A direct thematic line runs from the album’s first full song, “Appointments,” to “Claws in Your Back”’s riveting finish.

As an accidental concept album affirming the enduring power and purity of early emo (as defined by Dischord, Deep Elm, and especially Jade Tree), Attack on Memory feels above all necessary, a corrective for indie rock making allowances for everything except music that actually rocks.

The collision between acoustic instrumentation and crackerjack production makes for a lush and widescreen experience.

In the end, Barnett returns invariably to herself, a subject she finds hard enough to understand. If all this seems a little heady in discussion, it's to the credit of Barnett and her band--Dave Mudie, Dan Luscombe, and Bones Sloane--that it doesn't sound that way on record.

The bulk of The Suburbs focuses on this quiet desperation borne of compounding the pain of wasting your time as an adult by romanticizing the wasted time of your youth.

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

Slowdive offers maximum-volume shoegaze too, better than the band ever has before.

The best executed Harvey Milk album to date, and one of the most accomplished metal records you'll hear this year.

Each of its songs evokes an individual voice, an individual woman, an individual context and though their stories burn in different colors, each contains an ember of catharsis, a feeling that lasts throughout the album. It is the rare political pop record that looks toward the future and offers us something new.

Iceage write brilliant songs; on You're Nothing, they've found a way to clarify these compositional skills without stripping away their power.

As menacing as it is hooky, this is some bracing stuff.

As a first step, both Teenage Hate and Fuck Elvis Here's the Reatards are astonishing. All the energy one could hear in Reatard's better-known work is here in it's rawest, most volatile form.

The album naturally lacks the shock of the new, the jolt of Boy in Da Corner-- instead, it's a consolidation of his strengths, lyrically and sonically, and a more satisfying listen than its predecessor.

The quiet-to-loud dynamics aren't forced, the ahh-ahh backing sighs come at the exact right moments, the church bells on the title track sound like god. These songs are simple, mostly, but they're executed perfectly.

As with earlier albums, it’s studded with experiments: “Project 2,” an interlude of fluting vaporwave synths, and “Sugar,” where melodramatic violin and piano are coated in Vocodered gurgles. They’re less interruptions than camouflage.

Musically, American Gangster is lush and spacious.

The lyrics are elusive at first, darting behind fast-moving songs and delivered in impressionistic, conversational bursts that recall the delivery of Joni Mitchell. But the fearless generosity behind them communicates itself loud and clear, and it's a spirit that animates the entire album. With it, Spalding has once again redefined an already singular career, dictating a vision entirely on her own terms.

These songs rip and burst and go.

Only God Was Above Us is also the most honest album Vampire Weekend have made, an encapsulation of what the band does best, melodic and abstruse in Koenig’s own masterful way.

Somehow L’Amour sounds less there with each spin, beckoning you into its hazy world even as it dissolves into gray. The mystery is so perfect that it’d be a tragedy to solve it.

The music is poignant and meticulously arranged, and all you have to do is surrender to it. It helps that the engineering of ¡Ay! is pristine, often evoking a smoky, afterhours lounge, the kind you might find in a spy film from the 1940s. At times, it is so vivid and immersive that it feels as if Dalt is singing directly in your ear.

As exhilarating as Fourteen Autumns is at its most anthemic, the vividness of the lyrical themes ultimately carries the record over.

St. Vincent continues Clark's run as one of the past decade's most distinct and innovative guitarists, though she's never one to showboat.

Compared to the last two albums, Zonoscope has precious little guitar crunch, which makes it hard to even call Cut Copy a dance-rock band anymore.

The one new track is “Devotion,” a showstopping slab of new-wave twinkle. Outside of a killer opening punchline (“I don’t feel emotion/It completely takes over me”), it’s uncomplicated and blissful, a portrait of codependence that begs to be read as a you’re-the-real-stars diva move. It’s a victory lap, and I don’t begrudge it. But Hot Chip are far more compelling when they’re navigating the course.

While some will complain about Boards of Canada's failure to cover new territory, the rest of us will delight in what we see as a very accomplished album packed with great music.

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.

As with TPAB, untitled unmastered. demands to be approached on its own terms, even when you don't know what those terms are. You can't say he didn't try for you, ride for you, or push the club to the side for you.