As messy and thoughtful a take on house as we're likely to hear this year.

Through wallowing in its own mire and coming out the other side, Cigarettes After Sex becomes one of those restrained, low-boil albums where tempo, repetition, and muted composition construct an entire story within the pauses between the notes and the ideas between the lines.

Where they once aspired to be your blood-pumping druganaut, Black Mountain now excel at the art of making you uncomfortably numb.

Smile is their exquisite-corpse sequel, a near-automatic exercise in drawing inspiration from anybody but themselves.

With Centipede Hz, Animal Collective have delivered a cluttered, abrasive album that confirms their naysayers' exaggerated perceptions of the band. But even a patchy Animal Collective album yields several exceptional songs.

It’s not so much that Adele’s lyrics are platitudinous (although they often are), it’s that the album’s prevailing sentiment eventually becomes wearying.... But regardless of how one might feel about the spiritual utility of pop music, Adele’s instincts as a singer remain unmatched; she is, inarguably, the greatest vocalist of her generation, an artist who instinctively understands timbre and pitch, when to let some air in.

At their most effective, they speak loudest to our inner music geek: Come for what they remind you of, stay for what they’re learning to bring to the table for themselves.

Ragana have spoken about consciously balancing their individual styles on their records—Coley’s more elaborate odysseys next to Maria’s quieter and more minimal compositions—and that melding of aesthetics keeps Desolation’s Flower riveting.

The album is full of similar tableaux: These songs are dioramas depicting the New Mexico wilderness as a reverberation of the couple's desires.

It's rare for a band to survive the death of a key member, but Ra Ra Riot are actually thriving, turning The Rhumb Line from a potential "what could've been" record into a rousing, poignant testament to Pike's life and his former bandmates' resilience.

Despite capable guest vocalists, including Robyn herself, it's generally devoted to glossy, bittersweet electronic drifts that are too slow, too long, or too bland to hold interest for 60 minutes, though often unobjectionable in smaller servings.

Humbug isn't better than either of its predecessors, but it expands the group's range and makes me curious where it might go next.

Yo La Tengo are still one of the most talented acts going, and whether they're maturing or simply cooling off these days, they're still evolving.

But instead of pushing the electronics and making a funkier, nastier successor to his hit [Nu-Bop], this new disc feels like nothing so much as the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Winds Take No Shape seems to be the response to critics who called for more depth and less of the wide-eyed cuteness rampant on their self-titled debut. Their music is still lighter-than-air, but a newfound strain of wistfulness brings it closer to earth.

A mellow, slightly sub-decent album delivered at the wrong time.

It's a great bunch of songs, and it solidifies the notion that XTC are back from the wilderness and ready to rock the show.

It's all remarkably pleasant for a CocoRosie album--you leave it not with the feeling of having weathered an intriguing, baffling ordeal, but of having listened to something recognizable as an album.

"Blissfield, MI", like most of Runners in the Nerved World, is such an effortlessly enjoyable listen that you can miss the tension and ambition emanating from a band that’s chasing greatness as an escape from being Midwestern also-rans.

Times is a pristine album of frictionless bangers, but these songs are so controlled that they never come close to catharsis.

As extroverted as these songs sound, you really never get a full sense of Hooray For Earth's personality.

Oui is stunning easy listening in recession, but up close, it's genius. The production, the arrangements, the instrumentation, the electronics would sound cumbersome in the hands of the unexperienced, but the Sea and Cake fuse these elements with economy and care. If Oui doesn't erupt like an outright revolution, it's only because the band makes it look it too easy.

Rainforest feels like an artist confidently finding his niche.

A major leap musically and an unflinching reflection on the courage of rejecting easy comforts.

Friendship do not engage in world-building, instead calling greater attention to the world in which we’re all just passing through. While always endearing, over the course of Love the Stranger, they can just as often feel constrained by a documentarian approach.

Just 35 minutes long, the album is a mix of downbeat mood pieces, more fully fleshed-out songs, and effervescent ambient miniatures.

By stripping them down to their bones, Lynne gets the skeleton of these songs right, but in the end you can't help but miss the meat that made Springfield who she was.

A rotely rollicking, backward-facing fuzz assault.