Vol. 2 proves there’s more than enough country funk out there to fill a good Vol. 3.

The main drawback to Worlds’ sound, an impressionistic approach to mass-appeal fare, is that anyone with their ear to the (festival) ground might find these sounds to be relatively old-hat.

FKA twigs is not a masterful lyricist, at least not yet; some of her couplets feel clunky, like she's grasping in the dark for rhymes and coming up with the objects closest to hand ("If the flame gets blown out and you shine/ I will know that you cannot be mine"). But when she zeroes in on the essence of a thing, she hits hard.

Like their namesake, Melted Toys’ willfully warped nature can get in the way of their utility.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Being is most compelling as a pop album when it’s not trying to hook you; the rest is promising, but perhaps could do with a little more dementedness.

Somehow L’Amour sounds less there with each spin, beckoning you into its hazy world even as it dissolves into gray. The mystery is so perfect that it’d be a tragedy to solve it.

End Times Undone neither elbows past nor dwells too much on Kilgour’s considerable legacy. It’s a frozen moment in a continuum, and it shines with suitable magic.

The main problem is that the music is so self-conscious, as most of these songs sound like a band still trying to feel its way forward. The quest is noble and even necessary; the results, much less so.

The melodies for their slower and more winsome songs hit harder and soar higher than the power chord explosions, which can feel a little stale, like maybe someone forgot about that Schlitz can.

Its style is limited, but the band manages to spread out within it, discovering their own idiosyncratic little vocabulary without ever exhausting it.

Gist Is is full of clever turns of musical and lyrical phrase which will dispel possible accusations of self-indulgence and pretension, and somehow, within just a few listens, it becomes easy to enjoy this unusually paced album of so few easy hooks, and so many seemingly insignificant words.

There's a limp, mostly-constructed skeleton of a great rock record here, and maybe that's exactly what it's meant to be.

On Time Is Over One Day Old, any emotional extreme or attempted musical shift just ends up sounding like stasis.

These songs rip and burst and go.

The Voyager is not quite so easily summed up. It’s not anchored in one particular scene, but plays as broadly California, with sly nods to the Byrds in the guitars, the Go-Go’s in the vocals, and Randy Newman in the wry humor.

The diversity of sound the band rolls out on Pe’ahi is certainly refreshing, but it takes a chunk out of the foundation of their career.

The idea is clever, and very Beck: a mix of the modern and the antiquated so fluid that you start to see how they're not that different to begin with. The execution feels out of his hands, and really, out of everyone's--just another project whose purpose seems lost in the labyrinth of production.

It’s Shelton who confidently ties everything together and insinuates a larger story arc in the sequencing.

Racy is big, it’s bold, and positions its creators closer to "pop", only to reveal them as a pop band by context rather than nature.

Shattuck doesn't often telegraph the resemblance, and the band's growl-and-bash obscures it, but if you're listening for Beatles-of-'65 nods, they're all over Whoop Dee Doo.

The soul of Shabazz Palaces is pairing next-gen sounds with classic brass-tacks show-and-prove emceeing, and Lese Majesty tugs those extremes as far as they've ever been pulled; that it never shows signs of wear speaks to the strength of the bond.

With By All Means he completes a three-release run that's as solid as any in recent memory, even if the answer to the question of whether he has another gear in him remains unanswered for the time being.

The more human Ab-Soul dares to be on record, the stronger he becomes.

Where past efforts buried its intimacy under coldness and severity, Will To Be Well offers a warm, familiar embrace.

While Liminal is a testament to the Acid’s breadth of vision and production prowess--seamlessly incorporating everything from subterranean techno and avant-R&B to proggy sci-fi soundscapes and sad-bastard bedroom folk--its uniformly predictable pacing, with every song painstakingly built up from a pause to a pulse, grows wearing over a 51-minute stretch.

It’s a lot to tackle in seven songs, but there’s a depth and richness in both texture and songwriting that show glimpses of a new direction, one that might free them from their own drone-rock noose.

The album's most convincing when tackling the push-and-pull conflict between the individual and his hometown, as Common's good intentions are buoyed by memory, generosity, and attentiveness to his craft.

While Drop the Vowels doesn't carry the game-changing nature of that album, the relative sonic variety it provides compared to Luxury Problems' expressively singular mindset makes for a solid introduction to one of contemporary techno's most consistently exciting collectives.