The Heart Is a Monster contains no less than six ambient interludes. A whole separate album in that style would've been nice, but even in truncated form the interludes cast Philip Glass-ian shades onto the other songs and suggest that Failure's creativity is far from exhausted.

Judged on its own merits, A New Wave of Violence is a fine hardcore record, one that manages to balance chaotic intensity with a workmanlike precision that few punk bands can muster.

Dissolution Wave crystallizes Cloakroom’s strengths while refuting the idea that concept albums are always bloated and pretentious.

VII pursues no radical new directions for Maserati, but even though you sort of already know these songs, they still have enough engaging motion and kinetic force that if you ever loved them in the first place, you'll love them all over again here.

Witch is a solid record throughout, but it is one of those records that feels like a collection of songs--good songs!--rather than an actu

Tremors is actually kinda intriguing in a “canary in the coalmine” sort of way.

Release is not Cave’s strongest record, but it’s not a bad entry point. An odds and ends compilation, it provides a clear picture of the group's evolution from free-form psych-noodling toward its more sublime and trance-inducing current incarnation.

Kweli’s flow can feel rushed and sticky, as though he can’t articulate his thoughts as neatly as he can conjure them up. But his fans are loyal. Radio Silence will comfortably shore up the base.

As much as it can sound like it stands alone, Bish Bosch is part of a tradition of music that tried to find new ways to articulate that same old misery.

It's an album with its feet on the ground and its head in the clouds, and listening to it is a lot like waiting contentedly in a kind of musical purgatory, happy to be there but still wondering what comes next.

Ultimately, Wyatt has made a sadly triumphant album that questions how our minds remember what they remember.

How to Dance is most invigorating when it sweeps the band’s easy-rolling tunes off of the front porch and drops them at the roadhouse.

It's one of the least distinctive things he's put his name on, a step backward into Southern-rap exercises that point you away from K.R.I.T.'s music and toward his heroes.

Evolution takes time, and Mastodon continue to publicly work out their growing pains as they determine which traits best represent the unified sound they’ve been chasing this decade.

While Ambivalence Avenue is an excellent album by any measure, Bibio deserves extra credit for venturing outside of his established comfort zone.

Calexico have made records that sound like this one before, but they’ve never made one with quite this much fight in it.

Ultimately, Terrestrials works as a likable listen, a liminal play concerning the push and pull between dusk and dawn. But it serves as a mere footnote or, at beast, an appealing redundancy for Sunn O))) and Ulver.

Ones and Sixes is all at once beautiful, ugly, tense, warm, inviting and repellent.

For the first time in the group's decade of existence, they've made an album that doesn't entirely live up to their reputation.

While the band have reined in some of the volatility that made those introductory singles so exhilarating, there’s a cool consistency and newfound accessibility to Absolutely Free that makes it an easy, enchanting front-to-back listen, the songs locking together to form a smoothly contoured album arc.

Without fail, whenever a song on Emperor of Sand feels like it’s about to go overboard on the polish, the band takes it in a more jagged direction. Conversely, whenever a song runs close to rehashing Mastodon’s familiar bag of tricks, the band steps up its tastefulness and songcraft. The timing is so uncanny that you might not even notice.

Camila shines when it’s light and breezy, giving Cabello the space she needs to cook.

The resulting album incorporates considerably more atmospheric depth, including orchestral and keyboard overdubs. Pile are not growing soft, but they are growing.

Musically and emotionally, Lost in the Country is a decisive step forward.

Strange Burden is meticulous and crackling—a concise, gripping record that sparks and sizzles like a kinked spike of lightning.

Although Doja clearly envisions Vie as her poppiest album, with ’80s pop as her aesthetic of choice, the record is most interesting when she’s ignoring such distinctions rather than embracing them.

Though Band of Horses aren't likely to be heralded as trailblazers, they do sound quietly innovative and genuinely refreshing over the course of these 10 sweeping, heart-on-sleeve anthems.

The economy of Ethan Johns' and Steve Lillywhite's production helps, as do the straightforward arrangements and, most important of all, Finn's most commercial and least quirky set of songs since 1991's "Woodface," or even the group's self-titled 1986 debut.