All the deconstructions and rebuildings on I’ve Been to Many Places are more visceral than theoretical, and you don’t have to know anything about jazz modes or music theory to drown yourself in Shipp’s waves.

It’s her best and most daring album of this century, featuring some of her heaviest and most haunting performances.

When Reich's music quietly departs from its source material, the piece achieves lift off, as the form fades and the piece settles into a seething, anxious rhythm of its own.

Her work is a testament to the power of even the quietest music to help us feel things deeply, an experience that lasts for a few minutes that we can return to for a lifetime.

Rips mostly finds the band walking away from Timony's established voice and pushing toward something more direct and energetic--embracing the past, but also blowing things up and starting again.

There is nothing on Lily-O to break the spell these musicians have too carefully cast. In other words, there is nothing to get Amidon out of his own head or out of our collective past.

As she’s shed the trappings of distinctly 2010s R&B for something less easily time-stamped, she’s revealed a new and very telling set of inspirations.

With all the work to try and incorporate these far-afield guest vocalists aside, it's worth noting that the production itself is more reliant on them than ever. Underneath them, the music is often flat and unadventurous, tasteful where it could stand to be raucous and rigid where it needs to be limber.

It’s beautiful and ugly at the same time and, for now, Iceage have found their own unstable sense of peace.

It's pretty boring and one-note, but if Georgopoulos' indulgent, decadent tendencies produce the occasional dud, it seems a small price to pay for the intrigue of looking forward to what he’s going to do next.

V for Vaselines leaves a lasting pop smear.

Too many songs on Taiga come across as filler—too small and formulaic to impress at "taiga" scale, but too leaden to reach anthemic heights.

RAA don't have the element of surprise like they did on the originally self-released Hometowns, and it doesn't slowly ingratiate the way Departing did, but Mended With Gold proves Edenloff's songs of lost love can sneak up on you even when the music hits you square on the chin.

It’s been fussed over so much that any spark that may have spurred it has been smothered.

His latest, Way Out Weather, is the fully formed pinnacle of his career.

Our Love is a very assured record, from its unconventional, austere arrangements to its unrelenting focus and thematic consistency.

Raw is a perfectly executed version of what Westerners might call global kitsch: a series of evocative tourist postcards showing sunny scenes from Rio and Honolulu.

Ra alights on almost all aspects of its bandleader’s multidimensional sound and presents a coherent trajectory through it, alternating between otherworldly explorations and earthbound beats.

As a whole, A World Lit Only by Fire represents music converted into motion--kinetic and mechanical, inexorable and inhuman. Godflesh, never a forgiving band, has never sounded so relentless.

Flying Lotus has the notion that death should be the only limiting factor, and when he's put out a work that wrings beauty out of that very thing, what's the point of fearing anything?

This album’s equilibrium-upsetting aural eclecticism comes into sharp focus: even if you’re not a working mom trying to function on four hours of sleep per night, the buzzing busyness and hallucinatory disorientation of Cosmic Logic are liable to make you feel like one.

Social Rust proves that real experimentation does not require impenetrability at every turn.

What [3rdEyeGirl] don’t have is much of a personality. Recorded live in the studio using analog equipment, the album is nevertheless too proficient, too slick, and too professional to come across as much more than anonymous.

Art Official Age is not a return to form by any means, but a modestly exciting Prince album.

Everything could be accepted for what it is and be held to a more manageable standard: how good does a Weezer album have to be before it can be considered actually good? As it turns out, about this good.

Certain elements of Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, if given the right amount of attention, can be enjoyable to luxuriate in.

It’s rare to see a band as established as Electric Wizard come back from a slump with renewed vigor and a fresh shot of hellfire coursing through their veins, but with Time to Die, they’ve both surpassed expectations and proved that they’re still as vital as they ever were.

The second half of Cool Choices can’t match the first in quality or intrigue, but what makes the album as a whole worth listening to is Ghetto’s ability to burrow into a quarry of sentimental abandon and talk about what it feels like to be vulnerable.