Back Home provides heart-rending moments alongside its punk grit, expanding on Big Joanie’s sound without loosening their bite.

Despite its apparent intricacies, Evangelic Girl is a Gun feels oddly flat.

Empty Hands is at its best when the maximalist arrangements sound big, not bloated, and despite a few clunkers, most of this record plays to those strengths.

As with each of Cox's projects, Let the Blind works best as a swirling, disorienting whole, organizing traditionally abstract styles like graphic-design elements within his unifying vision until they communicate like good pop.

Yours Truly is a very safe record. Mostly written by two of R&B's most mawkish hawkers, Babyface and Harmony Samuels, it’s built on cliché and tradition, and written professionally to a fault.

Perfect Saviors excels in a more conventional sport of measure, expanding the physical capabilities of radio rock just a few degrees beyond the previously acceptable standard.

It's not quite the masterpiece everyone (at least me) was hoping for... but it does deliver on the hype, which in 2005 is almost the same thing.

Bad Neighbor whizzes by in a blunted haze, which might be an insult to another project, but it works well here, when the stakes are low and the mood is most important.

Not to underestimate the experiences behind Reid's lyrics, but the loss of faith that unravels throughout the record comes off a little grave, reminiscent of those fogged post-heartbreak moments where it's impossible to believe you'll ever be happy again.... But there are also beautiful, revealing turns of phrase.

In the sure hands of Pinhas and his comrades, Reverse is big enough to contain emotional multitudes.

Yuck are worth hearing not so much because of who they sound like, but what they've done with those sounds.

Further Out does successfully sound genreless despite being referential of a half dozen genres at once and is presented as a continuous listening experience.

For all of the uneven and uncertain moments of Cascades, it ends on a very high note, and “Landscape” is one of the most unequivocally gorgeous covers imaginable.

It’s clear Molina has grand ambitions here. But by confining them to a flyer-sized canvas, Kill the Lights becomes his first record that will have you not just marveling at everything Molina can pack into a 60-second song, but also lamenting what he might be leaving out.

That Campbell gets away with this broad palette is thanks to her empathetic arrangements and clever songwriting—the pocket chorus of “Ant Life” has the kind of understatement that only experienced writers would dare. She has a knack for making everything sound utterly effortless, as if the songs came to her during an afternoon nap.

The first Savage Mode didn’t become an ATL classic because of celebrity cameos or Billboard numbers; it was because Metro and 21 were at the peak of their powers, and only the producer is close here. 21 Savage is just along for the ride.

We can only hope that, as we enter the 2010s, Embryonic portends yet another new phase for the Flaming Lips--one that's equally as improbable and rewarding as the ones that have preceded it.

DeMarco writes about life--both the heavy moments and the mundane ones--with economy and newfound grace.

Pusha’s released a fair amount of music since joining Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music army three years ago, but My Name Is My Name is really the first release that delivers on the excitement initially engendered by the pairing.

The love in his music is as terrible as it is beautiful, a wrenching act of spiritual determination. Swans make this sound effortless, though, in a fitting end to a remarkable chapter of their career.

The album deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk, using found sound and his own sonorous, humming voice to tease out the complicated harmony of love and power at the heart of Kincaid’s short story.

There’s something special about Agora in how it integrates the immediate pleasure of his pop influences with the patience of his extended works.

On this album, every time it feels as if he’s close to breaking out—and the album’s best songs are replete with moments in which Bridges seems a hair’s breadth away from true passion—he recedes into the background and lets the technical expertise of his studio players, or that timeless-seeming studio itself, take over.

More than just chart her progression as a singer and songwriter, CYRK also sees Le Bon and her four-piece band developing into a crack psych-rock outfit that consistently leads the songs into unexpected places.

With one part arched eyebrows and droll wit, and one part melancholia and sharp social observation, the Sisters' debut is bursting with golden moments.

There are minor moments when Demo's slight r&b hooks miss and when Sway deviates too far from his good-natured strengths, but the lion's share is ace-- thoughtful but not pedantic, funny but not stupid, sincere but not treacly, realistic but not boring.

These songs sound full and finished even in their austerity.

It's clear that he's arranged them with an ear for future extended mixes in which the pop songs fall away, leaving only the shuddering metallic chassis underneath. Maybe, in retrospect, it's his judicious sense of balance that holds him back: a few more extremes, and his next work might really sing.