What’s remarkable here is how Fennesz dissolves into the bleak landscape, his signature sound rendered indistinct, a loss of identity that mirrors the album's main theme.

Even with Drake’s lazy punchlines, though, both he and Future are still great rap artists in their primes, and sometimes they figure things out just based on sheer talent. What the tape lacks in congruence, it makes up for in glimmering Metro Boomin production.

Music Complete certainly doesn’t do anything to diminish New Order’s formidable legacy, but it doesn’t necessarily expand upon it either. That being said, it still sounds like classic New Order.

His lyrics have grown more sophisticated. Humor was always part of his music, but on b’lieve i’m goin down it’s an animating principle.

There's nothing hectic about the listening experience; thanks to its relaxed pace and gently abstracted shapes, Wald is every bit as contemplative as the forest walks that inspired it.

At its best, Sleep feels like compositionally rigorous new age music. It’s a place in which you can settle for a while, with or without a pillow, and emerge only when you are ready to rejoin the restive world.

Yours, Dreamily draws spirited performances from its players, but works best as a one-off event.

Honeymoon just synthesizes ideas she's been vamping on from the beginning into a unified work. She figured where she was going long before she got there; with Honeymoon she has finally arrived.

While its ingredients are undeniably basic--all of the songs are built from a few period-appropriate keyboards and chugging drum machines, and that’s mostly it--what makes Cake Knife so consistently endearing is how effortless it all sounds.

Blackalicious is most effective when Gift of Gab’s knotty multisyllabic schemes unspool without decryption and nestle neatly in the nooks and crannies of Xcel’s soulful romps.

Have You In My Wilderness embraces the specific, rather than the eternal, and in her narrowed focus you can sense a palpable self-confidence and a hard-won precision.

The songs he summons from the synths offer proof that there were more songs left in him, but he's still digging in the same mine. Ad Infinitum might be the sound of an artist challenging himself, but it's not the sound of an artist challenging his listeners.

They seem to be stretching themselves on this record, searching to create something meaningful in an ugly world, realizing that there are limits to their subgenre-referencing sound and if they are to grow they’ve got to push themselves.

Don’t Lose This sounds like an excellent entry point for newcomers and casual fans, a gateway to exploring the Staples’ vast catalog.

While Savage Hills Ballroom awkwardly stretches to make universal points from Powers' personal distaste, his personal heartache results in the most truly resonant moments.

Though many of the songs convey images of earthiness and of dirt, there's a beauty that helps the collection soar above the ground.

[The] more chaotic and caustic Sun Coming Down, but the album’s relentless drive and uncompromising attitude constitute their own special kind of thrill.

In Beal’s attempt to exorcise old demons, the LP comes off way too moody and far too methodical to resonate long term.

He is most effective when he harshly distorts his vocals to create texture, and in the company of others he can serve as a welcome change of pace.

The moments when the music matches the intensity of Lydon’s singing are exhilarating.... Other mid-tempo tunes on What the World Needs Now don’t fare as well.

In Pagans in Vegas, humans and machines exist in a binary relationship. The reality is both more nuanced and fertile than that.

Artificial Dance is enough to make you rethink what you thought you knew about that era--and to make you wonder what else might be out there, just waiting to be rediscovered.

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

It's her mastery and attention that is ultimately what, I suspect, makes her work so consistently complex and worthwhile.

What the Isley Brothers achieved can't be contained in a single album nor can it be adequately summarized in a hits collection. They seized all the tumult, all the excitement, all of the sounds of their time and turned it into enduring commercial art whose endurance and depth is best appreciated in a set like this, where the actual records can be heard in their entirety.

So while Too is at times brave, that doesn't necessarily make it compelling.

Yannick Ilunga feels like pop music's future--borderless but deeply rooted, challenging but pleasurable--and La Vie is strong enough to have earned Ilunga the right to call his revolution whatever he wants.

Repentless is solid--far from a classic, but the best possible outcome.