Dove’s punchy ruefulness benefits from sparkling production by Tom Gorman and Paul Q. Kolderie, with whom Donelly has been working since her time in Throwing Muses.

On Good Thing, Bridges has kept his heart on his sleeve but updated his parlance to something a little less affected, a little more believable.

While Lost Friends’ slow-building ascents and soaring choruses function as necessary release valves for the unrest bubbling up from Joy’s lyrics, over the course of 12 tracks, a certain identikit quality takes hold.

Lanois and Funk demonstrate that even the briefest pause can reveal a more becalmed state of being lying just beneath all the noise and bustle.

Its pieces are beautiful and always different, and yet always the same, generic without losing character.

On Beyondless, Iceage reach for grandeur with more tenacity and suspending energy than ever.

There are elegant touches like this on each of Hollow Ground’s 10 songs, resulting in an album whose familiar melodies don’t demand your full attention but earn it anyway.

Rebound isn’t seismic—longtime fans will have no trouble cozying up to many of these songs. There are elements, however, that separate the album from its predecessors and suggest some tentative movement toward a new way of working.

If Knock Knock is a more conventional album than the more psychedelic and twisted Amygdala, it’s also a more affecting one. The fact that some of the guests appear more than once (Murphy gets two turns, as does Sophia Kennedy, the vocalist who released her strong debut album on Pampa last year) lends cohesion, and the production is extra lush.

At times it’s almost impressive how long an album called Beerbongs & Bentleys can go without cracking a smile. It is more assured and impressive than its predecessor, Stoney, but it’s also more exhausting.

Monáe has given us a pop record that feels gleefully youthful, perhaps even the album she wishes she could have had as a teen in Kansas City. The songwriting is precise if not always flawless.

Taken together with her other albums, it’s a part of a motley crew of modes that is shaping Princess Nokia into a great experimentalist. On its own, it lacks the completeness of a coherent project of genre hybridization, and lacks a standout single on the level of, say, “Tomboy” or “Kitana.”

There’s a palpable joy to these performances that distinguishes this album from its two immediate predecessors, even as its kinship with Roll With the Punches and Versatile underscores how Van Morrison’s latter-day music is all about the present moment.

Grid of Points burrows back into ambiguity, the vocal harmonies overlapping in foggy indeterminacy even when they are unaccompanied by any other instrument. And yet they are more heavenly than ever, Harris’ melodies drifting in almost liturgical directions.

Lavender ripples with the densest, most expansive production yet recorded under the Half Waif name. The album’s lyrics might stand out first because they are sung so clearly and with so much urgency, but Plunkett accomplishes a difficult feat in welding her voice to her backing tracks so that each song emerges as a singular organism.

The album suggests a full story, but it still seems paradoxically fragmentary. After its slow burn fades, after our hero has returned home, what’s best about Conquistador might be the sense of possibility it poses.

Forth Wanderers, their Sub Pop debut, feels like the end of the montage and the beginning of something real.

While Twerp Verse offers no tune as stick-like-glue as Foil Deer’s “The Graduates” or Major Arcana’s “Plough” it offers compensatory pleasures.

There are ways to hear this album as both damning or redemptive, depending on the perspective. But it is never sanctimonious, and it is constantly breathtaking.

A wonderfully poignant album that leaves you wanting more, The Four Worlds is proof that restraint can sing louder than excess.

They may have no trouble getting creative musically, but their lyrical content isn’t quite as inventive.

Competent but not always compelling.

It’s substantive enough to warrant its extended genesis and boost Sleep’s legacy, not just reaffirm it.

The bluntness of Monroe’s lyrics lends depth to the self-portrait she sculpts in these songs, revealing just how much she longs for and cherishes human connection.

4/876 is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises.

Primal Heart is a collision of hard electronics with light sprinkles of au courant R&B making for Kimbra’s most mainstream statement yet. ... However, her most ambitious efforts don’t quite reach their apex, causing her somewhat cocky assertions to land flat.

If the original recordings of Tonight’s the Night are a honey and hash-soaked lamentation, Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live is a salve for such palpable tragedy in the grand tradition of a live communion.

The back half of the album becomes harder to pin down, as Ras G switches up styles every few minutes.