It’s difficult to tell if the emcee is mocking a trend in rap—or simply perpetuating it. The air of poetic abstraction on the album doesn’t clear anything up. But elsewhere, the contrast in styles works more successfully.

The new album finds Boris honing in on their most essential quality: their ability to wrest a kind of endless subtlety from thick layers of distortion and volume.

It reveals a manic, uncommon glint in their inventive fires, the unmistakable fervid gleam which accompanies artists who know exactly what they're doing, even if the rest of us don't.

This is one of the reasons it's important to approach Discontinued Perfume as a full album, intentionally put together in a certain order. The Caribbean have never been what you'd call a singles act anyway, but here you need to take in the whole picture the band is painting.

Twenty-odd years ago, when Poly-Rythmo last made a studio album, they were at their lowest ebb. Cotonou Club finds them at another high.

James Blake continues to move as an artist, and the thrill of witnessing those movements hasn't dulled.

With By All Means he completes a three-release run that's as solid as any in recent memory, even if the answer to the question of whether he has another gear in him remains unanswered for the time being.

Throughout the record there are subtle hints of growth—both personal and musical—but they’re often dragged down by the redundancy of her thematic concerns.

That this isn’t a more ornate, Watch the Throne-type album is a bit deflating; the two collab tracks between the duo–“Leadbelly” and “Kirkland”–display how much of their synergy is left untapped across the 31 other tracks. It took some living with this record for it not to feel like a homogeneous, just-decent meld of MIKE and Earl throwing shots up in an empty gym.

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.

The album’s just a little over half-an-hour long, and it’s all of a piece, conveying casual imagery that meanders from the hands-in-pockets wistfulness of drifting and kicking on trash cans (“Knockin’ on Your Screen Door”) to turning on the TV and looking out your window. Throughout, he has a virtuoso grasp of understatement.

While it's nice to envision Western acceptance of non-Western music, it's nicer to imagine the universe's collective ass jiggling sympathetically to the best moments on Dirty Bomb--music so thoroughly uprooted that its traditions exist only as pivot points; fragments of sounds we know mashed together so intuitively that we barely recognize them.

[Galaxy Garden is] a wonder, his most complete statement yet, both a refinement and an expansion of the genre-of-one he's been perfecting over the last few years.

Cold of Ages is a big leap forward for a band that had already started out a few steps ahead of the pack.

Her mesmerizing, eventful, and strange album brings these remote voices close enough to feel their breath in our ears.

At least half of The Blood Album’s songs feel virtually interchangeable and the other half sound like AFI wrote this stuff in the time it takes to play it.

The maudlin “Love Never Dies,” the album’s lone ballad, dials things down too far, channeling musical theater over a lilting piano melody and funereal drums. It feels like a strange outlier, especially in comparison with her more evocative, emotionally spare one-off ballad “Sweet Love” from last summer. Still, Kiesza’s gut-punch delivery and melodies buoy Crave into a brief, bright pleasure.

After album opener and slow-burn stunner “Canada,” “Sandcastle Molds” breaks the mood; the rollicking drumbeat, nervous blues licks, and dissonant climax feel muddled and a little overdone when compared to some of their more relaxed songs. But the next few tracks get the album back on solid footing.

The collection is a timely, if at times exhaustive, introduction to the Six Organs origin myth.

Aspiring guitarists might need the alternate tuning suggestions, but listeners won’t really need the anecdotes. Rather, Jones puts it all right there in the pieces, speaking volume about the challenges and triumphs of growing up and older without singing a word of the blues.

You still never know from one song what might appear on the next, or even where the song you’re listening to might go, and it keeps the music fresh even when it’s retreading hallowed ground.

Dirty Projectors’ ornate arrangements can’t hide the fact that these songs are as direct and unguarded as Longstreth allows himself to get.

That's what's so great about it, though; save the Vaseline-on-lens Fleetwood Mac number that closes things out, there's nary a dull patch or an awkward spot to be found here, just a sublime (if sorta schizoid) trip through the warmest, spaciest parts of your record collection.

One of those albums where a couple of creative renegades flip out over every stylistic possibility available to them, overextend their ambition, and still come away from it making its missteps sound exciting.

Sylvan Esso is feel-good music on all fronts, and when it comes time to throw on something at a summer gathering that’ll make people feel slightly hipper than they were when they arrived, Sylvan Esso will be a go-to. But it’ll still feel like I’m living in a beer commercial, someone else's idea of an inclusive, hip summer day.

Thomson's lyrics are at once Single Mothers' main attraction and--for some listeners--their presumptive sticking point.

Good for You finds the Portland rapper, born Adam Daniel, sounding charming, clever, and carefree.

That voice is deservedly the musical centerpiece of Anthropocene, a record that, like its predecessor, is given flesh by a wide cast of accomplished collaborators, such as Wilco drummer and tasteful producer Ken Coomer and flashy Sturgill Simpson guitarist Laur Joamets.