Watching Movies with the Sound Off is a quantum leap in artistry, but it’s not without faults; the album’s about three songs too long, and a couple of the tracks in the back end just plain run together.

The music is a heady swirl of baggy beats and unabashed Beach Boys melodies, while the lyrics are wholly uninterested in anything intellectual.

Lacking both the demonstrative lo-fi sprawl of its predecessor and the hermetic perfectionism that often marks long-gestating albums, Jackleg really does sound like the Baptist Generals made it first and foremost for themselves.

Antenna to the Afterworld may have all the dressings of science fiction and fantasy, but like many great works in those genres, it's a strong, emotive character study.

Their stuff floats off, and the synths carry the whiff not of a beach breeze but of a department-store escalator.

At its best, Born Sinner, showcases J. Cole's overall musicality, pairing his ability as a lyricist with a more broadly developed production palette.

The extra thematic layer gives the music a depth that bodes well for this band’s future.

The lack of structure makes these songs feel experimental, but not sufficiently to commit to being out there in a remarkable way.

With Love is like a pocket book of poetry, a series of short thoughts only tangentially related. Zomby is the elegant menace, capable of beauty and great affect but too stoned or disinterested to fully commit.

While there's nothing revelatory production-wise if you've heard Lootpack's Soundpieces: Da Antidote, there's a little workshopper's insight in these protoypes for The Unseen-caliber bluntedness.

His is the ambient music of someone else's party, happening far away from where you are, and the distance is part of the allure.

Each fluorescent strike of noise, incongruous tempo flip, and warped vocal is bolted into its right place across the record's fast 40 minutes.

In Dva, Emika may be aspiring to a larger scale of pop, but for the most part this only serves to amplify her flaws.

Getting Closer is fashionable and curious, but there's an extreme lucidity to it that is off-putting, forgetting for a moment a handful of dud tracks.

Even if it doesn’t have the same cultivated mystery or incapacitating demands of Agaetis Byrjun or ( ), Kveikur is every bit a return to form, tapping into its predecessors’ bottomless emotional wellspring for a Sigur Rós album that can be listened to casually or intensely.

Much of Curiosity finds Wampire a bit too comfortable and self-satisfied within their washed-out aesthetic, and the premeditated haziness of the recordings--and obvious attempts to weird them up, through squeaky synth settings and effete vocal tics--ultimately undermines the duo’s songwriting ambitions.

While Field of Reeds is a mysterious album in many ways, what it makes clear is Barnett’s faith in the purity of sound, rather than words, to communicate.

Ultimately the success of Half of Where You Live lies not in Gold Panda repeating old tricks, but in how he's expanded his repertoire to include new sounds, and his aesthetic proves sturdy enough to accomdate them.

The darkness is where Lortz repeatedly returns, and when he does, the album swoons into a near-stasis.

Their singing is stripped of its former bite, and while they still ramp up the fuzz, it's a much cleaner-sounding album made at Dan Auerbach's Nashville studio. And as a whole, it's very inconsistent.

Truth be told, Pythons seem to feel pretty conflicted about itself: hooky, Weezer-ish guitar pop offset by desperate, discomfiting lyrics, fleeting hopes of reconciliation quickly dashed by heavy-hearted resignation.

It’s silly, it’s in no shape or form subtle, it’s fun, it works.

The problem with Chapter II is that even the album’s high points are only just good, when the dubstep world has reasonably come to expect great things from Benga.

This is the early-hours sound you nod off to, not the one that has you second guessing what you heard.

The third album from this Canadian collective is their strongest yet, and clear proof that while yes, everything old is new again, there are a scant few armed with the passion and power to craft something worth revisiting.

Few groups do wistfully melodic trad-rock any better right now. Smith Westerns haven’t only not burned out, they’re a budding institution.

Avalanche’s obsessive squeaky cleanness keeps its audience at a distance. Coco might insist that she’s still looking for trouble, but there’s none to be found on Avalanche.

Cashion and Willen’s sense of melody is as rich as their textural layering, resulting in pieces that are immediately engaging yet hypnotically serene, and, at times, devastating in their poignancy.