What follows is surprisingly full and wide ranging, almost as much as the Bruegel painting that graces the album's cover.

Monáe has given us a pop record that feels gleefully youthful, perhaps even the album she wishes she could have had as a teen in Kansas City. The songwriting is precise if not always flawless.

It’s undoubtedly a document of the 1995 tour and the exhausted but inspired band they were afterward. The reissue hammers this home by incorporating several early live versions of album tracks that are fascinating for being only a few missing lyrics away from their final incarnations; they display the band’s confidence in the material, in what they were managing to create out of chaos and catastrophe.

Complex enough to reward repetitive listening and compact enough to encourage it, Blue Record is one of the year's most generous hours.

Pile could have remained in their amorphous realm of rock, but they needed to grow up. Here, as musicians, they did.

You get the impression those songs aren’t in his wheelhouse anymore; that instead, Callahan’s purpose, in this vivid season of his career, is to divine more nuanced shades of happiness, try to act as a conduit to that kind of connection, and leave a gap for us to fill in. It suits him.

Coming on the heels of the beef, though, the regionality of the album seems more like an elaborate gotcha to Drake rather than a musical pivot sparked out of passion. That missing spirit is in the production, too clean and synthetic.

You can feel the warmth pouring out of the music.

A flawed, overlong, hypocritical, egotistical, and altogether terrific album.

Twin Fantasy is not a perfect record—the latter half is bogged down by soundscape-y passages and spoken word, for one thing--but that only validates it as a powerful document of teenaged pain and longing.

Drawbar Organ / Quiet Hour takes that fascination [with dub] and grinds it in the back molars, spitting out something lumpy, infirm, and wonderfully transformed.

In These Times is more elegant, and more ambitious.

Former Things is packed with Campbell’s busy, weaponized arrangements. The lyrics, too, are deliberate and dense—she’s one of those uncommon songwriters whose words work equally well on paper.

Tyler uses major-key guitar melodies judiciously, instead of sprinkling them throughout, which makes their shapes more memorable: After the blown-out tape distortion of opener “Cabin Six,” his six-string enters at the start of “Concern” like morning sun through a window.

This isn’t escapism, but a meditative retreat—give it an hour of your time and return to the material world more grounded than ever.

As much as Blackstar shakes up our idea of what a David Bowie record can sound like, its blend of jazz, codes, brutality, drama, and alienation are not without precedent in his work.... Bowie will live on long after the man has died. For now, though, he’s making the most of his latest reawakening, adding to the myth while the myth is his to hold.

Isbell is obviously familiar with the music of the region, yet Something More Than Free sounds nondescript and--worse--placeless.

You get lost in it, and if you're wired a certain way that mixture of desire and confusion is easy to map on to the wider world. For 22 years, the only way to get there was through Loveless and its associated EPs; now there's another path, one many of us never expected to find.

Their third and undoubtedly best album, U.F.O.F., a mesmerizing flood of life filtered down into a concentrated drip.

Her lyrics have the conviction of someone like Fiona Apple: a profoundly individual presence that centers, above all, on self-reliance, on searing autonomy, on the act of becoming. My Woman does this more vividly and lucidly and daringly than before.

It’s got at least one song that instantly joins the ranks of his very best (“Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”) and plenty that draw direct lines to previous high-water marks, both thematically and musically.

The adherence to krautrockin’ repetition remains, but the proto-punk engine has been replaced by electronic loops and glacial synths. Suddenly, a band that once sounded most at home in strobe-lit basement dives now sounds primed for a late-afternoon slot at your roving summer festival of choice.

The music is skilfully marshalled: sober and lucid even while hallucinogenic and deranged.

If you're not inclined toward acoustic improvisation or unstructured abstraction, Orcutt won't change your mind. But anyone can admire the raw soul of his playing and the way he shoots out ideas in real-time, reacting so quickly it's as if he's creating a new language as he speaks it.

The self-produced Teeth Marks is a sharp and thoughtful distillation of these modern American small-town complexities. Religious hypocrisy, financial ruin, systemic addiction, ruinous love, devotion so intense it begins to burn like hatred: Goodman finds space for it all in these 11 tracks, which glide between breathtaking a cappella eulogies and dive-bar R&B, between gnarled rock and plaintive ballads.

This is a bolder, clearer, preternaturally vivid iteration of their music.

If his tales feel like strangers’ snapshots found in a box at the flea market, his songs have an equally vintage tint, shot through with a déjà vu quality that makes them feel like you’ve heard them before, but can’t quite place where.

He channels the wonder of his youth as if no time has passed, exalting the sublimity of waterfalls, rainstorms, and crashing waves. ... Elverum imbues these memories of constant experimentation with undeniable romance.