than the destination.

Madness is a spacious and satisfying record: what it lacks in standout moments, it makes up for in coherence.

When tested to come up with his most insightful work and justify his missteps, he delivers compelling alternate truths. Wins and Losses shows the rap game is much harder to score than one might think.

Unlike a lot of ambient-leaning electronic music, this doesn’t necessarily work as background listening: Its moods are too mercurial, its changes too nuanced. You need to be paying attention to really appreciate the subtle mutations in his sound, yet there’s also something about his queasy tones and grizzled frequencies that keep the listener at arm’s length, emotionally speaking.

Despite such extraordinary highs, Ballet Slippers is not essential. If you’re not a zealot, chances are that these recordings—as with most live records, a tad distant and dependent on the power of suggestion—won’t convert you.

When he’s not over-intellectualizing his emotions, Caesar can be disarmingly raw. If only he didn’t write like a cyborg the rest of the time.

It's fun to hear Black Dice go straight for the jugular throughout the aptly-titled Load Blown, and hit the mark every time.

This might be BMSR's most accessible effort, but if you couldn't get past the vocoder and voodoo before, it's unlikely that you will now.

Thug’s rapping itself, known for its unpredictability, is sharper than ever; his voice feels clarified, strengthened.

In the end, 13 isn't what every Sabbath die-hard dreamed it might be: a true pick-up-where-they-left-off comeback for the group's founding quartet. But the record does belong in the view of every metalhead--not just because such a seminal band still deserves obligatory props, but because, imperfections aside, the record embodies the kernel of the original Sabbath idea.

Make Sure They See My Face is overdressed to impress when easing up may have been the best way to ease back into the public consciousness.

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

All 11 tracks are paced somewhere between 120 and 125 beats per minute; all of them follow pitter-patter house beats; all of them use the same palette of cool jazz samples and Chicago house basslines and warm, watery keys. But if you're a fan of this kind of thing, A Minor Thought proves that sometimes variety isn't the most important quality in an album.

Decent enough—and certainly the strongest project Nas has released in his current era—yet seldom amounting to more than nostalgia bait for the 40-plus contingent. It’s meant to be a celebration of these two rap titans’ respective careers, a goal the album modestly achieves, but it spends so much time dwelling on the past that it’s hard to know precisely what Nas and Primo wanted from the experience.

If in the past [Fallon] managed to transform similar icons [Ginsberg, Van Morrison] into a communal mythology, here it too often sounds like regurgitation, as though the reference were an end in itself.

Ultimately, the album's song-oriented material is the most memorable.

Its hard-psych is ugly, alluring carnival music that warps and melts before us just as we begin to trust it. Through it all though, there’s an undercurrent of humor and fun; Turnbull’s active imagination stretches out for miles and he comes across as a twisted visionary on his most accomplished album yet.

To make the personal sound universal is no small feat, but there’s a fine line between universality and sounding like your songs could be anybody’s.

Catamawr Yards, then, gets better as it gets more adventurous, and it gets more adventurous as it leans more on that backing band.

Whine of the Mystic is musically plainspoken and direct.

The project doesn’t feel uninspired, exactly, just rushed. The best songs on Purple Reign still capture that shivering, waking-nightmare energy.

Campaign outpaces his recent efforts like $ign Language and Airplane Mode but, still, mostly just preserve Ty’s musical bottom line.

This album often sounds like a studio-crafted simulacrum of a full-band performance, every element a bit too polished.

Pastiche is the entire point of Lobes. Maybe its period recreations provide some surface pleasures, but it’s not enough to erase the suspicion that We Are Scientists have turned into indie-rock journeymen, content to dabble in sounds and styles that have just fallen out of fashion.

It is more interested in signaling than embodying. Cyrus can access the best musicians and producers, and she can register a genuine interest in more subversive art, but few songs on her new album feel like they emerge from experience, or a burning desire to explore new sounds.

The bulk of Gorgeous Johnny is unfortunately too earnest and too patient really to go anywhere in particular, preening like a collection of meticulously cleaned Travis demos or, at their worst, an Adam Green album without any of the dirty bits.

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

Alegrias is a pleasant stylistic diversion, another in a long series of non-revelations. That's Gelb's appeal: a guy, a thoughtful guy, who won't press you into adoration, even when he deserves it.

Kings of Convenience would do well to assimilate more of Øye's electronic leanings into their original sound, rather than merely mining sad troubadours past for inspiration and leaving these tracks as sparse source material for the obligatory remix album.

After the Disco is a more cohesive record, and that turns out to be the problem: Mercer and Burton's eccentricities have been sanded down to a single, flattened plane.

She's never been as in control of her voice, an incredible instrument that is as strong as it is attractive. And on The Living and the Dead, it's found just the right setting.

Their songs burst open upon inspection; you must first shrink to their size, but once you do, you'll probably want to stick around for awhile.

Kinshasa One Two is worthwhile both as a cause (all proceeds from sales go to Oxfam) and as an experiment, albeit one that requires some judicious editing to extract the tracks that really count.

Their debut does more than enough to stand on its own, not only ambitious in its own right, but leaving little doubt about Hundred Waters' capability of handling wherever their ambition takes them from here.

It’s fitting the trio recorded it in a repurposed slaughterhouse, because Fall Forever is the work of a band gutting its sound and watching it bleed out.

Fishing Blues’ saving grace, the only song with any real passion and continuity, is one about police brutality written from the perspective of the officer.

Mensa is also writerly. His bars can sound productively picked at and pored over, or clunky and pent-up when overly pampered. The Autobiography splits those tendencies down the middle, casting its star as a remarkable, easy-to-digest rapper with an affinity for half-baked wordplay.

