The Waiting Room might be Tindersticks’ most subdued effort to date, but it still flashes the irreverence that enlivened efforts like The Something Rain and Falling Down a Mountain.

With Jet Plane and Oxbow, Shearwater achieve not only their grandest statement to date, but their most grounded as well.

[Pond Scum may be] a fans-only album. And yet, taken on its own terms, Pond Scum is also a good-faith effort to plumb the nature of God. Not just any deity, but the distinctively American one born in 1741 in Jonathan Edwards’ hellfire sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and since then praised and perpetuated in countless old-time folk and gospel songs.

The project doesn’t feel uninspired, exactly, just rushed. The best songs on Purple Reign still capture that shivering, waking-nightmare energy.

As much as the singles on Something thrilled, it struggled for coherence from song to song. The songs on Moth feel related and extroverted, pulled together by a common purpose. They have a charming asymmetry, they drift in sometimes oblique and irregular patterns. This is pop that wants to show you what it’s made of.

It’s a record about addiction, to be sure, but to an intoxicant more elusive, potent, and damaging than any street drug: desire. And like any stimulant, the highs are ecstatic (see: "Outsiders," a stained-sheet celebration of odd-couple consummation, or the nostalgically trashy "Like Kids") and the lows are crushing (see: pretty much everything else).

Revealing Rattling Trees as a soundtrack from the jump puts the Llamas at an advantage and a disadvantage. It helps to explain the structure of the album, which kicks off with an overture that touches on all the melodic themes to be heard later, followed by quick instrumental bits that precede actual songs. But without the full text of the play or a chance to see it before hearing the music, these pleasant-but-slight songs become more negligible.

At times New View can seem like a concept record detailing Friedberger's ambivalence about her main gift: spinning fragile memories and feelings into accessible songs.

Like Champagne Holocaust, Songs for Our Mothers puts too much emphasis on setting the smoky, sinister scene--upping the reverb, working in odd yelps or electronic clatter--and too little attention on establishing dynamic, compelling arrangements.

For all Not to Disappear’s forward strides, something remains of the debut’s pallor, and with it a niggling suspicion that, despite their commercial inferiority to the xx, Florence and the Machine, and even Foals, Daughter have no spicy condiments for those groups’ bread and butter.

Emotional Mugger still feels transitional--either the moment before he tucks in and gets way weirder or another stepping stone before he switches gears all over again.

Some of their more conventional tracks may pale a little in comparison to their newer aesthetics, if only because their evolution has been so slow and protracted.

In many ways, Adore Life feels more alive than Silence Yourself--in part because it feels more human, in part because it's telling you to be as loud as possible.

Coliseum stacks everything in the right place, and it’s all executed with the usual precision, so why doesn’t the album dazzle quite like the last few? Like the four albums before it, the Besnards self-recorded and self-produced this one at Breakglass, and more than its predecessors, it begs for an outside collaborator, somebody to shake up the band’s routine and perhaps lend some new tricks to their shrinking playbook.

This is a sincere, soulful project, brimming with honesty and humble perseverance.

The drastic acoustic reinterpretation on this album feels like the song’s natural state, the long-building crescendo threatens to swallow the singer before he has finished saying his piece.

The result is a record that, on the surface, sounds beautiful from start to finish. At times, though, these arrangements create a smoke-and-mirrors effect that obscures the weak spots in LeBlanc’s songwriting.

In between bursts of inspiration, Ardipithecus is largely a record of growing pains.

The redeeming moments are ones which make some unpredictable moves--any shocks are welcome on a record as polite and poised as this.

There's a wealth of both visceral adventure and reflective emotion in hs pieces. At best, these songs are thrill rides, mood swingers, and thought provokers, all at once.

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.

Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is interesting the same way a friend getting a dramatic bad haircut is interesting: Once the shock wears off, you still have to look them in the eye and level with them.

The best moments on Leave Me Alone occur when Cosials and Perrote are going all-out, belting together without restraint.

The beats sound like money, and the raps are whip smart and cleanly tailored.

Main Attrakionz, who are sharper and more consistent than ever here, even if the high points don’t quite match those of 808s II.

As strange and surprising as anything Whitehead has ever made, these 10 songs bristle with an exploratory energy that has long been his best (if rather inconsistent) asset.

Though he’ll only tacitly admit as much, our player entrepreneur is hurt, and Beast Mode’s heavy-hearted sounds assist him in sorting through it just as Monster’s menace helped him turn spite to fuel.

Christmas in Reno is uncomfortable to listen to--the tracks that you so often associate with being jolly are torn up into pieces and burned at the core. However, that's exactly Ramone's intention.