In the end, though, it’s that feeling of disposability that makes the album’s title resonate more pointedly in the wrong way.

There's no question that many of Lost Time's lyrics are funny, but the attitude that fueled NVM feels crushed. In both the vocal delivery and the driving guitars, the vibe is damper, the color somewhat drained.

Despite its minimalistic approach, the album poignantly illustrates the binary oppositions that cropped up in Hiroshima’s wake: life and death, hope and fear, war and peace, atomic and organic.

At its best, Human Performance is Parquet Courts in a mellower, heart-stopping Velvet Underground mode, but it is also at turns upbeat and funny, sensitive and odd. Compositionally, these are the most dynamic Parquet Courts songs yet.

All of those tracks work because they’re never played as straight genre experiments; they all sound first and foremost like Woods songs, even when they draw from a different vocabulary than any that came before.

There's not a lot of forward motion here; motifs and timbres repeat across the record, and while many tracks flow seamlessly from one to the next, his open-ended constructions give the album a rewardingly meandering feel.

Out My Feelings doesn’t have the rawness of In My Feelings, but its production is impeccable where that one was spotty, and it soars when Boosie reminisces on his pre-rap days or makes statements in line with Black Lives Matter about the murders of unarmed black people by cops.

A gorgeous, unassuming little record, it is Silver's most sophisticated virtual environment yet; disappear into it for a while, and you may come back with a newfound appreciation for sounds you once thought irredeemable--yes, even slap bass.

On Slay-Z, there are hints of that power. They don’t shine nearly as bright as her almost flawless debut record, but they keep us watching and listening.

This time Osborne, Kunka, Rutmanis and Crover all sing leads in various spots, which gives Three Men and a Baby a loose, freewheeling vibe, especially when coupled with the variety in the music.

The directness with which it speaks to its audience makes it easy to imagine Celebration inspiring a lot of its younger listeners to start a band. For anyone else, it’s just an inspiring testament to indie rock’s continued vitality.

Still curious, still appraising, Bird offers an intellect remarkably porous to change.

Kooshanejad works by breaking down samples into unrecognizable blips of sound, and then layering them up into thickets of melody and rhythm. There is the sense that any individual noise could be one locus on a larger waveform, any melodic line or rhythmic figure a patchwork of them.

It is a painfully raw, emotionally generous, politically charged, intensely intelligent, sometimes unlistenable album.

The songs here aren't necessarily breaking new ground stylistically, but that really isn't what matters. At this point, Mould clearly has nothing left to prove.

With songs that play like a grab-bag of genres and lyrics that have little of the humor or self-awareness the band displayed in the past, it's hard to muster the patience to uncover anything deeper.

The first five songs at least are totally gorgeous, the strings glassy, the tone all understated seduction, the structures fluid and surprising. ... By the Homme-tinged desert rider "Used to Be My Girl," misanthropy has set in.

All kudos go to Boots for parlaying this influence he’s garnered producing the likes of Beyoncé, Run The Jewels and FKA twigs to help craft this record for a band whose breakthrough moment has eluded them for long enough.

At once cosmically huge and acutely personal, Zauner captures grief for the perversely intimate yet overwhelming pain it is. Long may she keep at this music thing.

The five tracks here differ from their predecessors only by degrees, so if you liked the previous records there's little here to find too upsetting, but as an EP it feels like a stopgap ahead of the next Com Truise album.

Super elaborates and intensifies Electric’s approach: Louder, brighter, more. It doesn’t have the sustained arc of that album, but Price specializes in renovating house and disco, modernizing with care, and his small details still beguile.

It is, if anything, even denser, more dimly lit, more seamlessly contoured [than 2013's Cupid's Head].

He's a skilled enough songwriter that he could probably pull off an entire sobering album about this stuff. Instead he made a really fun, self-effacing one.

There may be no artist more committed to the line as a creative medium than Nisennenmondai; projected through Sherwood's spacetime-distorting lens, their vision of infinity becomes all the more engrossing.

Many of the songs ("Embody," "On the Lips," "Too Dark" and "Sleep Song") on the album have appeared in acoustic permutations in past work, and they make the leap seamlessly. Each are marvelously well-wrought trains of thought, cramming existential questions into the banality of everyday moments and finding something beatific even in the plainest of things.

All told, Fleeting isn't as distinct or as instant as its predecessors, particularly Jones' 2011 masterpiece, The Wanting.

As frustrated as those songs are, there's also a ruminative quality to their lyrics that carries throughout the album. It feels like the product of a man finally settling down after years of travel and activity, and not liking what he sees.

Where they once aspired to be your blood-pumping druganaut, Black Mountain now excel at the art of making you uncomfortably numb.