It sounds different from the old version of the band, but not that different.

Welcome Back to Milk scans as an overhaul of its protagonist’s romantic history, a poised reassessment of domestic situations that seemed okay at the time, but maybe weren’t the best, after all. Wherever her gaze turns, Houghton’s conviction is lethal.

Maybe it's good for a laugh, but only as a defense mechanism against the cringe-inducing experience of watching artistic expression abandon a heartbroken man at his lowest moment.

It’s always just one move too many.

Why Make Sense? is probably the fourth-best Hot Chip album. But that’s not necessarily a knock, because their fourth-best album is still a very good album.

The music is colorful and bright and dizzying. It recalls the energy and wall-of-sound quality of Konono No 1, except more frenzied and texturally varied.

Peanut Butter is a chaotic listen, powerful in parts and fragile in others, and often both at the same time. No matter where it goes, it's always running away from itself.

Set aside the negligible opening and closing tracks, and Sol Invictus has just eight tracks spanning 34 minutes, an underwhelming running time considering how long Faith No More have been away. Such brevity could be overlooked if Sol Invictus was accompanied by a significant shift in the band’s sound, but many of these songs feel like retreads.

PC Music is escapism whose primary effect is to remind us of what we’re trying to escape. We can’t trade body for avatar; we can’t displace longing forever. But for the space of an album--the sheer forcefulness of this intention smashed into a dizzy half-hour span--the sincerity within our most fundamentally artificial impulses comes calling.

Wauters has always seemed breezy but never quite so meek.

On Ratchet, an honest, earnest pop record, Shamir elaborates on the gutsy melodies of those early demos and singles and makes good on the hype.

He has his handful of obsessions, his rules, his limitations, and once in a while he returns and gives us a record like this, something that will be sounding good five or 10 or 15 years from now, or whenever the next solo record comes along.

It’s almost as if the first half of the album is comprised of songs that Crocodiles had finished writing by the time they got to the studio, and the second half is all of the stuff that they came up with while they were there. And this exploratory spirit is where Boys finds its strength.

Anamai may not be as pummelling as a HSY record, but their metaphysical weight makes up for it, producing an even more striking result than Mayberry’s other band.

With Niagara, he's taken strengths from his entire oeuvre to reach deeper into himself and produce what may be his best record yet, one that brings all the fulfillment of noise and transcends them all the same.

It is rewarding to have Herren's voice at the table again, to remind the world where a sizeable chunk of this sound derived.

A charitable perspective might see the band's embrace of pub rock as a conscious rejection of political correctness in the form of so-called good taste; the reality is that it seems like a last-ditch attempt to aestheticize a sublime lack of inspiration.

Like Power's best work, Dumb Flesh moves you when it literally moves you.

It’s all gleaming and immaculate from a distance, sharp and shattered if you get too close.

While Bush is strong enough musically, you can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if this crew had followed R&G with a full-length a decade ago, when everyone involved was still in his prime.

The detail-oriented approach that delighted on the Weather Station’s early records reappears on Loyalty.

For longtime followers of the band, Anxiety's Kiss has the feel of a logical endpoint, the latest natural development in an impressive career of progressions.

Overall, it's clear that HIVE1 doesn't manage to engage all of its composer's talents, despite its occasionally locked-in blend of notated percussion parts and sharp electro-production.

While Rundanns has all the makings of a late-career triumph, it’s less a new watermark for Rundgren’s sprawling discography than an analog to it: beautiful and baffling in equal measure, all over the map, and beholden to nothing but its own inexplicable logic.

Ultimately, 1000 Palms sounds like emotional throat-clearing, the transitional sound of a band finding their bearings, resetting their dials, and getting back on their feet in the wake of a lot of personal and professional turmoil.

It is his most personal record, but not because it's bare and raw, but because it's surreal and dreamlike.

The Good Fight is a streamlined reminder to ignore the restraints. Great music is great music, no matter where it comes from.

The problems with Jackie, a serviceable record that gets better with multiple listens, is that unlike her previous releases it's more heavily focused on paint-by-numbers Dr. Luke electro.