Artistic restraint is a new concept for WHY? and it’s understandable if Moh Lhean as a whole feels slightly tentative at points.

Warmth stands to resonate with those seeking a transportive experience whose peaks and valleys never overwhelm.

Watch Me Fall is neither a reinvention nor a holding pattern for Reatard--walking the line between them is tricky, but he continues to make doing so look easy.

Eskimo Snow just feels like the right kind of album for an incredibly gifted and increasingly prolific band like WHY? to release as a quick palate cleanser, reaching an endpoint of a certain sound rather than trying to top its predecessor's unmatchable extremities.

There is no guiding conceit to Easy Come Easy Go, no criteria that connects all of Faithfull's sources, which frees her up considerably to find the hidden passages between these disparate songs.

Traditional Synthesizer Music feels not so much traditional as a refresh: a suite of music that is crafted and ferociously complex, but at its root a pure and primal thing, high on its own chaos.

The problem is that the strangely smug We Don't Even Live Here feels more like P.O.S. preaching to the converted than attempting to make a believer out of anyone, lacking any palpable resistance necessary to justify the constant underdog pose.

In A LA SALA, each member of the trio has several opportunities to shine while making each track sound individual, and it all comes together cohesively because Khruangbin know where their strengths lie.

Vanishing Point is both an anachronism and, if you’re on Mudhoney’s wavelength, a hilarious bulwark against everything that’s annoyingly ephemeral about contemporary underground culture.

If Dälek didn't have all this discordant float working for them, they'd be one of the most irritating rap groups in history.

Oversteps finds them working in a comparatively less rigid fashion, almost organic compared to something like Confield. Focusing on creating tension and release within their compositions, they're still incorporating new designs, not merely repackaging the previous products.

[Guitarist Dave] Chandler's prowess as an axeman cannot be given enough emphasis: his writhing, twisted, screaming solos, and devilishly heavy riffs funnel blood and mercury into Saint Vitus' heart, as Wino's pipes lay down the soul.

1000 Days is a heartening record, a record that sees a young band picking up steam, playing with their influences more deftly than on their prior LPs, and bringing a thoughtful approach to old and well-traveled sounds.

An exceptionally personal album from someone known for his intimate songwriting.

Blush is a record of impressive variety, both in sentiment and sound. Some of the riskier arrows fall far off the mark, but more often than not, Hawke hits her targets with verve and style.

Requiem for Jazz is a complex record, requiring sustained attention and careful thought. Though it lacks the fiery rage and visceral immediacy of 2020’s LIVE, its nuanced critique of jazz’s role in Black history is an important and necessary continuation of the conversation that Bland began over six decades ago.

If Smith’s earlier albums tended to flush the sound field with twirling synthesized figures like so many kites in the sky, Gush turns up the gravity and clears out more negative space. Each sound bears more weight and locks more readily into prolonged grooves.

Return to the Ugly Side is clearly designed to be experienced as a single piece, complete with an opening instrumental overture that recurs later in the album, and seamless flows in and out of tracks.

Tiga's still not a dancefloor chameleon like Basement Jaxx and he's not yet as pop-oriented and clever as say, the Pet Shop Boys, but Ciao! at least sees him glancing in those directions.

Think of Sports, then, as a freshly taken Polaroid with a lit cigarette stuck straight in the middle of it-- a burning hole bridging the distance between then and right now.

Totems Flare regains a measure of hospitality from its predecessor, but it brings only one new idea to the table-- Clark's singing, which is only partially effective.

Dominated by shuffling drums, slow southern rock guitar licks, and pedal steel, the music on Mount Moriah is unobtrusive and reserved--at times almost too much so--but there are some fine flourishes in these songs, which feature members of Megafaun, St. Vincent, and Bowerbirds

English Electric, the British new wave band's second full length since the reformation of the classic 1980s lineup in 2006, neither escapes from the quartet's past nor fully aims to.

The latest Horseback album, Piedmont Apocrypha, compacts this meandering trajectory into a five-song narrative that's inclusive, intriguing, and unquestionably creepy.

There may be no artist more committed to the line as a creative medium than Nisennenmondai; projected through Sherwood's spacetime-distorting lens, their vision of infinity becomes all the more engrossing.

The album is at its strongest when it leans into its own mysticality, sounding old-fashioned and contemporary simultaneously.

The mindset of Skip a Sinking Stone is best entered with the intent of total immersion and allotting a similar amount of Mutual Benefit music to more conventional song structures and interludes can feel like a vision quest stopped too frequently for bathroom breaks.

What The First Family does do well is situate the listener in a time and place that seems galaxies away from the one the Beatles would birth two months later when they put out Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.