Murray's Revenge is one of the better gang-unrelated and Dre-unaffiliated records to come from the West Coast since Murs' last one.

While Jepsen makes B-sides markedly better than other artists’ A-sides, she can still falter; some points feel like kissing a crush for the first time and missing the spark.

You have to sit still a while and let the trio’s sonic images wash over you before their musical zombies rise from the dead to terrorize the stereo space. But give this album a fraction of the patience and attention that Wolf Eyes have put into it--effort on a par with their excellent previous effort, No Answer: Lower Floors--and you’ll be glad you stayed up late enough to see how it ends.

Woods' greatest strength has always been songwriting, and sharpening the focus and cleaning up the production has only enhanced the band's welcoming melodies.

MIKE’s rhythmic passion manifests in a firm self-awareness absent from his earlier work. He hasn’t exactly outrun his demons, but his place in the vanguard of New York’s underground rap scene has invigorated him.

More than a continuation of that trajectory, Three Futures feels like a quantum leap. There are more voices, more perspectives.

While Long only uses a steady beat and some deeply resonant chords to convey this revelation, he nevertheless moves like a poet to unearth that heartening sense of truth here.

A Beautiful Life is her best album as a vocalist, as she finds new ways to bend her voice to different styles and sounds.

The wall of sound is strangely, stultifyingly uniform, a thick slab of piano-led clangour--like the din of a bustling room overwhelming a lounge singer’s best efforts.

Their singing is stripped of its former bite, and while they still ramp up the fuzz, it's a much cleaner-sounding album made at Dan Auerbach's Nashville studio. And as a whole, it's very inconsistent.

A testament to the influences of their youth; echoes of Lennon and McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel, Nick Drake, and Fairport Convention glide through the album before tiptoeing into a corner and reappearing a few tracks later.

Throughout it's fourteen tracks, there's no doubting The Weakerthans are smart guys who keep up with literature and politics, but over the course of an entire album the band's ambitious literary posturing drowns in the bland songwriting and lack of captivating hooks.

There's not too much here to knock the sprinkles off your ice cream cone, but Twice is an impressively consistent and well- crafted collection.

Goddamn if he doesn't sing like a cranky Neil Diamond here...

The Book of David is a pleasure-first listening experience, and Quik deploys each of his tricks with a showman's flair.

Like Cunningham's entire oeuvre, each track unwinds into a tapestry of intense sonic detail if you just give it a little time to recline.

Cody finds a more grown-up Joyce Manor, but every track contains enough blunt expressions of existential despair to tie them to their angsty past.

While one occasionally wishes that Frankie Rose could get a few paces further out from under her own shadow, the best of Cage Tropical does something similar, taking her own retro influences and using them to leapfrog her way out of a creative rut.

Though it is certainly a darker listen, III is largely about the same concepts as its predecessor: unquenchable desire that eclipses reality, the ruthless blow of rejection, and the struggle to remain afloat even when “humanity equals misery.”

Like all agreeable ambient music, it burbles away in the background, invisible right up until the moment you notice it--a little like the ambient revival itself.

The Unseen in Between may be his most stationary album, with as many songs about being somewhere as getting somewhere.

The result is one of the most structured, deliberate releases of Frisell’s career, a diaristic set that no one will ever mistake for a genre study.

As he expands his sound beyond genre confines, he can sell a multi-part epic like “Jake’s Piano - Long Island” and a complexly orchestrated slow-burner like “Ticking.” But he doesn’t yet have the same range in his writing, lyrically or melodically.

Glitter and Doom Live is not simply a souvenir of a tour most fans didn't attend but a de facto greatest hits of Waits' fourth decade of music, during which his gnarly adventurousness didn't wane but only intensified.

The most appealing thing about this record is that this band, having created a brilliant and moving sound, returns to it again for another 38 minutes.

Monch might flounder into familiar indie territory if his music weren't so lucid and lively.

This is a lazy-Sunday-hang of a record: cozy, congenial, and only periodically exerting the energy to get off the couch.

As the band’s tightest, most approachable album, Standards feels like Into It. Over It.’s answer to Transatlanticism, a record that, while not quite a commercial crossover, feels like a trial run for one.