Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place. Instead it moves, and moves others with it.

There's an organic, humanistic ethos operating behind her music: we are all people, and we're all moved by the same primal passions and stimuli.

Acoustic has all the ponderousness of a forgotten episode of MTV Unplugged, and that setting only highlights Band of Horses’ worst tendencies.

There’s pretty of sunlight on Galore, but no heat or friction, as everything from the production to Pepperell’s enunciation is so glassy that all of these somersaulting hooks might as well be gibberish.

Entire swaths of music are cut from Persson’s cloth; she is a known quantity. For better or worse, this lets Persson get away with an album like Animal Heart, one that isn’t much of a statement.

Real Hair keeps its runtimes tight and its choruses front-and-center, pulling in some of Major Arcana's looser ends without sacrificing its fall-apart charms.

When you're operating within a strict template, you have to find some distinctive way to fill it out--a felicitous phrasing here, an unexpected chord change there. Without those elements, there's little on Sun Structures to remind you that you are, in fact, listening to a new band called Temples.

While ††† may be on the same scale as Deftones, they’re not a replacement, and it stands to reason that Moreno can ascend to the heights of their previous work. But on †††, it’s like he never had wings.

Whether you find dance music far too repetitive or you live for old Traxx 12"s, you will remember Dance Mania's tracks, as they are among the catchiest and most brazen of their kind, alternately hypnotic and disruptive.

Tranquilzers does very little to reinvigorate or recontextualize chillwave or shoegaze and does even less to signify innovation on its own terms.

It's the mood of Hotel Valentine that stands out the most.

Remaining true to your identity while also evolving and keeping an audience that’s always a moving target interested in you is a tough gig. On Emmaar, Tinariwen are up to the task.

Little Red is not the best album it could have been--a few of the bonus tracks should have made the album proper--but Katy displays a vision for her career that suggests an exciting future.

Chorus, Herndon’s new two-song EP, essentially amplifies the extremes of her musical personality and pushes the tension almost to the breaking point.

The forward movement of July can be entrancing and propulsive.

Mitral Transmission is a fascinating album, then, a would-be footnote that reveals Fox’s willingness to mine most anything for sound. Sometimes, as on the first half of Spiritual Emergency, that process can lead to messy results. But elsewhere, it’s the power pushing Guardian Alien and Fox past their past associations and into a wonderfully strange and unpredictable future.

There’s no chest-puffing here, no braggadocio; this is only the very sincere statement of a person doing his best to work through the worries of living and share any delight he’s stumbled upon along the way.

It’s that they’re one of many bands following this particular path and Dunes’ best hope is that you haven’t heard any of them yet.

Angel Guts is yet another strong, occasionally frustrating record restrained by Stewart’s consistency.

Ultimately, Terrestrials works as a likable listen, a liminal play concerning the push and pull between dusk and dawn. But it serves as a mere footnote or, at beast, an appealing redundancy for Sunn O))) and Ulver.

Whatever the songs on So Long are actually about is up for debate despite their plainspokenness, but suffice to say, they trigger the exact joy buzzers that leave you usually infatuated, perhaps a bit hopefully lovelorn.

After the Disco is a more cohesive record, and that turns out to be the problem: Mercer and Burton's eccentricities have been sanded down to a single, flattened plane.

Songs usually don't develop past their first five seconds, and the album slides back out of your attention field quickly.

Benji sounds more like Kozelek relating events instead of crafting them, which makes the continuity and reflexivity of the record feel both uncanny and the work of protracted genius.

Moon is plenty fine in its own right, and if this heralds a return to further music from Raymonde as well as getting Dosen a little more attention than previously, then nothing wrong with that in the slightest.

That’s the realm where CYMBALS work best, when they use understated sonic brushstrokes--a flutter of synths here and there--to deepen the mood.

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.

As a literary exercise, it’s convincing; as a listening one, it’s mixed.