Spell Blanket is an expansive sonic feast, swiftly—but intentionally—oscillating from minute-long loop fragments and textural studies to more fleshed-out, properly arranged songs. There’s a noticeable flow in energy, which gives the collection more of a proper album feel than a mixtape or thrown-together compilation.

The best and most essential part is the fifth disc: Townshend’s solo demos, scratchy and awkward, like a novelty private press album by someone with far too many ideas to capture on tape, on his own. The good news is that it all holds up. Minus the eternal “I Can See for Miles,” none of these songs found a permanent home on classic rock radio and so they belong entirely to this album, unburdened by decades of overplay.

Whether or not Iron & Wine and Calexico ever choose to follow this up with another collaboration (fingers crossed), it's clear that both acts are stronger for having worked with the other.

Crucial parts of the album don't sound as intriguing today as they once did-- namely, all of the voices.... On the other hand, the rhythm tracks still kick ass 10 ways to Sunday.

Warm Leatherette was alternately more sanguine and more severe—a bracing confluence of reggae, new-wave, and post-punk that showcased Jones’ range as a performer and her uncanny, occasionally perverse vision as an interpreter of other people’s songs.

Wiki has always wielded his considerable talent to paint cityscapes with words, but with Elsesser’s production, they become transportive.

Guided by a more mature sound, Infinite Worlds is the rock music we need nowadays, when it seems like home, wherever it might be, is getting farther away.

It's packed with ideas, some of which work beautifully and some of which are just a joy to hear play out, but most of all, it's still a whole other world of pop music--an absolutely unique, enchanting, and irreplaceable vision of how the stuff can work.

The excitement is sustained so consistently over the hour-long running time that you'll almost begin to wish the six-minute songs were even longer.

The “new” material on Piano & a Microphone has already circulated as bootlegs, but this album clarifies its details, rescues it from indistinct hiss.

A significant step forward from her debut, Two Suns is home to some of the year's most thrilling music so far.

Flower Boy shows thoughtfulness can be freeing. As Tyler, the Creator embarks on a journey of self-discovery, he becomes close to whole.

It still speaks for Cluster’s prescience, to render the mechanistic noise of early electronic devices and warm them up in such a manner so as to reveal that no matter the new technology, such components are ultimately human after all.

Though there are pockets of brightness, the melancholy of Kenny Segal’s “contraband” and Child Actor’s “phone screen” are Neighborhood Gods’ prevailing mood. .... On this album’s paralyzing second half, he slips in and out of sometimes wildly disparate vocal modes to communicate that flickering dread. When he recounts a dream about a seemingly omniscient baby, he does so in a regimented syllable pattern that feels, uncannily, like a downward spiral.

This ambient music is not psychedelic. It never evokes outer space or the cosmos or, for that matter, the natural world, even when it uses the sound of water. It’s music for the indoors, music for doing things, there for you if you want to listen closely but also content to exist on a subliminal plane.

The rare box set that’s actually more than the sum of its parts. The highs on here are higher than the lows are low, and, more significantly, the warts-and-all approach creates a compelling context for Dick Jensen and the O’Jays alike.

Half of rage is confronting the sorrow that births it and watching it metamorphize. Witnessing the chrysalis is With a Hammer’s most generous gift.

Love is turning everyone into an audiophile, then, which means it's making younger people a little older. And it's also a mashup remix, which means it's making older people a little younger. They were just a pop band, yes, but if anyone can bring all these music fans together under one tent, it's the Beatles. Which is what Love is ultimately all about.

On an LP dubbed Razz Tape, this session spills out energy, with complex songs that slam hard and flow with ease.

Yeah, it's a fun album, and it's probably the most affable thing they've done so far together. But don't take that for a weakness.

What distinguishes the recordings on The Time for Peace Is Now is how the passion of the singers is tempered by the professionalism of their supporting players. Everybody involved was attempting to appeal to a broad audience: They were converting doubters into believers by playing gospel that could masquerade as pop.

Here every sound and beat is laid bare, with no heavy reverb blanketing the songs like fog. The newfound clarity produces neither thinness nor tedium, but simply a direct, unadulterated power.

Compared to 2017’s ken, a gothic-sounding record distinguished by chillier tones and pared-down lyrics, his masterful new album Have We Met sets a larger canvas. Produced by bandmate John Collins, the music is sweeping and bold and surprising.

Cold House takes a fantastic batch of songs and intelligently mixes in cutting edge electronic elements a la Autechre and Nobukazu Takemura, a couple of west coast underground hip-hop artists, and some delicate backing arrangements, and creates one of the most innovative releases of the past year.

Bakesale add-ons will mostly be of value to those who loved Sebadoh's first few years of all-over-the-place wildness, but it's not as if their second-disc inclusion can dull the parent album's punch.

It all adds up to a remarkably visceral, sensual, confident electronic record that stays absorbing from beginning to end, and should finally catapult Hopkins to stardom in his own story.

Their self-titled debut EP for Warp and LuckyMe spans 16 minutes of some of the year's most brazen, positively huge hip-hop sounds.

Like a great sacred text, the music of Kirtan: Turiya Sings is concentrated and rigorous, yet simple and full of ease. Like the original Turiya Sings, it’s also a pleasure.