By paying attention to detail, Yttling and Li's prove that doesn't have to be [an impossible task]. But even more impressive is the way their intimate, playful miniatures capture the daring and novelty of modern pop, as well as its hooks.

With Outside Love, McBean takes this theme on an adventurous journey to surprising heights, and the fully realized sound allows his ideas more room to breathe.

You may drift through recent Sea and Cake records more than you engage with them, but you still tend to want to drift for longer than a half-hour. Nevertheless it suggests the band is still master of the niche it's carved, and not out of new ideas just yet.

Give Blood falls squarely in the "pleasant surprise" camp; a gift to short attention spans everywhere.

Combining post-punk’s propulsive rhythms with progressive rock’s winding melodies, Lifeguard channel the verve and manic energy of making art with like-minded peers and the rush of sharing your bespoke musical world.

If it's been years since you've listened to these songs, as it had been for me when this reissue arrived, you might believe you're hearing them for the first time. And if you've never heard Earth this early, get ready to change your conceptions: The fountainheads of drone metal have been surprisingly versatile from the start.

As impressive and encouraging as the production is, Pemberton's rapping isn't up to snuff. He's still overly dry and often noticeably amateurish, and he sometimes pushes himself to do things he can't.

Songs rarely pick up from a crawl. Sustained guitar chords fan out and crush whatever momentum the band gets going. The bursts of distortion that colored If Children are almost pornographically expanded.

In Chewed Corners Paradinas has put together an LP brimming with fresh ideas-- which, for an artist entering the third decade of his career, is no mean feat.

Sex & Food is best in this spaced-out zone, where alienation sounds genuinely alien. The record’s disembodiment is precisely what makes it intriguing and, occasionally, unlistenable.

Plenty of songs on Lonesome Drifter tell multi-layered stories, but the longest one stretches barely beyond three-and-a-half minutes. The laudable economy of language resembles his fellow Texan Townes Van Zandt. So, for the most part, does the mood.

Songs like “Automatic” and “Mon Amour,” meant to feel airy and perfumed, wind up coughing on their own musk. Ware’s adherence to such rigid disco blueprints also has the knock-on effect of making her voice sound less remarkable than it actually is.

So Darnielle doesn't sing about anger; he sings about loss, and in a way the results are as dark and brutal as The Sunset Tree.

If you listen to it too many times you might forget it’s on; it blends into the background easily. But the mood it conjures is surprisingly rich. The album plays out like a gorgeous day at the end of the summer and the bittersweet calm that follows as the weather gets cooler.

It's not always great--the band has a tendency to let its best ideas get the best of them--but there is a bigness of sound that is hard to approximate. And even harder to control.

So really, it doesn't turn out all that different from the most recent Earlimart, Beachwood Sparks, or Jason Lytle records: perfectly okay, not pushy enough to be even remotely unpleasant, and in a way you're hoping it's better.

On the plus side of the ledger, you can understand what the hell Oberst is talking about most of the time on Upside Down Mountain, which makes it an immediate improvement over Cassadaga and The People’s Key, two albums that somehow managed to be cryptic and pedantic at the same time.... But elsewhere on Upside Down Mountain, he wields populist observation like a politician, trying to utilize his homespun wisdom from an elevated plane.

Thank Me Later presents its star as a bottle-serviced hip-hop headcase tirelessly searching for love and good times while caught up in his own thoughts.

Growing's approach is uncharacteristically undeveloped here, as the trio never seems to know for what exactly what it's aiming.

There is enjoyable music here, and I've no doubt that the Bibio project has plenty of life on it.

This isn’t an album about clearing one’s mind. It’s raw and frenetic, a blistering and desperately beautiful soundtrack to the mounting chaos.

Music Can Hear Us lays out DJ Koze’s panculturalist ethos clearer than any of his prior studio releases, island-hopping from wispy echoes of son Cubano (“A Dónde Vas?”) to Japanese-language doo-wop (“Umaoi”) to, uh, Damon Albarn-fronted Afrobeats? .... To show the next generation how it’s done, DJ Koze throws two absolute heaters into the back half of Music Can Hear Us.

This second-hand facelessness runs throughout Volta, which still reads oddly rote and cold with this addendum. Even with its hulking abundance, Voltaïc is flesh without bone.

The Heretic’s Bargain [is] their most cohesive record to date, and suggests that it will likely be bested on that count by the next one.

Where the old Bondy would sometimes show his hand too blatantly, the new Bondy is playing his cards with greater aplomb and much greater skill. When the Devil's Loose, A.A. Bondy's second album, is evident of this ever-growing skill. But that's not to say there isn't room to grow.

That impulse to complicate is thankfully mediated more thoroughly and evenly on Love Yes than on previous efforts, only poking through here and there. It is also striking that this very complex album was recorded entirely live; the music seethes with precarious energy.

This may be Herren's least accessible project to date.

Where [Winners Never Quit] moved with confidence and conviction of purpose, Control wallows in an amoral netherworld of overamped midtempo ballads and incomplete thoughts.