It’s a master-level maneuver that underlines the essential theme of the three-disc set, which is that after a quarter century of pushing music into the future, Carl Craig’s still not done.

Retired from the road but still quite active as a musician, Sakamoto’s mission isn’t novelty, but an expressive palette he has carefully made for himself with a ship-in-a-bottle-like focus.

There's enough stylistic extension here that Katy finds a way to transcend enough signifiers to call herself pop above anything else.

Like the debut, this album is only eight songs, but floaty interludes like "In a Bubble on a Stream" or "Juju" allow attention to drift more freely, closer to TTA's super-limited 2006 ambient excursion Escaping Your Ambitions.

Perverts is an awful lot to take in one sitting, and it often feels split between two distinct aesthetic modes: the wistful chill of slow but structured songs, and the brutal unmooring of eerie ambient collages. Both styles converge thematically on the same tortured core, but the switch between them can cause whiplash.

Whether it's the lush power-balladry of "Beg For the Night" and "Be Mine Tonight" or throttle-pushing rockers like "You Call Me On", Confess is defined by its melodic and emotional immediacy.

Versatility, it turns out, may not be Clams’ strong suit, though that’s hardly a problem; as the first half of 32 Levels demonstrates, there’s still plenty of room left for Clams Casino to grow into his own sound.

Throughout the album, he’s haunted by both the things that have and haven’t happened to him, what he has and hasn’t done, ruminating over a tight 32 minutes across eight tracks that feel haunted even at their hardest.

This album is more for Naeem himself than any listener. And when it hits a sweet spot, drifting somewhere between manic experimentation and somber fury, Startisha shines.

As Chopper reaffirms, Kiwi Jr. may never be the kind of band that deals in linear narratives or grand conceptual statements. But like the background bit actors that fill out the frames of a big-screen epic, their songs amass minor details to major effect.

Refreshingly, SweetSexySavage is at its best when it’s most exuberant, giddy in the face of haters and common sense alike.

Oberst has traded in a lot of his post-adolescent trembling for a calmer, less unbridled melancholy, but Conor Oberst is still packed with disheartening realities, and Oberst refuses to temper his pessimism, even when it starts to feel heavy and contrived, more like a narrative tic than anything else.

Songs in A&E is certainly Spiritualized's best work in 10 years.

While some moments are absolutely stellar, I Might Be Wrong is only a shadow of what a Radiohead live album could have been.

The record is experimental in the truest sense, each of its tracks signifying a possible point of departure.

Forgoing the bitterness that made 2006's What Are You On sound so tinny and doomed, We Live in Rented Rooms, despite its endtimes stoicism, may be Cornog's highest-fi album to date.

If you’re in this emotionally combustible state, you’ll relate to You’re Gonna Miss It All directly and deeply. If you at least recognize it in retrospect, you can just as easily appreciate its wealth of infectious songs that are both sharply observed and sharply written.

Don’t mistake their expanded palette for a lack of focus: as always, Darkthrone keep these eight songs’ latent chaos on a tight choke-chain, timing the hellish tremolo riffs as carefully and slowly as an October surprise.

Even if they do sound tighter and more controlled as a unit than they have before, The Bug Club still sounds disheveled and spontaneous enough to be mining the human anatomy for one-liners.

More so than Forgiveness Rock Record, Hug of Thunder presents Broken Social Scene as a rock band making rock songs, a coherent montage rather than a patched-together highlight reel.

His music is heavier and more complex than it used to be, the arrangements harsher and stranger. And then there’s his singing: Once a competent and breezy instrument, Walker’s voice has evolved into a throaty speak-sing that sounds depleted, as though it’s been scooped out of itself. These shifts give the record a deeper emotional resonance than anything else he’s put his name to.

Ferndorf as a record isn't something to get you hearing music in a new way or an open up a new world, but it does succeed very nicely for what it is.

Nothing has established their voice by transforming that anxiety into languid, slanted harmonies. The Great Dismal takes stock of their career, finding vaporous beauty in shrugging off their inner demons.

Under Stellar Stream is filled with such fertile repetition.

This is a solid debut album.

These new songs are shadowy and spacy, a little bit lost, maybe even a tad sexy despite themselves--all brighter and richer than their predecessors.

Here's the first full-length Broadcast product that pulls back the veil and lets us hear big stretches of what it's like when they're trying sounds out, getting abstract, being well and truly difficult.

It's a dense, patient work that could only have been made by someone who's done this before.