If nothing here quite reaches knockout-blow strength, fine--it doesn’t really need to. Goldfrapp have found their platonic ideal, and that’s ideal indeed.

Even in its most indulgent turns, Star Stuff serves its purpose: After making an overly disciplined live album for zero spectators, it’s refreshing to hear Bundick really jam like no one’s looking.

Number 1 Angel is best at its most vulnerable. ... The other novelty of Number 1 Angel and Charli’s past work is that it showcases, and is largely stolen by, a lot of guests.

Whatever actual healing powers she may be channeling probably depends upon the patient; nevertheless, Kelly Lee Owens presents an artist with an unusually focused vision of what music is capable of.

Feel Infinite is warm and inviting, a taut mix of R&B love songs to finding your true self on the floor.

The songs are viscerally anguished, but they don’t wallow. There’s an essential, breezy levity to the music; the parts require one another. The whole of II moves forward and on.

He runs into trouble when he loses the self-awareness of it all. ... Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams finds its true comfort zone when it is simply sweet.

A few tracks are infectious enough to merit standalone listens.

Bringing it live is still crucial to metal success, and on that front they are ready to ascend to the next level. That doesn’t translate on Heartless, where too much space is squandered.

So simple, so tactile, so deceptively real are these songs. Their cumulative effect is that they become wobbly with metaphor, forcing the listener into the kind of magical thinking that transforms everything in the living world into a sign of the dead, only to snap back into a reality that for better and worse means nothing.

It’s neo-neo-noir music that draws you into its discomfort. If its vast expanses leave listeners vulnerable, at least there’s more space to let yourself roam.

While the productions are animated and spacious, creating openings for his jam-packed phrases, the sound doesn’t take the full step forward that would help spotlight and redefine Seattle rap.

It’s the kind of record that would be called “triumphant” if Boucher was in a position to enjoy any of it.

While the best moments of his previous two solo albums felt like little more than stripped-back versions of solid Hold Steady songs, We All Want the Same Things is more subtle and strange.

On “Loser’s Hymn” and the closing “Dins El Llit,” they keep the pace brisk but downplay the drums, and the results, a kind of dance music with its head in the clouds, are both invigorating and meditative--like the album itself.

The more voices he lets into the frame, the fuller and richer the results, and More Life bursts with energy and lush sounds--more guests, more genres, more producers, more life. It is as confident, relaxed, and appealing as he’s sounded in a couple of years.

Amid Find Me’s otherwise downcast worldview, “Love Captive” lets in some light.

Unlike the effortless Atlas, In Mind exposes a trace of tension between form and content. For all Courtney’s synchronicity with his home environment, he sometimes sounds like he’s spinning his wheels rather than exploring the new contours of the recalibrated band.

The early-stage versions of a few Ultramega OK tracks that round out this reissue ... add to the story by showing how much more precise the band got in the year or so after they recorded the Screaming Life EP, with the two versions of the single-chord grind “Incessant Mace” showing how that song’s brimming dread was the result of a fair amount of experimentation.

Packs is a record by, of, and for New York City, espousing the romantic notion it will never change, no matter how much the world does.

It feels more like an intimate recording project than a live band document, mostly splitting the difference between routine electro-Stones rave-ups and strung-out ballads.

This isn’t a record you crank in traffic en route to an across-town meeting; it’s a record to unwind with later that night on your second glass of Syrah--a sturdy shrug to cap off the day

ADULT. still do a convincing showroom-dummies impersonation, but they’ve never sounded more human than they do here.

In 2017, the challenge for a veteran metal act is to not relentlessly innovate, but to mine any small new parts of their sound. Kreator and Immolation have proved successful in this regard already, and Obituary, while sticking closer to their roots, have also proven their vitality here.

This is a band whose effortlessness can misguide you into thinking they’re not trying. Don’t be fooled.

They sound twice as developed.

While it’s laudable that Jenkinson is always moving, never resting, Elektrac feels a bit of a sideshow: a flexing of technique with little to display but its own shiny spectacle.

Paradise challenges its listeners to emotionally engage with their surroundings in hopes that they develop a conscious understanding that there are consequences to our daily conveniences.