Part Three sounds much better. The songs are more linear and of a piece: dank bop compositions that often gnarl up in the middle and leave no room for extended solos. The pace and form of their songs no longer springs from jams, and there’s new tension and spacing to show for it.

Thankfully that mixture of modesty and reticence didn't endure, because Zayna Jumma is a densely layered piece of cultural cross-pollination that consistently spills over into outright joy.

Some might lament the fact that so many tracks feel like teasers pointing toward something longer and more developed, with most of these two- or three-minute ideas fading out as soon as they get a good, eerie groove going. If so, you can take comfort that he's given himself so many possibilities for album number three.

Nothing here is going to replace “Boys in the Better Land” in the alternative disco pantheon—but Chatten has made a bold claim here as a folk auteur, whose classical songwriting and tender, veracious touch resonates now and into the past.

Smith’s voice is assured and grounded: She reaches far less frequently for belting high notes and runs than she did on Lost & Found, instead sitting back comfortably.

Consistent, concise and stylistically compelling, Hyperview is a good set of tracks, and a worthy crossover attempt at that, provided you’re OK with consulting the lyrics booklet and willing to take a ride on the undertow.

The songs may arise from turmoil, but the production is enveloping and inviting, suggesting there’s a path out of the darkness.

The opening Wright sample is a hard look back at a year most people would already rather forget, but it's a perfect intro for Gutter Tactics, an album that draws much of its strength from the same well of outrage and disaffection.

We get his best on How to Get to Heaven From Scotland, an album any Arab Strap fan could love.

She Remembers Everything is a collection of miniatures that collectively paint a vivid, haunting portrait of the blessings and bruises of life.

The tension between those two poles--refusing to grow up and yearning to move on-- is the emotional engine that drives the band and its impressively confident record.

These songs are bolder and more brutal, less interested in florid wording or oblique metaphor; they express feelings of alienation and self-loathing with discomfiting clarity.

In Spades clocks in at just 10 songs in 36 minutes, but feels as expansive and substantial as a double-album statement.

Given its relatively seamless mesh of spiky, aggro party music and the more contemplative electronic moments created by Martinez and Moore, Spring Breakers is the rare soundtrack that covers both extremes and makes it work as a whole.

With Angels of Death, Castle confronts death’s forms with the clarity of a scholar and the reverence of an empath. It’s a meditation on something we never desire but always receive.

The Posterkids sound positively ageless through No More Songs about Sleep and Fire, not having missed a flailing beat through the intervening years of decreasing tempos.

As much as the singles on Something thrilled, it struggled for coherence from song to song. The songs on Moth feel related and extroverted, pulled together by a common purpose. They have a charming asymmetry, they drift in sometimes oblique and irregular patterns. This is pop that wants to show you what it’s made of.

For every bit of overcompensation--he actually cracks a bottle over a dude's head in "Raw"--there's something vividly rendered and honest.

In less capable hands, music so meticulously researched and constructed could sound like pure mimicry. Instead, Dummy have transcended their influences and crafted their own record collector gem.

Buoys is a sad and wistful album, though in a non-specific way.

When asked to rank the group’s previous albums by Noisey last year, Kugel ranked them in reverse order. On The Devil You Know, their evolution continues.

HTRK are at their most vulnerable here, sounding in desperate need of sating desires before they are paralyzed by listlessness and disappointment.

Much sharper-edged than the sounds one would usually associate with healing, Daijing’s music still seems to cultivate a space in which one might grow.

Lost in Space leaves you feeling that she's already covered this terrain.

Lahey’s songs thrive on idiosyncrasies, not generalities, so it makes sense that sexuality for her would be one part of a person’s character, not the full portrait. Still, while the singer’s first full-length is consistently likable, it is most lovable at its especially individual turns.

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

The result is a vibrant, bold record that is, at its heart, a love letter to her home country.

It’s a short album—six songs, 33 minutes--but a substantial one, a deeply personal work that takes us inside the mind of Animal Collective’s most mysterious member, while restoring some of the patience and mystique that’s been sucked out of that band’s recent, more spasmodic work.