We listen to Weezer in 2016 largely for nostalgic dog whistles. We listen because Blue retreads like "Endless Summer" and "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori" offer Proustian pleasures in spite of their obviously-recycled frameworks, and because the simpering, sweet "L.A. Girlz" is the group's best single since "Island in the Sun."

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

Throughout One Kiss, it's obvious how much Thomas missed writing these stirring, expansive, romantic pop songs for Saturday Looks Good to Me. Even as they sputter through certain emotions, that longing comes through loud and clear.

Those great choruses? Still great, but not when songs are dragged out this long and the payoff arrives right on schedule, about four times a song. It's indulgent, but it's hard to make songs sound this big. Fortunately, it won't be enough to wring-out the magic found in a great many of these songs, and surely won't be able to stall Land of Talk who, with Cloak and Cipher, are progressing quite nicely.

Morrissey has often talked about exaggerating her feelings in song to make up for her youthful lack of experience, but within the lavish Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful is a songwriter whose knack for subtle self-assertion needs bringing to the fore, not dressing up in quirk.

Taken apart from the high expectations set by their debut, Waiting is another strong collection of guitar pop gems from a band quickly proving itself to be a better, more elusive quantity than any easy genre tag might suggest.

In playing it this safe, Summer Camp is just another entry in an increasingly trivial catalog.

Ghostface Killahs is marred by too many tracks that are either curdled by casual cruelty or just tired retreads.

Through all of this chaotic history, DJ Premier is trying to patch together an album that will pass the smell-test, and he does a decent job. Anyone who held out this long for a Gang Starr album will likely be pleased with the results.

[The] Fratellis aren't so much the sound of young Britain as the sound of dad's old record collection.

You can tell that these songs were shaped and sculpted and polished ten times over, the attention to detail and space a welcome step away from the often sloppy clumps of no-fi ruckus clattering up from garages and out of bedrooms everywhere right about now.

As ever, Topley-Bird's voice continues to be a strange and beautiful thing, but it's admittedly less strange and less beautiful when framed against this hopelessly warmed over setting.

Looking like Michael J. Fox clones decked out in garage rock gear, The D4 present aural amnesia with the lyrical complexity of an even less non-ironic Andrew WK.

The formula of acoustic arpeggios, light drumming, tender pianos, and the occasional subtle horn or string section makes for an album that's as slight and gentle as Saltines and mineral water. The boys never deviate from this, and thus Quiet is the New Loud, inane title and all, never reaches higher than saccharine easy listening.

Some may find that the new transparency makes his work a bit pedestrian, the work of another guy with a guitar and a few chords sharing simple sadness. But Ahmed’s senses of song and arrangement remain highly idiosyncratic, where verses spill into choruses and solos in unpredictable fashion.

Cry Mfer is expectedly eclectic, hurdling between indie folk, electro-pop, and one piano ballad for good measure—while the differences may feel jarring, the common thread is Konigsberg and Amos’ unflappable chemistry, and their willingness to put even some of the most difficult sentiments to tape.

LETHAL is, in spirit, a passion project: Rico Nasty sounds like she’s having a blast. Yet certain moments seem dropped in, as if to meet a rebellion quota. .... The album has highlights if you know where to look.

A handful of inspired moments prevent Exodus from fully succumbing to mistakes and whiffs. Swizz seems to be having fun behind the boards.

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

So Sewn Together is gently rustic, occasionally (a bit) heavier than you might expect, and ready for any adult-leaning-but-alternative-friendly playlist. It's also pretty bland, and at worst banally melodramatic in ways that suggest the unfortunate arrival of the Meat Puppets power ballad.

Compared to the last two albums, Zonoscope has precious little guitar crunch, which makes it hard to even call Cut Copy a dance-rock band anymore.

Unlike a truly original record like Ether Teeth, For Good is hardly groundbreaking: it’s an album of warped, melancholic indie-pop that slots in nicely next to acts like Sparklehorse, the Eels, and Radiohead. That’s hardly a bad thing, even if Fog’s current incarnation is a far cry from its more experimental beginnings.

Dave Matthews Band sounds best when it’s weird; the bummer on these songs is how bored the band sounds. But even as a cadre of producers smoothes out the band’s crunchiest tendencies, glimpses of the DMB’s ambitious musicianship shine through. These outliers aren’t always successful.

Ultimately the success of Half of Where You Live lies not in Gold Panda repeating old tricks, but in how he's expanded his repertoire to include new sounds, and his aesthetic proves sturdy enough to accomdate them.

Doom Abuse is most enjoyable when its superficial slapstick is at its most pronounced, which is most of the time.

It's a soft but sinister set of songs-- the Bay Area's answer to the Velvet Underground's self-titled record. Where Sic Alps were once wasted and wobbly, they are now stoned and serene.

On Untitled you get to decide whether you prefer Nas thoroughly exploring half-assed concepts or half-assedly exploring thorough concepts.

If Ida's sound is like a river, the emotions the band conveys are simply stagnant.

Blanck Mass is all about Power excavating new domains while still working within that great glut of voluminous space he's already mapped out.

Ontario Gothic is certainly part of a great story; but as a perfectly satisfying half hour of modest and common dream-pop, it's not much of a story on its own.

Too often the rawk they bring feels terribly labored.

Haven is no parody, nor is it a carelessly made record--it's simply a late entry that tugs the same strings, only to lesser effect.

Jacuzzi Boys is a collection of well-recorded, well-constructed, boring songs.