Intimate and slow-moving, Woman is good but underwhelming.

Whine of the Mystic is musically plainspoken and direct.

Some of the songs may even leave you thinking they could use another element, but in the end, it's nice that they remain as spare as they do, the edges left soft and fuzzy, the way you see things in the dark.

The undercurrent of darkness in La Luz's music is what makes their work so fierce and intelligent. You could blink and miss their sneaky, underhanded way of slipping unease into their cheerful-sounding songs.

If you like DeMarco, you'll like Another One. It's like a novella, or a made-for-TV movie--something to chew on while we wait for the next major project. It riffs on his established formula.

Cooper and Hoare's deceptively simple interplay slowly worms into your synapses, as their seemingly anonymous melodies gain personality.

On much of the album, repetition crosses into redundancy, especially true on the two Modeselektor-produced tracks, "Tawwalt El Gheba" and "Enssa El Aatab".

After a while, even unremitting noise and relentless nihilism becomes rote and, frankly, kind of boring. Without the occasional beam of light, it's hard to actually appreciate how dark--or how good--a band like HEALTH can actually be.

Y Dydd Olaf is a crucial minority language record, but Saunders' beguiling melodies and execution also make it one of the best British debuts of 2015.

Living Legend isn't bad, exactly. It's a consistent release with no substantial misfires, full of densely packed verbiage and grand gestures, reminiscent of a time when technique, style, and personality seemed inseparable, interrelated qualities in a rapper's arsenal.

It might be their weakest album, but Presence is among the most special; none of these songs sound like they could have come from another record.

Zeppelin's most singular record, if far from their best.

Coda is a great listen with a skip button close at hand.

The rhyme skills and lurid way with imagery that first brought the group to national attention remain on display throughout the album, but YRN's warring agendas suggest a few more tries are in order for the Migos to get their formula sorted.

This is sparse, windswept music, full of warm, circling guitar plucks, gathering echoes, and long, slow fades.

Rather than build off each other's styles and arrive at a cumulative, comprehensive sound, Teenage Time Killers' revolving cast have conflated quantity with quality, resulting in a pedestrian product that, at best, offers a decent soundtrack to throwing back beers at Punk Rock Bowling.

On Cascade, he’s back to forestalling that knowledge through repetition, which is what gives his abstract pieces their surprising sentience and unaccountable melancholy. The machine is doing the work, but the composer has done the thinking and feeling, and that makes all the difference.

At its best, it feels like an opportunity for two daring drummers to explore with and without their kits.

For an album reportedly inspired by Carl Sagan, the 10-song, 36-minute Momentary Masters is remarkably lean and focused.

His debut album, Knockin' Boots, could actually be the best LP-length statement to come out of house's reawakening.

She is deft and adaptive, at once inspiring dancing and melancholy reflection: La Havas is always in motion.

Where previous PE releases this century have often sounded dated, this one often sounds forcibly modern, the sonic equivalent of your tech-challenged granddad trying to use Spotify.

The production is dense, thin, and minimal, the guitars and drums pushed tight to give all these lyrics extra oomph.

A 29-track, 93-minute rock opera that immediately restored their claims to outsized ambition, as only a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera might.

With this crystalline collection, Watkins Family Hour offers a more compelling insight.

You can quibble with the inclusion of familiar material in a Bootleg Series package, but you can't argue--not yet, at least--with the unreleased depths of the Davis vault.

Seraph might be shifty, but Arsenault still works with blunt force.

The aesthetics of her songs with Hershenow remain timid and careful.