On her fifth solo release, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, she may be maturing, or more vulnerable, or more vulnerable to her maturity. But regardless, the sheen gets slicker and her music gets duller as the time passes.

While the subject matter of POST- ensures its relevance and substance, much like everything else Rosenstock has ever done, it also sounds like the most fun thing one could possibly do. It’s a motivation to, at the very least, get out of bed.

On Reservation, Angel Haze shows herself to be the rare rapper who has copped a great deal of contemporary popular hip-hop and R&B and come out the other side as purely herself.

The ravishing delight Tumor brings to this character is what makes their music so affecting. Yves is a performer whose roles, played with the utmost rigor, always find a way to linger in the memory.

Like the best artists from the South, Goodman renounces perfect symmetry and leans instead toward the crooked and out-of-focus. These are qualities embodied by the characters who populate her songs.

Gibbs skates over these beats, effortlessly gliding in and out of the pocket. Even the moments of stark contrast feel natural.

This ambient music is not psychedelic. It never evokes outer space or the cosmos or, for that matter, the natural world, even when it uses the sound of water. It’s music for the indoors, music for doing things, there for you if you want to listen closely but also content to exist on a subliminal plane.

Not particularly easy work. But with Big Time—her clearest and most radiant music—Olsen set out to more deliberately foreground the virtue of ease.

The new mastering job, by Frank Arkwright working with Marr, actually is really good: loud but not bomb-level loud, clear, and airy. (Hatful of Hollow, in particular, is dramatically improved from its previous incarnations.) On the other hand, Complete is a profoundly inaccurate description of this set.

I'd assume Bay of Pigs' disco diversion to be just that in the long run, but after the relatively wagon-gathering summary of "Trouble in Dreams," this certainly feels like a break and, perhaps, the first blush of something new. Cheers to that.

All the more for you to swim around in. And those peaks certainly take you higher when the builds have been teased out to the limit.

Isn't Anything crystallizes MBV's unique dynamic.

Ancestral Recall, aTunde Adjuah’s ninth studio album as a leader and his most progressive statement of stretch music yet, is a testament to the contemporary flexibility of the jazz tradition; at times, it also constitutes a hyperspace leap out of it.

It offers a window onto the playfulness of his improvisations and, in a structure that mimics the range of an actual Prince album, shifts nimbly between up-tempo songs and ballads, sweat and tears, near impossible to stay sitting still while listening.

Time and again he suggests that freedom itself is an act of improvisation, of imagination, that begins now: “We write our own story.” It’s in the context of these bigger ideas that Com lands some of his biggest gut-punches of all time, while rapping in his simpler, prize fighter mode.

Encapsulating and elevating the best of Destroyer's back catalog, Destroyer's Rubies serves as a potent reminder that the intelligence of Bejar's songs has never obfuscated their emotional weight.

The best moments on this record arrive when Harding’s playful approach to words syncs up with her playful approach to sound. The logic driving the end result may remain hidden, but its allure is undeniable.

The sparse and largely unobtrusive music, and Jurado’s wanting vocal range place the emphasis on storytelling, one his strongest assets. The results, however, are a mixed bag.

What makes Painful so eminently approachable after all these years is that it manages to sound like a fully realized, band-defining statement yet unpretentiously off-the-cuff at the same time. It’s a feeling reinforced by the overflow of material available on this reissue.

MAGDALENE is visceral and direct, but despite featuring a trunk-thumping Future collaboration (“holy terrain”), this is not a play to make pop music in the charts-humping sense. It’s a document of twigs’ marked achievements in songwriting and musicality as she elucidates her melodies without sacrificing her viewpoint.

The songs are occasionally great—“Ghosts” and “Burnin’ Train,” in particular—and sometimes they feel remarkable just due to their old-school presentation.

This isn't the Roots' most accessible album, and it's definitely their most downbeat, but it comes from a place that isn't always easy to dwell.

It’s just a meticulous document of a band whose hedonism kept them from restraining their absurd level of mastery. So here: have Zep as they both wanted to be and eventually were.

From a production standpoint, the record is nearly flawless. The bulk of YHLQMDLG strikes a balance between reggaetón’s dembow riddim and an island-influenced Latin trap palette.

Across these 102 tracks, he sounds as devoted to his work as ever, puncturing a style of music built to offer definitive answers with his own heavy brand of cosmic nihilism.

Rejoicing in the Hands establishes Banhart as a major voice in new folk music. Not only does it improve on the promise of his earlier releases; it effortlessly removes the listener from the context of the recording.

While undeniably beautiful, Vespertine fails to give electronic music the forward push it received on Björk's preceding albums. Rather than designing sounds never before imagined, the album merely sounds current, relying on the technology of standard studio software and the explorations of the Powerbook elite.... Still, Vespertine makes for an intriguing listen, and manages to hold its own after hours on repeat.

The most disheartening thing about From a Basement on the Hill is its plainness-- it's neither a perfect record (and not one of Smith's best) nor the kind of colossal disaster that could be angrily pinned on money-hungry handlers and desperate fans.