Amid last year’s dual hubbubs about their newly sharpened rock songs and their subsequent crash, Live at Maida Vale preserves the memory of the pugnacious, strapping quartet at the center of it all.

When he’s at his best, you feel like you’re getting a well-selected sample from the endless trove of sounds and ideas blubbing inside his brain.

The delicately chained unison of the guitar and vocal melodies makes for a standout passage in a record that feels fresher and sharper than we've heard from Veirs in awhile, and perhaps serves as the dark flipside of children's record Tumble Bee.

Though Trap Lord's vision is refracted through split personalities--for better or for worse--A$AP Ferg still sounds like a star in the making.

Albums recorded over ample stretches of time often don't hold together well, and Tonight is no exception.... Although one of the strengths of this album is that it's clearly coming straight out of a void, oblivious to anything else around it, there's also a childlike wonder coupled with a decent understanding of the gruesome side of life.

Occasionally a hint of shoegaze filigree or kosmische bliss gets drawn into the swirl, but it’s not enough.

If space-rock as a whole is a role-playing game, one in which its players imagine having front-row seats for the heat-death of the universe, then Deep Trip is the one of most advanced vehicles yet designed to take them there.

It's his most focused album, with every song's tone easily flowing into the next, and it's also one of his best.

The most satisfying songs on I'm Rich are the ones that adapt a bit to the fact that all six members, logistically speaking, cannot be present to scream every note in your face as you listen.

This is the album that might’ve better earned the title Everything in Between, as the songs are composed of scraps, MacGyver tricks achieved with contact mics, bass guitars, and doctored amps. Occasionally, the effort manifests in notable progress.

The inability to define Porcelain Raft contributed to the initial intrigue, but with his second LP in two years, Remiddi has cemented his sound; Permanent Signal is more or less more of the same, a mutual fatigue passed on from Porcelain Raft to the listener.

With Doris, Odd Future’s Odysseus is finally back and chasing the ghosts out of his head.

If you have absolutely nowhere to go in the near future, Bitchitronics will make an excellent travel companion.

The record's uncompromising hard luck street narratives are dispensed with a preternaturally sharp eye for detail that dabs Gates’ economic writing with a shock of much-needed color.

Though it draws upon the distant past, Julia Holter's made a timeless people-watching soundtrack: an acutely felt ode to the mysteries of a million passersby, all the stars of their own silent musicals.

Flourish is a purposefully alien and repetitive album, and at the outset, it works.... But in the second half, the iterance becomes tedious; footholds are few amidst the long stretches of vast electronic tundra and the Perish side B can feel like a sheer drop towards revelatory closer “In Kind".

We Knew It Was rarely evinces the same boldness, proffering instead a steady procession of jangle-fuzz jingles that yield moments of brain-massaging beauty (the gleaming outros of “Song From a Short-Lived TV Series” and “What Gets Me By”, in particular) but little of Surf City’s more combustible qualities

Danilova has taken these compositions about as far as they can go, and still there remains something intriguing about Zola Jesus, not just for her ghostly enigma or art world appeal but now for what really comes next.

Between the spirited music and Hütz's delivery, you're not likely to walk away from Pura Vida feeling uninspired. But if you want to really hear what Gogol Bordello is saying on Pura Vida, a little history with the band is going to go a long way.

Thoughtful, quiet moments like that ["What Can We Do," "Me & You & Jackie Mittoo," and "Your Theme"] work but, this being Superchunk, the uptempo tracks still hit hardest.

The dynamic between the wobbly production and the sturdy songwriting defines Moon Tides, though I wouldn’t say it causes any tension. Conflict is clearly something avoided within the tenets of Pure Bathing Culture. But it does result in a listening experience that causes more ambivalence than it probably should.

This is a charity album, released to aid the Isle of Wight Youth Trust, and as such it's a commendable venture. Still, its placing in the New Order discography is hardly likely to be significant, especially as the Live at the London Troxy album from 2011 already documented this incarnation of the group in a live setting.

When you start to pay attention to its manifold subtleties, you’ll likely only lean in closer, noticing even more details within an album that suggests they never end.

Unlike the other reunited groups of their generation, Medicine doesn’t sound nostalgic at all, and in fact they sound more contemporary than the majority of young guitar bands playing right now.

Move Way, dBridge's new EP and his first for the evergreen R&S label, puts a strong focus on his efforts to maintain the structural integrity and rhythmic impact of drum and bass while pushing its forms outward from the template-driven repetition he's spent his post-Bad Company career trying to counterbalance.

The songs don’t really go anywhere, but they don’t need to--it’s the psychic tone that matters, not any sort of hooks, and the blissful state they produce comes from simply enjoying them in the moment.

If you're looking for evidence of any major stylistic shift in Martin's approach on Filthy, it's better to settle for a solid reiteration of a lot of the stuff he was doing on his last album.

It's another excellent chapter in CFCF's story, a strong case for how much unexpected magic can be found in the ordinary and, more importantly, in CFCF's ever-mutating discography.