There’s a newfound focus that was missing even on Salvia Plath’s The Bardo Story and Silk Rhodes’ self-titled.

Even if Schmilco isn’t Wilco’s most exciting album, it’s among their most consistent and immediately gratifying.

It’s not his most revelatory performance, but it’s certainly his most joyful.

One can imagine the project’s subject would have ultimately preferred the more understated tracks, concerted in their muted menace--focused on the task of creating a cinematic impression of the unknowable.

That the songs can sound enormous while maintaining this kind of person-to-person intimacy is Jepsen’s particular talent.

It’s a complex portrait of a man in transition. The album is an evolution for an artist who still may have his best in store.

Cosmetic’s stewing textural undercurrent intensifies the band’s outer antagonism by highlighting the trembling, deep-seated dread within. It’s riveting and ruining in equal measure.

With Trouble, Russell, Morley, and Yeats have dug one foot deeper into the thick, sludgy, noise-strewn topsoil they’ve long called home. Call it a trench, if you will, but it isn’t is a grave.

The sense persists that the more Eluvium piles on, the less unique he sounds. False Readings On is awesome while it’s playing, and when it stops, it’s gone.

The album flows well, effortlessly segueing from Achtung Baby-like rock to mechanical new wave like Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys. O’Riordan and Koretsky sing simple lyrics, often repeating the same phrase over and over, allowing alternate meanings to sink in.

In its drive for conceptual rigor, the album neglects to engage the listener musically. That puts a lot of weight on the story, which tends toward the abstract.

Middle-aged rap has rarely sounded more grown, with all the mixed-blessing perspective that comes with it. Anonymous Nobody is kind of a downer, but sometimes that’s what you need, especially when the optimism’s just below that melancholy surface.

Even if Here, the band’s 10th album, finds Teenage Fanclub comfortable with their identity and largely uninterested in testing its boundaries, they still find some room for experimentation.

Ultra is also Zomby’s most experimental record in ages.

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.

While Brettin’s singing is greatly improved--lazy but more present and self-assured--his lyrics are at best inscrutable and in general lacking in substance.

This is grand, unapologetic doom metal that should also fit fans of symphonies, post-rock bands, and alt-rock radio. And this is writing so rich that it raises deep, pressing questions about our very existence with richly written scenes and sharply posed worries.

So as good as it often is, Amnesty feels like a missed opportunity, the first safe album from an act that once would have recoiled at such a thought.

Hopelessness has always been a throughline in Staples work but Prima Donna puts a finer point on that feeling, both in its songs and interstitial spoken word bits.

It’s rangy and stunning, an exciting new curve in the fascinating Young Thug arc.

Take It, It’s Yours may be one of the comfiest cover-sets in recent memory, but beneath its chilled-out façade lurks an identity crisis.

Motion Graphics’ contradictions--simultaneously placid and disorienting, warm and chintzy, intimate and distant--make it a seductively unusual listening experience as warm as the surface of your laptop. There’s no irony here; Williams’ lucid machine dreaming is deeply felt.

Even if McCombs remains impossible to pin down, on Mangy Love, he’s never seemed more intent on making a connection.

Standouts struggle to hold their own amid the album's more overwrought anthems and straight-up misfires.

["Sometimes" is] a knockout punch to an already gripping body of music and a fitting last word that cements this album not just as a heartfelt expression of love for John Cage, but for love itself.

The power of Frank’s work often comes via extreme transparency, but he’s not writing diaries. It’s about how he’s able to locate the crux of any situation, or expose undue artifice, or peel things back to their naked core.

46 minutes of music that plays like a mixtape, sliding from song to song, demo to demo, like scrolling through Frank’s hard drive of unreleased material. It’s an intriguing peek into his process, and it contains some of the rawest vocal takes he’s ever put out.

Home Wrecking Years feels like a guy just filling in the downtime before he gets back to work with his main band.