If Haram was the Alchemist’s entry to Armand Hammer’s world, Mercy is a shared vision. There’s a greater understanding of what they can create together, and a willingness to add other sounds into their combined vocabulary.

His project, like the guy himself, has clearly reached, if not maturity, drinking age at the least. If Alex G keeps it up at this rate, the next round'll be on him.

Through Mitchell and Hamer, these characters, made flat by design and even more by time, spring into full dimension, ache and grieve and flirt, live and die and get born again.

As a single-disc shot, Soul Music is a truly unique and enriching experience: a collection of old sounds from one of dance music's enduring mainstays, re-assembled in a way that sounds fresher than ever.

Ultimately, though, Pressure Machine rarely escapes Flowers’ Brandon Flowers-ness: try as he might—and you do get the sense that he’s trying so, so hard—his usual wide-tipped brush can’t do justice to what should be finely detailed scenes.

The core tension between Tamborello's complex, almost impossibly dense production and Gibbard's cutting voice makes Give Up a pretty damned strong record, and one with enough transcendent moments to forgive it its few substandard tracks and some ungodly lyrical blunders.

His new album Sorry You Couldn’t Make It restores him to a more even keel, examining grief from greater distance while savoring life’s little sweetnesses. Billed as Williams’ country album, Sorry You Couldn’t Make It hits its thematic marks within funkified arrangements.

Plugs 2 maintains a smirking joie de vivre—just so long as you’re on the right side of it.

The music is abrasive, but in its most shocking moments, the band allows beauty to shine through the grime and static.

I quit starts so strong. .... A brutally honest edit might have reconsidered the more stylistically anonymous or lyrically thin concepts.

Musically, this debut is lovingly and exactingly orchestrated with an array of instruments-- not just the usual piano, cello, and drums, but also flute, organ, melodica, and horns-- that subtly shade the songs' emotions. Strangely, however, Hinson entertains few possibilities and seems to rely too heavily on his acoustic guitar to shape the tracks.

Country Funk re-creates this shift smartly, compiling songs by white artists playing with black sounds and black artists playing with white sounds, all without drawing neat parallels between these musical traditions.

While Frog's vocal melodies are often simple, with nursery-rhyme lightness, tuning into their lyrics make them seem more like sugar-coated pills. They establish Smith as both an objector of the failing system and another one of its many idle subjects, free-floating in the rush of disappointment.

The most Chisel-sounding record he's released as a solo artist, returning to stripped-down arrangements and, on "The Angel's Share" and "Little Dawn", his fascination with repetition.

The same indefatigable hopefulness that sets Sexsmith apart also makes Retriever a bit tiresome.

Telling the Truth has its moments of deeply felt poignancy, but its real value lies in its highly creative and endlessly listenable assimilation of soul, pop, rock, and folk signifiers.

Mental Wounds Not Healing is a brutal, beautiful experiment--and a seamless collaboration that sounds more like the birth of a great new band.

Its few missteps are well balanced by a handful of blissful, seismic bright pockets.

Even though 4 has a greater emphasis on instrumental compositions that don't suffer much from the absence of Ejstes' vocals, it's a bit of a disappointment that they only show up in half the songs.

This lyrical simplicity shouldn't obscure the fact that these are sharply constructed songs that take unusual turns. One of Girls' specialities is their willingness to go completely over the top but somehow keep us right there with them.

Change is pleasant and breezy, a cozy place where she can explore the outer limits of her voice. Listening can feel like walking into one of those gallery shows with just three sculptures, where everyone is wearing a tweed jacket and a pair of mustard-colored slacks. It sounds cool, and you feel cool listening to it—but that’s about as much as you feel.

Sumac are at their most compelling on tracks that occupy an LP’s entire side, where disparate elements can clash at length.

If Post Pop Depression’s refined execution has you missing the more unhinged Iggy of old, rest assured, he’s not going down without a fight.

Romanticism occurs in the distance between what might happen and what does, and listening to Before the World Was Big feels like walking through this exalted liminal space.

In terms of a debut record-- and especially given the weight of expectation placed on her to deliver something special-- Alright, Still isnâ??t anything else but a fantastic success.

Cripple Crow is undoubtedly impressive, vastly singular but entirely accessible, and an inspired listening experience where Banhart again proves himself one of the more talented and charismatic forces in modern folk.

The album spends nearly its entirety trying to revive a sound prevalent in 1994.

Yannick Ilunga feels like pop music's future--borderless but deeply rooted, challenging but pleasurable--and La Vie is strong enough to have earned Ilunga the right to call his revolution whatever he wants.