So obviously the biggest difference between the Last Shadow Puppets and Turner's main gig is in the lyrics. Though less immediately noticeable than the majestic production, the change in the scale of Turner's songwriting is ultimately more profound.

The album radiates a deep appreciation for the communities and history behind the global rise of dance music—and, as WITH A VENGEANCE’s title implies, a successful campaign to enshrine SHERELLE in its ranks.

Live at the Fillmore sounds and feels vibrant and inviting, and it is curated with obvious attention and care.

His songs are about joy and hunger and reflection and fun. Not one of them feels as if it’s trying to save hip-hop.

If you can resist getting totally stranded in its opiate-friendly atmospheres, the joys of 936 are easy to pin down.

If LUMP is a commentary on the commodification of art and the self, then its final minutes suggest the duality of music as a commodity.

The Charm... is surprisingly great as conciliatory moves go.

If the band’s homespun and deliriously catchy 2014 compilation record Sunchokes captured the kinetic energy of a sweaty college party, The Refrigerator is the sound of a 10-year reunion, subdued and sentimental, reflective and a little restless.

If Stormzy’s last album, and the pressure to speak for a generation, weighed heavily, then This Is What I Mean feels lighter, freer.

Star Wars is their strongest record in a decade.

Though Everything, Everything is unquestionably a swan song for the Emerson years, it's far from a mopey affair. In fact, it tackles early tracks like "Rez" and "Cowgirl," and pumps them up with megawatt power.

Surrounded is polished and persuasive enough that everyone should give it a try.

Long rows of evenly pulsing notes paired with streaming harmonies make for a low-stakes default mode. But when an album's mild downsides are all relative to its overwhelming strengths, it's hard to complain.

For Owens, loops—both electronic and lyrical—are a grounding presence, like a chant uttered in a meditative state: a simple phrase or pattern that functions as a conduit to another world. With Inner Song, Owens seeks to take the listener to a place of healing, finding solace in the shelter of a repeated chord progression.

It’s when he sticks to the highly personal that Curry’s music is devoid of all cliché--the power of his performance, the veracity of his pen, and the color of his wordplay make him an expert at voicing the tribulations of this doomed condition we call being young.

Not to malign their previous catalog, which certainly trumps most of today's post-punk regurgitates, but Family Myth proves fewer studio tricks lead to tighter songwriting.

Despite a culminating victory lap in which riffs from the group’s past albums come back for a curtain call, the album doesn’t feel like a nostalgia trip. Instead, it’s a consolidation of the strengths that this band has been amassing over its long life.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes doesn’t just broaden Metro’s sound, it’s a showcase for artists relieved to be working with Metro again, because that’s when they are at their most creative. ... Metro stumbles a bit when he deviates from that Atlanta sound.

Staking his place as a fully formed singer, composer, and producer with All Our Knives Are Always Sharp, Njoku unsheathes his blade.

One of those albums where a couple of creative renegades flip out over every stylistic possibility available to them, overextend their ambition, and still come away from it making its missteps sound exciting.

Several of the new versions on Crime Rock just amount to tighter, better-quality recordings. In other cases, the changes are quite dramatic.

Ultimately comes out a very solid if not revelatory record.

Tapscott's specific words can get muffled, but more often than not that only helps to add a welcome sense of mystery to The Blue Depths, as for the first time it seems Odawas know precisely where they want to go and how they plan to get there.

Part vibraphone-laden, Chicago-style post-rock, part electronic minimalism, and part pure melodic exploration, Happiness occasionally manages to slip into an immensely blissful groove.

Metals is a vivid evocation of a place that touches on fittingly vast themes about nature, love, and life itself.

Her lyrics as well as her performance may strike some listeners as overly literary, but there is method in these mannerisms. That unwieldiness becomes one of the album’s most appealing traits.

LaVette is a proud interpreter, and even back in her earlier days she was covering David Bowie and Neil Young, but on Scene of the Crime her choices are a little less NPR-friendly than they were on the all-female critics darling roster of "Hell to Raise."

Reason in Decline doesn’t pose. Instead, these 10 tightly coiled songs rightfully treat those former concerns—bitter character studies of lovers and townies, jilted analyses of the overcrowded underground—like Clinton-era trifles, conflicts of no consequence in a time of autocrats and prospective apocalypse.