These songs sound full and finished even in their austerity.

The intimate nature of Has God Seen My Shadow? thus illuminates those qualities that often get overlooked in Lanegan’s high-profile pairings: his grace, tenderness, and self-deprecating sense of humour.

Throughout Static, Big Ups come across as a band in complete command of their sound, fronted by a guy on the verge of losing it.

A record whose middling between arena aspirations and headphones listening feels less of a fusion and more of a compromise.

The four new songs here are less blank than the four on the first, if only marginally.

For a "studio experiment," it's exceptionally listenable.

Hidden World is the work of a band that sounds much older and more assured than it should.

Give the People What They Want is a pretty short 10 songs, though its breezy half-hour leaves plenty that sticks and plenty more worth revisiting when it doesn't.

Between the carefully plotted reference points and the not-exactly-gripping lyrics, Forever tends to run together over the course of its 39-minute runtime. Still, taken song-for-song, there's no shortage of takeaways.

As a proper third album, Marci Beaucoup doesn't stack up to its precursors, but as an advertisement for Marciano's services as a beatsmith, it's much more successful.

Blank Realm is still bent on mixing the diamonds with the rough, and on Grassed Inn that particular swirl is at its most intoxicating.

Until the Colours Run works just fine for an all-purpose wallow, but it’s simply too ponderous to be the galvanizing social commentary to which it aspires.

An unwelcome presence, Morello is simply the most obvious of many elements on High Hopes that just don’t work. It’s all the more unfortunate given that there are actually some redeemable songs here, along with some brief glimpses of Springsteen the rock'n'roll storyteller.

The pleasurably gnashing dissonance of Music for Shut-Ins' past/present collision suggests that the L.I.E.S. label's what's-next surprises are far from growing stale just yet.

Each of these tracks is indeed summery in its own way, as is most of There’s a Dream. But there’s one thing that neither this collection nor Hazlewood ever forgets: The brightest sun always casts the darkest shade.

At the heart of his music is still an inimitable bittersweetness—the light shrug that follows the realization that in time all things will die and pass. His best songs have always felt like ballads, regardless of tempo. There are some of those songs here.

Beyoncé seized the powers of a medium characterized by its short attention span to force the world to pay attention. Leave it to the posterchild of convention to brush convention aside and leave both sides feeling victorious.

The most innovative and intriguing aspect of Pulaski is not its music, but ultimately its not-quite-definable form.

It's thanks to these big highlights that II becomes a record you walk away from only remembering the best parts, as they largely overshadow all else.

It sounds like like a lot of learning and a lot of loving went into this album, and the result is FaltyDL at his most open.

It's far from perfect, but it's never less than driven, and that drive gets you past the garbled syllables and any pesky feelings of deja vu.

How could the scene that gave us 1999 and Control have such an underknown history where its pre-eighties R&B roots are concerned? Thanks to the deep knowledge base and research that went into Numero Group's Purple Snow compilation, it's made clear just why that is--and why, in a fairer world, it shouldn't have been the case.

This work feels more in tune with decay and exploitation in sexual portrayal, the numbness accrued from a constant barrage of imagery, than anything that’s notionally "sexy."

The End of Silence is Herbert effectively tussling with what "significance" means at this particular moment in time, in a record that's as much a part of the gathering noise of the 21st century as it is a comment on the constant numbing we've wreaked upon ourselves.

Rival Dealer has some of the most immediate music from the Burial project, but it's worth noting that this is also a noisy, dissonant work.

It’s a master-level maneuver that underlines the essential theme of the three-disc set, which is that after a quarter century of pushing music into the future, Carl Craig’s still not done.

Intellectually sophisticated but prone to using primitive musical effects to convey such messages, Warwick’s results vary wildly after that.

The Remainderer is an encouraging sign that stability has yet to ossify into stagnation with this ongoing iteration of the band, who formidably exercise their elasticity over the course of these six wildly divergent tracks.