It’s a playful, fantastical response to some serious life changes.

Rather than feel tacked-on incongruities, the three Rave Tapes remixes found on the EP’s second half provide a welcome, unpredictably outré counterpoint to the linear songs heard on the first.

Black Messiah pulls together disparate threads few predecessors have had the smarts or audacity to unite.

The Pinkprint’s singles underwhelm.... But they’re redeemed by the bonus tracks—a thrilling, confounding six-song set that elevates The Pinkprint from an occasionally transcendent, if unbalanced, break-up album to something far more intriguing.

A Los Campesinos! Christmas is a record for those who want to spin a seasonal record that's both crushingly isolated and humorously self-aware.

It's not her finest work, but it's plenty good enough to rope a cohort of new fans into what's promising to be one hell of a creative ride.

It would be a tall order to expect them to rival Frost's raw power, but these remixes don't unearth much fascinating stuff, and the EP turns out (mostly) competent but wan.

2014 Forest Hills Drive is a decent album selling itself as great. It wraps itself in the garments of a classic, but you can see that the tailoring is off.

It’s a strong album, but it’s not another Forever Changes, whose accomplishments in retrospect were unrepeatable, or even another Four Sail. On the other hand, Lee wasn’t aiming to craft something in that vein.

A handy 4xCD compilation (disc four a fascinating set of outtakes and unreleased material) that captures the good Captain’s cagey albeit failed move towards mainstream rock acceptance.

It’s just voice and guitar throughout, but Kozelek’s nylon string work is consistently engaging, even as he falls back on some of his go-to fingerpicking patterns.

The sequencing shapes the album beautifully, creating a sense of emotional fatigue while only hinting vaguely at redemption. Thematically, however, that cycle implies a romantic fatalism, as though every relationship is doomed to end painfully. That’s what makes Gentlemen at 21 such a compelling and necessary reissue, even if the album has never been terribly hard to find.

Cohen is a genially commanding stage presence, falling on his knees at crucial moments and doffing his cap for his accompanists' solo turns. The Old Ideas songs, sprinkled throughout the set at just the right intervals, are naturally at home, capped with the wry God-speaking-to-a-man-named-Leonard "Going Home". Otherwise, the songs you know and plenty of songs you should know better are probably here.

36 Seasons is more in line with the spirit of Ghostface’s recent output, where he’s more prolific and "for the love" than ever and somehow lazier at the same time.

Power of Anonymity is a masterclass in the sleight-of-hand that we call techno; there is virtuosity in the music's very attempts to sneak past under the cover of darkness. It may pass unidentified, but it will not go unnoticed.

Over the course of the next 10 minutes, the recording stirs to life in a slowly mounting atmospheric swirl of eerie guitar squeals, rain-on-tin drum patter, random bass blurts, and frosty-breathed coos, before the two groups find a common ground on a stalking rhythm that eventually yields to a series of seismic, Boredoms-worthy psych-metal eruptions at the halfway point.

Now he's breaking out with a full-length record that's more restrained, more skeletal, and often more mournful than anything he's done before, a metamorphosis from somebody who's had fans growing to expect them on the regular.

It’s a seamless and occasionally thrilling listen that establishes a fact many could have predicted: Blige’s throaty vocals, as passionate and emotional as ever, are an ideal fit for house music. Nonetheless the album doesn’t exactly play out how you might expect.

It’s the easiness of Monuments that truly make it an outlier--whether Corgan constructed a masterpiece or just sounded labored, it was obvious that a ton of effort went into Smashing Pumpkins

Its hard-psych is ugly, alluring carnival music that warps and melts before us just as we begin to trust it. Through it all though, there’s an undercurrent of humor and fun; Turnbull’s active imagination stretches out for miles and he comes across as a twisted visionary on his most accomplished album yet.

For all his clinical reserve and careful attention to detail--some of these beats might as well contain footnotes--Barnt has ended up crafting an unusually heartfelt testament to techno's emotive potential.

If they've managed to brainwash their listeners, they've done it by making a record that's hard to tune out.

At War With Reality is, above all else, an At the Gates album that feels like a pastiche of At the Gates. At least it’s a spirited one.

It’s no doubt a conservative record, maybe even a deeply unfashionable one, but much of its strength lies in the fact that it sounds different from everyone else out there.

Where overbearing arrangements don’t get in the way, a cloying sentimentality does.

What makes Painful so eminently approachable after all these years is that it manages to sound like a fully realized, band-defining statement yet unpretentiously off-the-cuff at the same time. It’s a feeling reinforced by the overflow of material available on this reissue.

Classics is charming and sleepy in a '60s samba sort of way, filled with whispering percussion, light electric guitar solos, and string arrangements worthy of the silver screen.

Some songs maintain the attraction of anticipation, hinting at where they might go without ever fully abandoning other options. But others feel more flat than ripe, not so much flirting with tense silence as drifting into empty inertia.