Fortunately, whether she's sifting through the anguish she's caused her mother and the trouble she's having finishing her album, or realizing that good sex can make for bad boyfriends and that even sucky jobs serve some cosmic purpose, she generally cuts through the crap without pretending to have easy answers.

Most tracks on the first half clock in under four-minutes, but as the songs stretch out longer on the album’s back half, there’s not enough structure to support them.

The drums are the most overt scaling-up device throughout the album. Carey often slowly brings songs to a crescendo and then proceeds to play around or against them with all his strength. As captured in Whitesel’s immaculate recordings, unburied in the studio haze that cloaks most of Bon Iver’s records, this approach is arresting: something like Glenn Kotche drumming for Def Leppard. Vernon’s voice, too, comes into sharper focus. .... The greatest foil to Vernon’s voice, though, is Wasner’s electric guitar.

Weatherall has created ever more highly textured tracks, moving beyond that “old-school sound” for something denser and more contemporary. But with all of Ross’ attention to detail on Family Portrait, sometimes the tracks don’t fully cohere or else their sentiment feels half-baked.

Sometimes the album sounds like typewriters hammering away, sometimes like a child mindlessly poking a wind chime, but it all pulses with the same energy—the kind that powers the brightest ambient music, the most ecstatic jazz, the most serene New Age.

Between this spring’s cold, uncompromising Droptopwop and the personable crossover stab of Mr. Davis, Gucci Mane is making his most engaging music since his Trap Back/Trap God resurgence.

On In Amber, Butler may have found a handful more peaks and his share of valleys, but few can emerge from the shadow of what came before.

Certainly they want to expound upon the past, not to replicate it, which makes Like Love Lust their most adventurous album to date, and in some ways their most calculated and self-conscious.

The Gold Fire Sessions combines Santigold’s musical past with a passion for spontaneous experimentation. It plays like a distillation of joy.

The generational chasm between parents and children can feel deep and dark, but Anne, both the album and the person, builds a bridge with light and tremendous empathy.

Four of Arrows’ best songs are ones Menne co-wrote, ones that keep the energy up and the ideas simple.

Proof of Youth mostly recaptures the enthusiasm and unique sensibility of "Thunder Lightning Strike," further filling that niche for lo-fi sample-based old-school-noise-rap we never knew we needed filling.

As humble, tastefully appointed psych-pop goes, the Proper Ornaments surely have their hearts--and heads, wooden or not--in the right place.

My only real complaint is that the physicality of the bass and drums could have been emphasized to an even greater degree-- while your ear is constantly drawn to the rhythm section's permutations, Leaneagh's voice sits perhaps a bit too prominently in the mix, and the exhilarating wildness of the drumming is often suggested rather than truly felt.

Minerva's music remains an acquired taste, and Will Happiness Find Me? is not a record to convert people who've been put off by her stuff in the past. Still, it's noticeably clearer in its vision than anything she's put out before.

Within its limits, the album is fairly diverse, though after so many records, the style might be wearing a bit thin.

While it doesn’t always work, it’s Yves Tumor’s use of field recordings that gives Serpent Music an ambulatory quality.

The versatility of core members Auscherman, Kevin Krauter, and Keagan Beresford--each of whom writes, sings, and swaps instruments--affords them chances to try on different masks, a huge strength despite some inevitable flat results.

6lack’s great instinct is knowing when to do a little less, and on 6pc Hot it pays off sublimely. He no longer sounds like a replacement-level R&B singer. He's starting to sound like a master.

Home for Now isn’t necessarily groundbreaking; there are plenty of bands working with similar fusions of indie, pop, and electronic music, but the album shows them clearly moving forward in their abilities and ambitions.

What Jakobsson has always tried to accomplish with DJ Seinfeld was to try to tap into some grand universal emotion, a sense of want inside us all. This time, he finds it in joy instead of grief.

The two of them could’ve used nostalgia to coast on the legacy of their nearly decade-old debut to turn in a serviceable redux. Instead, Why Lawd? leans into a rawness and fear Yes Lawd! only hinted at.

It's a true global-pop album, and a hopeful template for things to come.

Summer Sun is pleasant, if nothing else, but that's such a loaded word for an album that clearly aspires to (and ought to be) so much more than it accomplishes.

The Posterkids sound positively ageless through No More Songs about Sleep and Fire, not having missed a flailing beat through the intervening years of decreasing tempos.

Problem is, where Elf Power previously made every extra instrument sound like an essential part of their songs, here, these things just sound like last-minute additions aimed at making one song sound remotely different from the next.

That's just the thing with Badly Drawn Boy-- he doesn't care about momentum, or continuity, or a lot of other things that you might quite reasonably care about when you sit down to listen to his records.

Ultimately, Chain Gang suffers from a lack of depth, but it's not so painfully hollow that listening isn't kinda fun.