Nothing Was the Same is Drake and 40's most audacious experiment yet in how far inward they can push their sound; a lot of the album sounds like a black hole of all 40's previous productions being sucked into the center. Song-to-song transitions, which have always been melty and blurry, are more notional than ever.

He has his handful of obsessions, his rules, his limitations, and once in a while he returns and gives us a record like this, something that will be sounding good five or 10 or 15 years from now, or whenever the next solo record comes along.

Our Love is a very assured record, from its unconventional, austere arrangements to its unrelenting focus and thematic consistency.

While some critics take issue with Rubin's underproduction, none of the songs on American III require ornate instrumentation. Whether they've been fluffed up or stripped raw, at the core of each is a compelling statement from one of our greatest humanists.

A revelation. .... If six years is what Roxanne needs to produce a leap in scale as bracing as Poem 1, then so be it: This will cast shadows deep and long enough to sit underneath for a long time.

Overall, Psychic Chasms is something like a dream collaboration between the Tough Alliance and Atlas Sound, the latter of whose Internet-only Weekend EP shares a delinquent theme with one of Psychic Chasms' best songs.

Even with the subtle narrative running through the record, McMahon’s songs gain resonance less from their lyrics than from the forward pulse of his music.

Music that's both haunting and life-affirming, something to make you dream and think.

It's like they've spent the past two years building a bionic version of the band--not only brighter and tighter, but weirder. The group nurtures its eccentricities and the result is a record full of them.

Change, while unquestionably more mature than anything the Dismemberment Plan have released in the past, is also, at times, an incredibly powerful record that can make mundane ruminations seem like Socratic philosophy.

Just a few years into her adult life, and only one album into her recording career, Melina Duterte has swept past a milestone many musicians never even get in their sights.

The Best of Blur serves as a document for an astonishingly consistent career full of hits over in Britain.... As with any retrospective, the track listing isn't going to please anyone.... Still, it's hard to argue with the material that made it to this record. The disc, though not sequenced in chronological order, covers all facets of Blur's career.

Simultaneously sparse and rich, The Crying Light mines maximum intensity from a relatively minimal mix of basic melodies, pithy lyrics, and understated arrangements.

The ultimate draw is Antony's voice, and within the first two seconds of the album, it should be very clear to even the most unaware newbies that Antony has an amazing Nina Simone/Brian Ferry/Jimmy Scott vibrato, a multi-octave siren that would sound painfully lovely no matter what he was saying. Lucky for us, he fills that promise with worthy syllables.

Throughout, the songs on Obsidian are physical in a literal sense, mimicking the human motion of the characters described therein.

In a field of brilliant ambient techno producers, he’s delivered his most dazzling and definitive statement to date.

It doesn’t feel corny or hyperbolic to call this record life-affirming, so perfectly does it capture the flashes of gratitude, self-knowledge, and inexplicable joy that often follow an experience of great pain.

It's a true global-pop album, and a hopeful template for things to come.

The ability to live with such contradictions and give them life with his words is part of what made Scott-Heron’s work special, and McCraven’s music inhabits that complicated space and keeps its sharp edges intact.

The loose, scatterbrain album operates much like the early solo endeavors of Paul McCartney, with 80% developed gems flowing effortlessly from the damp, rustic English countryside.... Piano, strings, harps, and wurlitzer attach insect wings to the lovely songs. They'll swarm and pester your head for days.

Celestial Lineage feels like the contemporary American scene's defining statement after San Francisco group Weakling's seminal 2000 offering Dead As Dreams.

In the past, he’d mix his voice to fit within the instrumental; on Process, he makes it the focal point. Co-produced with Rodaidh McDonald, Process brings to mind James Blake while nodding to mainstream hip-hop.

Our Endless Numbered Days is cleaner, more diverse, and generally sparser than its predecessor, and, given the apparent limits of Beam's former setup, it's also an astoundingly progressive record: Beam has successfully transgressed his cultural pigeonhole without sacrificing any of his dusty allure.

Just as his thematic concerns have become richer, so has the music backing them up.

Who is William Onyeabor? doesn't provide any answers its own posited question, but the mystery and wonder of the man’s music remains intact.

With all the column inches and message board posts arguing about whether M.I.A. is an opportunist or a clever contextualist, genuine or a fraud, full of good intentions or no specific intentions at all, the closest thing to a truism about Arular is that it's a taut, invigorating distillation of the world's most thrilling music; a celebration of contradictions and aural globalization that recasts the tag "world music" as the ultimate in communicative pop rather than a symbol of condescending piety.

The slight nods to accessibility and the decreased stylization might disappoint some of the faithful at first, but Strange Geometry grows more appealing with repeated listening.

Because Up in Flames is so focused on big moments and aural candy, it's wise that Snaith decided to keep the record under 40 minutes. He blows you out and then packs it up.