The way that Everything Everything play against the macho, aggressive posturing of contemporaries who could care less about caring should be their strongest calling card.

All of those tracks work because they’re never played as straight genre experiments; they all sound first and foremost like Woods songs, even when they draw from a different vocabulary than any that came before.

Music has a way of conjuring a sense of intimacy between listener and artist, and La Maison Noir weaponizes that rapport without dismissing it. Noirwave may not be a movement but it is a force.

Loud isn’t their aim, and Plum’s special, big moments stand out against the quiet.

What’s surprising--and thrilling--about their debut full-length, Constant Image, is that its social commentary would have felt just as timely at any point in the past 30 years.

An encouraging but ultimately disappointing contemplation of time's ceaselessness, love's promise, and Harvest-era Neil Young.

In execution, it's not too different from his previous works for the label. The music is busy and technique-intensive, but tuneful and meditative.

Bicep’s expansive production and compact song-lengths often lack the transportive and hypnotic potential that the best dance music offers. But it succeeds as a lean and consciously paced album.

While The Turning Wheel was originally planned for release in September of last year, its whimsical presentation and urgent, socially conscious lyrics give it a timeless feeling.

By culling from early releases and rescuing tracks from last year's tepid Drag It Up, the band showcases a surprisingly deep and ridiculously rich canon of loser anthems ("Wish the Worst"), dark ballads ("Salome"), odes to romantic doubt and suspicion ("The Other Shoe"), cowboy calls ("West Texas Teardrops"), and frenzied barnstormers ("Doreen")-- all written and played with generous humor and genuine exhilaration.

Ross knows his lane and stays in it on Teflon Don.

XOXO is a battle-scarred but unbroken collection, worthy of being filed alongside venerable mid-career milestones like Wildflowers and Time Out of Mind.

Black Hole Superette features some of his best compositions to date, a whittling down of his maximalist tendencies in favor of a more spacious sound that prioritizes wispy atmosphere over cluttered claustrophobia.

The Holy Pictures turns out to be very much a soundtrack--but one in which heart and mind prove to be as inspiring a source as any script Hollywood throws at him.

Ultimately, Constricting Rage will either prove redundant or ravishing.

It’s Shelton who confidently ties everything together and insinuates a larger story arc in the sequencing.

While most of the dance world continues to view the creation of a solid album discography as strictly optional, Signs Under Test is a strong entry that proves Tejada's quietly building up a legacy of excellence.

Car Seat Headrest is a band almost predestined for the kind of high-stakes storytelling a rock opera requires—if only Toledo could let his own ideas breathe.

While no track dips below the quality line, the album lacks thematic fluidity and spark.

In addition to remasters of The Idiot and Lust for Life, Pop’s new boxed set loops in the decent if not great TV Eye Live (a live album originally released in 1978 to free Pop from his RCA contract), a disc of alternate mixes and edits, and three live discs all recorded in 1977, featuring Bowie on keys and with very similar tracklists—a show of excess for anyone but the most ardent completionist fascinated by the variations in delivery and ad-libbing from different performances on the same tour. [Grades for seven discs: 86, 90, 63, 50, 74, 72, & 63]

Book of Curses reaps the discontentment sowed through years of simmering anger, finding joy in perhaps the only reliable constant: the catharsis of punk rock.

Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep is the latest chapter in the chaotic yet deliberate evolution of a no-holds-barred performer who’s only now reaching their apex.

Bottom line is that Mogwai are an insanely powerful live band, and these sharp recordings play like a unified set rather than a scraped-together compendium of disparate sessions.

Pissed Jeans haven’t overhauled their sound or reinvented themselves or “matured” as artists so much as they have amassed a new inventory of modern miseries to turn into scuzz-punk tantrums, from catalytic converter theft (“[Stolen] Catalytic Converter”) to crippling medical debt ("Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt").

The Stand-In is a gorgeous-sounding chronicle of such archetypal props, characters, and sounds, though the conceit does occasionally smother their narrator’s natural, vital wit.

Plenty of these tracks keep feeling like exercises: too thick and melodic to work like dance music, but with melodies that refuse to stick as satisfyingly as pop.

While there was an unspectacular battle-rap anonymity to his past lyrics, they were at least spit in the service of a strong overall style. Now he's grown a bit, upping the emotional dimension subtly and letting some more specific humanistic details come through, even in the lines that read like average boasts on paper.

The young British producer Mark Taylor offers a more all-embracing vision of rudely extroverted modern garage, unified by his familiar palette of turgid bass tones, decaying synth riffs and shuddering, syncopated beats.