Whatever the Weather dazzles by pulling you towards them with the gentle confidence of an outstretched hand.

Something Worth Waiting For is the sound of a band not tripping into place but clawing its way to the heights of its potential.

Giant Palm is a holistic and distinctly contemporary work, always rooted in the landscape of the present, never coming across as postmodern pastiche. Bock is a deeply idiosyncratic songwriter, and Burton is thoroughly attuned to her peculiarities.

This is instrumental music that embraces its undying capacity for uplift, that shakes off distinctions between bathos and pathos, between mawkish and grave, as it blasts upward.

Their tendency to temper their noise with surprisingly sugary pop hooks and wormy choruses is what keeps these songs from becoming pretentious or tiresome.

The Young Liars EP was as fully realized as all the critics suggested, yet now, TV on the Radio sound like a work in progress. Still, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes shows more strengths than mistakes.

On its face a seemingly modest project, At the Dam bursts with ambition and ideas, offering a meditation on the ever-evolving relationship Lattimore has to her instrument and the spaces she shares it with.

Big tracks aside, it's an awfully static record, which gives it the kind of high-art "difficulty" that we critics have been known to like.

Stuart Duncan’s fiddle reinforces the small-town details of “Matthew,” about simply trying to make ends meet while enjoying a little bit of joy in between the trials. That’s a theme common to country and folk music, yet on Country Squire Childers invests it with enough insight and immediacy to make those hardships sound perfectly present tense.

Artificial Dance is enough to make you rethink what you thought you knew about that era--and to make you wonder what else might be out there, just waiting to be rediscovered.

It's fair to say the songs lack the epic sweep of the last couple of albums, but there's still little about Hey Venus! to fault beyond the faint whiff of musical conservatism.

All the Time is sincere so it doesn’t have to be deep—merely an invitation to look beneath the surface.

Coffman doesn’t necessarily transcend the cornerstones she’s sampling on City of No Reply, but she’s not aiming to.

Secret Wars is the first step toward the combination of Oneida's monolithic psych-rock and the numbing riff iteration they've spent so long deriving.

The lust, greed, excess, and anxiety that they grappled with on PAPOTA are still there, but this time, the atmosphere doesn’t feel as friendly or accessible. Splayed out across Bulgarian folk music, trance beats, bruxaria atmospheres, samba, and even bits of nueva ola, Free Spirits feels dialed all the way up.

While the best moments of his previous two solo albums felt like little more than stripped-back versions of solid Hold Steady songs, We All Want the Same Things is more subtle and strange.

Full of tactile details and poetic turns of phrase, the songs on Safe to Run have the feel of road-trip musings, as though she were recording stray thoughts from an all-day drive.

Her work is a testament to the power of even the quietest music to help us feel things deeply, an experience that lasts for a few minutes that we can return to for a lifetime.

The detail-oriented approach that delighted on the Weather Station’s early records reappears on Loyalty.

Felix da Housecat appears to have approached this record in the same manner as other pop craftsmen like Stephen Merritt or Elvis Costello might: as a tireless effort to mine sub-styles and hooks that populate his detail-oriented visions of the perfect song. While that might translate into a record that fails to sit totally comfortably in either the pop or dance section of the CD shop, it's hardly lacking in compositional substance or high-toned flash.

A Wonderful Beast shows again how Johnson’s voice adds layers of meaning to his music--and how he’s kept that skill fresh by finding new ways to deploy it, and new people to help.

The homespun warmth and tribal rhythms of its predecessor have given way to chilly digital perfection--though plenty of organic elements persist, in a way that's crucial--and the album as a whole is more thematically unified.

Planet Her is a kaleidoscope of pop versatility that benefits greatly from a market that currently values eclecticism. It feels both premeditated and casual, well-crafted yet trenchantly frivolous.

Speed is perhaps the point here; whereas 2017’s Strike a Match punctuated energetic pacing with more meandering tracks, Run Around the Sun barely stops for breath.

At its heart, this music might be all about structure, but it’s also about listening to patterns evolve, celebrating the journey that leads wherever the music wants to go.

For all its lavish instrumentation and weighty subtext, however, Babelsberg never overwhelms Rhys’ preternatural gift for writing swoon-worthy melodies.

Tthere’s a palpable narrative here, a sense of loss and stillness, and it reanimates Dalton, if only for a moment. It’s good to have her back.

Malone is an unmistakable presence on his songs, his otherworldly croon an essential element to his genre-hopping sound. Despite the considerable leaps in quality taken on Astroworld, it still doesn’t feel like Scott can muster that level of individuality.