Yet unlike the more cohesive albums from those aforementioned acts, Immolate is a one-step forward, one-step back proposition, marching in place to an internal setting somewhere between chilly background mood and something more melodic and engaging.

Lady Walton contains the most accomplished and varied music Clogs have recorded to date.

It's probably his most immersive single release--or album, or mixtape, or emanation, or whatever--in a year and a half, better than both Based God Velli and I'm Gay.

With Lovelessness, Bison B.C. prove that rudimentary doesn't mean uninteresting or trendy.

Nothing sounds belabored, nothing overthought. Sheff even allows himself to understate like never before..

Friendly Fires is teeming with ideas, and although the record's consistent sound can be exhausting--there is no release, no relaxation in tempo--it's encouraging to locate a new band with too much passion, so much that it can hardly execute its ideas on one page.

What makes Gem feel like a such step forward (and such a straight-up enjoyable romp) is the way it playfully appropriates the debauched excess of glam rock to achieve its own singular vibe.

When you sleep... has a much more distinct and iconoclastic character than their slick debut, drawing from the effervescent, percolating polish of early '80s Hot 100 pop that they flirted with on "Heart Out.".... That doesn't mean that When you sleep is consistent by any stretch. It's 75 minutes long, which could mostly be solved by trimming the four (!) lengthy ambient tracks on the record.

Milk Famous falters by creating an Uncanny Valley effect by adopting the most easily replicable aspects [of Spoon's sound] without maintaining any sort of human element or offering anything that's identifiable as their own.

Sometimes Ashworth sounds like she’s yearning to startle her own music’s hypnotically pleasant surface, and there are times you wonder if the gauziness of shoegaze is doing her a disservice, hiding her in plain sight. But SASAMI is a powerful first effort, and Ashworth is a compelling presence.

King Tuff feels like the couch surfer friend you invite to your house party, the one who's often charming and fun but will not leave until every last drop of beer is gone.

Carpenter’s bandmates mostly help him resurrect an old sound instead of crafting a newer, fresher one, yielding distinctly diminished returns.

Tie on the celebrity blindfold, and Broken Boy Soldiers no longer seems like that much of an achievement-- just another case of men recreating their favorite vinyl deep cuts, if a bit more skillfully than most FM scrapbookers.

The faster stuff is pretty much in line with the key tracks from "Mag Earwhig!," and the lesser of the slow jams could very well be on any of the records after "Do the Collapse."

In Rubin—as much a guru as he is a producer—Kesha’s found a collaborator willing to indulge her spiritualist tangents. But neither the ideas nor the audio clips feel fully integrated into a broader theme of the album. Her ambivalence is more potent.

So go ahead and grant the Eels an exemption for going the orchestra tour route; the additional personnel justifies their paychecks by saving this live album from being a rote greatest-hits-with-crowd-noise exercise.

As great as all these songs are individually, they sound best together, and hearing them in relation to one another reveals things about them that are harder to catch when they're separated.

Somehow this totem of influences works, stacked one atop another in a monument to the newly refocused Strand of Oaks.

The lyrical coarseness serves an important function, reinforcing the urgency of O'Connor's performances and creating the impression that she has worked hard and fast to document her emotions at their rawest and wildest.

An exuberantly echoing starburst of lo-fi twee-pop gone grand.

Dalliance is the sound of a good band tightening to the point where they become something greater.

Olympic Mess speaks volumes without utilizing language or conventional musical tropes; it's an experience so captivating that language only breaks the spell.

Kamikaze has a slightly slicker, glammier edge than its predecessors, as well as some unobtrusive strings on a couple of tracks, but the peppy backbeats, gang-shouted choruses, and fist-pumping enthusiasm remain.

Enjoyable as it is, EP 4 does seem like smart risk management, a test run that confirms that whatever the group comes up with won’t be a Pixies-style disaster. As such, the rewards are modest.

You can’t knock Czarface Meets Metal Face too much for sounding like a period piece, since that’s so clearly the intention. Czarface has always spoken directly to a specific audience, one that values familiarity over progression. And if what you’re looking for is a hip-hop album that sounds like it could have been recorded 15 years ago, Czarface Meets Metal Face certainly delivers.

In one sense, The Other is a logical extension of its predecessor’s more lustrous moments, like the jangly acoustic outlier “Eyes of the Muse” and the stargazing ballad “Staircase of Diamonds.” But the execution here is more sophisticated—and the overall tone far more serious.

If the album makes for an occasionally uneasy listen, that only speaks to its authenticity: Anyone who’s ever lain awake at night wondering where their life is going will feel a cringe of recognition in these songs.

Rome shows how precise the National’s alchemy is: If Devendorf is replaced with a drum machine, if Dessner confines himself to the piano or quiet noodling, if Berninger rambles too far afield, the whole thing falls apart. It’s Alligator deep cut “The Geese of Beverly Road” where Rome best demonstrates the band’s collective power. On record, it’s patient but stiff, held back by a lo-fi drum recording; live, it’s the massive, sweeping anthem early believers always hoped it would become.