With Let’s Turn It Into Sound, Smith turns her music upside down, shakes out her assumptions, and lets the pieces fall where they may, all in the interest of finding new connections between things that were never meant to go together. It’s a leap into the unknown, and her excitement is infectious.

Mountain Moves indicates that something better--something made by diverse but like-minded collaborators--might be able to come next.

A solid, consistent return that sounds like the band never left.

The emotions are big and the choruses are bigger, but the production is too washed-out to risk actual vulnerability. It’s music to sink into, an electronic dreamy mush that’s somehow equal parts Foster the People and Mazzy Star.

These go-hard-or-go-home tracks are still sprinkled across Fluorescent Black... But those who've been along for the 10-plus year ride may be looking for more of them.

If Broken Dreams Club is indeed an honest glimpse of what's ahead, it sounds as though Girls have much more to give.

Granted, the record is far from perfect... Despite all of that, it is a Stephin Merritt record. And SM still maintains his charmingly cynical worldview and almost bottomless well of clever turns of phrase.

Walking with Thee is neither an album of triumph nor of disappointment.

If there's one positive remark to be made about What's Next to the Moon, it's that it sheds revelatory light on the subjective nature of lyrics. Yet, that might be the only truly positive remark this album deserves. Sure, Kozelek's voice is still smooth and sad, and his guitarwork is still deft, yet modest. But these are standard factory settings.

Measure is, if nothing else, a truly crafted record.

Deeply atmospheric and richly impressionistic, Under the Sun is an easy album to disappear into.

Though uneven, Lover is a bright, fun album with great emotional honesty.

This is straight-up anti-pop-rap: unpolished, unevenly mixed, structurally unbalanced, primarily self-produced, and polarizing. ... They don’t sound half-baked so much as purposefully unfinished, a move even further off the grid for one of our most promising shut-ins.

Payten’s writing is strong enough that she pulls off worthwhile takes on familiar themes. ... Her lyrics only falter when Payten sounds aware of her audience, becoming self-consciously clever.

Dennis is an album of floor-fillers, especially in its first half, that plays out like a bad hangover, one song shifting into the next like Dante passing through the circles of Hell.

Powers narrates these vignettes from a distant storyteller’s perspective, and a gap emerges between his authorial point of view and the intimacy of the home video material. This dissonance is certainly haunting, but when the album’s final track arrives in a montage of the VHS clips strung together over heartfelt piano, its affecting ambience feels somewhat abrupt. But the record’s final moments remind us that these songs still spring from a singular voice.

Different Rooms’ greatest coup—and what sets it apart from Honer and Chiu’s previous collaborations—is its command of form. The whole album speaks in parallel.

Once again, though, Baldi is simply unwilling or unable to stop writing hook-filled songs, rendering Here and Nowhere Else even more tense and thrillingly conflicted than its predecessor.

These tracks all feel like they were written by a very precocious teenager, and that’s a big part of their charm.

It seems particularly odd that for all the time and sweat Stoltz has put into this music, there's no sense of a real person behind these songs, just a tightly wound bundle of ideas borrowed from likely pop sources.

Lyrically, No Color is a step in a new direction for Dodos -- for mostly better.

Magnolia Electric Co. is no Crazy Horse, and Molina's vocabulary on the guitar doesn't yet have the presence to carry such extended interpretations of his material.

One of Speedy Ortiz’s strengths is that beneath all the instrumental layers, there’s a narrative puzzle to unpack. Sad13’s Slugger solves its puzzle for you, but in the hope that you will be able to go at it alone in the future.

“Breakthrough”, “masterpiece”, “bold leap”--those aren’t words that really seem applicable to With Light and With Love, or Woods for that matter, but they’re allowing themselves to be extremely likable for a larger crowd.

It doesn’t all quite land. ... But with the glow of “Doomscroller” acting as a foil, even those lesser songs still manage to productively contribute to that contradictory posture of solidarity-oriented striving that suffuses Formentera.

It’s that blazingly honest, hyper-personal quality that places Cerulean Salt in the tradition of Elliott Smith, early Cat Power, or Liz Phair's free-flowing Girlysound tapes--the work of a songwriter skilled enough to make introspection seem not self-centered, but generous.

In a year where the likes of Kanye and Trent Reznor have reached deep into the dark circuitry of the Wax Trax back catalog to revive the corpse of industrial music, Factory Floor’s relentlessness suits the present moment.