These songs are generally not the type to grab you right away, but there's enough mystery and melody there to call you back.

Nothing short of elemental in its beauty.

Plays like a big, half-drunken romp through golden-era rock 'n' roll-- airy and thrilling and shifty as hell.

The lengthy, indistinguishable tracks could pass for a Daniel Lanois-produced collaboration between the Dave Matthews Band and Kenny G.

To stick with the digital-age-anxiety theme, Networker feels not unlike a dating app meetup that went fine, but not great—just entertaining enough to hold your interest for a round or two of drinks until you’ve decided you probably wouldn’t see them again.

While if i could make it go quiet is an occasionally uneven listen, it’s a strong declaration of conviction. Although Ulven is still fine-tuning her approach, her eagerness to explore hints at promising potential.

At their best, Rush to Relax's songs maintain a firm grip even when they meander.

Loud Planes documents not the dissolution but the redefinition of their relationship; it's a staying-together album, which not only makes it much more interesting but provides a persuasive argument for their musical compatibility.

There’s a newfound focus that was missing even on Salvia Plath’s The Bardo Story and Silk Rhodes’ self-titled.

Like the city in its ’80s golden age, MILANO is superficial, vibrant, and full of possibility.

With Hummingbird, Local Natives have made a thoughtful, lovely album with small gestures that provide great rewards.

It's an impressive influx of new talent, but you would be hard-pressed to hear it for most of the album.

The band’s effusiveness often feels torrential, which makes its more inane moments come off as collateral damage. On Shadow Offering, Braids isn’t afraid to steer dangerously close to the eye of the storm.

Everything Ecstatic marks his first slight step backward as a solo artist but it's hardly a failure.

Though less memorable than its predecessor, Lex succeeds when it is heard as intended: as a conceptual companion to Reassemblage’s opaque experimentation, an appendix of utopian ideas that adds nuance and provocation to a seductive sound world where East meets West, and breath and circuitry are made one.

None of these modes are new—you might hear echoes of the Ramones’ brash vintage punk, PJ Harvey’s spare 4-track demos, or Jeff Rosenstock’s radically optimistic pop-punk—but Grace comfortably inhabits each.

As a technical achievement and as a piece of pure sound, The Civil War is inarguably Matmos' best record.... [but] there's less of an emotional core here than on previous offerings.

I’m People is his best effort in nearly a decade precisely because the music sounds emphatic, insistent, unselfconscious in its celebrations. Taylor doesn’t try to force the miracle; he just lets it be.

Nothing sounds overworked. If anything, Burhenn and Swift present the songs in an understated manner, confident in the quality of the material and the strength of her voice.

Infra works as an enveloping and moving work even absent any knowledge of its beginnings. Others may glean different feelings from it than I do, but that is part of the point.

Oh Holy Molar, Felix's second album, recalls the starkness and exaggerated intimacy of records by Cat Power and Scout Niblett, but Chua is a far more reserved and poised individual... [Yet some songs] reveal the limits of Chua's voice and aesthetic.

77 is long; 18 tracks and 68 minutes, and you’d think that if a band insisted on staying around for so long they’d have more to say, or at least display more stylistic variation.

At first listen, it’s as perplexing as its immediate antecedent Not the Actual Events. ... The EP’s final track is both the strongest and strangest.

Visiter stands out within their consistently enjoyable catalog for being the least consistent and most surprising—an unalloyed mix of timely African polyrhythms and freak-folk wooliness, bowl-passing ruminations on the existence of God and one-minute shrugs about getting dumped.

It is an album of quiet delights, but at times it feels like the songs are simply stretched too thin: three-star meals served with five-star service.

Being shouted at for 53 minutes to find some agency in the midst of chaos may not make for highly nuanced music, but it would be hard to argue that you couldn’t use it. This is kitchen-sink maximalism as refuge—just throw everything in there, there’s no time.

Wild Smile is wild indeed, the band's aesthetic and feel summed up perfectly by the cover art.

Its power, both in spite and because of its core ethos, is undeniable.