Putting the Days to Bed is a solid effort-- a step in a promising new direction.

They really leave no space for Palumbo, and while there are distinct choruses, there are no hooks. There are more memorable basslines than vocal melodies.

His bars vary from the goofy (“She made me bust a nut, that’s a starburst”) to the confusingly profound (“Time is poured on me when I ride that Maybach”), but it’s his ability to apply his signature inflection to just about any rhythm he conjures up that can make Drip or Drown 2 nearly hypnotizing.

Throughout Time Makes Nothing Happen, Gengras toys with the tropes of electronic dance music (repetition, meter, gridded quantization), only to gradually veer off into unkempt wilderness.

He mostly manages to boil down the macho bloat of his sources to graceful essences without underplaying the pomp.

Her supple singing and the lively production keep Jupiter from being a slog, but the hazy symbolism sours the experience.

These new songs are energizing for González, but they lack that sense of genuine discovery, of a songwriter being lifted away from his usual comforts. Instead of letting the drum machine reshape his songwriting, he mostly uses it as a metronome.

While it doesn't recapture the magic of the Sprout-era Guided by Voices records, Universal Truths and Cycles marks the return of some of the most sorely missed qualities of early Guided by Voices: strong vocal melodies and refreshingly atypical song structures.

Selmasongs breaks no new ground whatsoever for the Icelandic composer, instead dwelling in more comfortable regions already mapped by Homogenic.... the record definitely has its great moments. The problem is, there are only two of them.

An immediately engrossing and challenging collection of moody, evocative songs-- an entire album of "I Want You" and "Watching the Detectives" for those so inclined.

The Golden Dove has moments of significant achievement.

Tape-chewed textures and digital glitches initially defined Wyatt’s first few releases, but there’s a remarkable clarity throughout Union and Return that belies the fact that for all the beauty of his fourth album, his inherent weirdness still squirms beneath the surface.

The band sell their introspection by marrying it to convincingly urgent music. It’s also a lot of fun; all the flying guitar chords and thumping beats inevitably quicken pulses.

Like most of his recent records, it’s another collection of mostly very good Gucci Mane songs, marred by occasional awkward bits.

They say you have to see egg punk live to really get it. But the goofy, revved-up glory of Super Snõõper comes pretty close.

Consider OH the "most Lambchop" of Lambchop releases, as it swings through almost every tone in the band's history of influence-collisions, arriving at a soul of its own.

Thrice Woven is WITTR deboned. As welcome as it is that they’ve dropped Celestite’s pseudo-kosmische schtick, they’ve come back with a facsimile of what once was.

While the band has always played around with a variety of sounds, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of songwriting, most of Mystics doesn't measure up.

It starts to distinguish itself from its long-established template when the band gets less edgy.

The mercurial, combustible potential within suggests we may not be laughing at it for much long.

Even without the heavy emotional resonance of those mixtapes, Str8 Killa works as a showcase for a ridiculously solid rapper. Gibbs knows his craft inside and out.

This is a transitional record, an in-betweener, one that Lidell may eventually look back on as a door to something else. The good news for all of us is that even when he's down, he's not out.

It’s an adventurous, impressive display of instrumental can-do, a music nerd’s romp through high-fidelity magic that’s only occasionally hampered by insipid writing.

Deschanel is more convincing when she's on an extreme end of romance--either losing it or being swept into it--than when she's trying to rationalize it.

So many ways for it to go wrong, but instead it's a unique, catchy and lovably weird record, with highlights that could hold their own with the best indie singles of the year.

Machine Messiah, though, is the rare Sepultura album where the vibe of the music doesn’t consistently match its central themes.

Dacus intended 2019 EP as something of a diversion from her usual work, a series of stand-alones intended to flex new musical muscles. Perfect as these songs are for our moment, there’s an unmistakable staying power to them, too.