The Healing Component would have benefitted for a couple of those brighter moments to keep things moving, but it’s a small gripe.

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.

Somewhere is as its best when Garvin bares her teeth and uses her sense of humor to talk about what is haunting her, be it spending far too much time alone, or trying to find your place on new ground.

Crash is Charli’s best full-length project since Pop 2, a canny embrace of modern and vintage pop styles by one of its most sincere students.

There are few moments across No Fear that feel immediate, timely, or necessary, and their sense of urgency has dulled. For all the hype, fans deserved something better than just good enough.

Mitchell’s voice is gorgeous and rich throughout, a piece of high-pile cotton velvet warmed in the daylight. She renders “Both Sides Now” with the wisdom of survival, the “up and down” having still somehow delivered her here. But too often, her patient approach is swallowed by the tide of well-intentioned boosters, associates who make Mitchell feel like little more than an honorary guest at her own party.

Oh Sees prove that aforementioned Afro-funk excursion is no random one-off experiment, but a reliable rhythmic foundation that can fuse seamlessly with their signature garage-psych sound.

A case can be made that the 1978 world tour is the genesis of Dylan’s latter-day incarnation as a restless and mercurial road warrior. That knowledge doesn’t change that, as an album, The Complete Budokan 1978 isn’t just a drag, it’s often dorky, too.

Brash, grungy, and loud... a tiny handful of outstanding tracks and a whole mess of schmaltzy filler.

Witch Cults is like the sound of Broadcast and the Focus Group trying to cast their spells at the same time: Some of the record is great, plenty of it is cross-chatter.

They may not be doing anything especially new, but Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings are the very best at what they do, and they've made another excellent album.

A dark, disconcerting record that derives its power from restraint. It's Southern gothic through the filter of Ernest Hemingway, with the frightening stuff left off the page but seeping between the lines.

If much of it is merely pretty, this is easily the most diverse and wide-ranging Dirty Three record yet, absolutely the right thing for them to be doing at this time.

Through a combination of Arling and Cameron's sharp studio skills, their sure feel for genre, and most importantly, an unfailing sense of humor, these two manage, somehow, to make the zillionth such retro LP sound fun and cool.

[Sounds] as much like playful garage-rock as cocky Europop.

It shouldn't surprise anyone in today's age of shattered expectations that Beaucoup Fish is not as great as we'd hoped.

With better lyrics and a longer attention span, McKay would be a jaw-dropping songwriter, but it's difficult to get sucked into a song if you don't connect with the singer.

Some of the rowdiest Giant Sand music since the near-grunge of 1992's Center of the Universe.

While Quality may lack the basement charms of [departed producer DJ Hi-]Tek's finest, it more than compensates by employing a funkier and more upbeat sound palate to further draw out the nuances of what is already one of the most rounded and complete rap personas in the game.

If you take it as a whole, Uh Huh Her is deeply engrossing: Harvey has never explored the minimal-verging-on-primitive side of her music so thoroughly, or captured so exactly the sound of a mood swing.

A Shut-In's Prayer is arguably the strongest album of Owen Ashworth's career thus far, and it arrives at a time when the influence of his former project looms over specific spheres of indie music.

The results resemble dance music as glimpsed through a funhouse mirror: strangely distorted, sometimes goofy, and deeply pleasing on a simple, almost childlike level.

A front-to-back listen through Patterns of Light can feel like a tour through all the places where pop radio and esoteric thought crossed paths during the ’70s, and a tribute to the ways both music and physics strive to explain a universe that can sometimes feel stubbornly unknowable.

Ardor ultimately feels emotionally coherent but tricky to categorize. BIG|BRAVE are the sound of the raw unconscious, turned up loud.

Scattering the puzzle pieces, as Cunningham and Stewart do on Parts, has its own function--that’s how you find all the strange little edges. You start to see the insight you can gather when you’re forced to look at each part of the whole.

The record is also uncannily timely; you’d be hard-pressed to find an album that more vividly conjures the equally disorienting and liberating effects of putting your life on pause. This is the sound of your brain on lockdown.

AIN’T NO DAMN WAY! is consummately smooth, but it rewards close reading and detective work. Brilliant things are happening underneath the gleaming surface.

The two reunite on Dying Is the Internet, striking an even more idiosyncratic fusion of their respective talents while their music remains as heavy as ever.