True to form, the record hides moments of grace within an impenetrably violent landscape, capturing a rupture at the boundary of what is bearable. The songs gain intensity as the album progresses, leading the listener deep into a hell of the Body’s careful making.

As with other Magnetic Fields projects, some deeper cuts succeed more than others. Still, any lows aren’t particularly low.

What makes Last Day of Summer engaging has as much to do with White Denim's potential future as it does its roots.

Minks adapt the style that the Clientele matured into over their recent full-lengths, which adds a foreboding touch to these love-and-regret-focused songs.

Caught in the Trees, quite simply, is too busy moving along to get too caught up in anything.

More often than not, the contradictions between the band's knowing appropriations and its calls against jaded cynicism resolve themselves in the album's intricately rewarding attention to rich and unexpected sonic details.

It doesn't help that Cole brings the least-flavorful bars of his career to his debut, aiming, most likely, for something more universal than his diaristic mixtapes. The few glints we get of his personal life are intriguing.

Fear of the Dawn is fucking weird: not obligatorily weird or try-hard weird, but genuinely, imaginatively weird.

Based on Rated R, Rihanna's artistic aspirations are currently loftier than her abilities. Then again, her tenacity in the face of the unimaginable public humiliation this year is beyond brave.

If you like DeMarco, you'll like Another One. It's like a novella, or a made-for-TV movie--something to chew on while we wait for the next major project. It riffs on his established formula.

This is music just about anyone can enjoy, either for close listening or simply ambient sound.

Most of Kila Kila Kila is heavy in all the wrong ways and strangely earthbound.

Even its best moments sound like an amateurish reiteration of These Are the Vistas' quasi-jazz anarchy.

Overall, it reads like a look through some stranger's photo album-- there are a lot incredible images contained within it, but there are also a few embarrassing shots and the occasional moment in time that isn't framed quite right.

Now, with the early new century demanding "opuses," Tool follows suit. The problem is, Tool defines "opus" as taking their "defining element" (wanking sludge) and stretching it out to the maximum digital capacity of a compact disc.

You've got your acoustic guitar base, your occasional slide guitar fill, your Dylan-esque organ, your chug-a-lug drums, and your mildly catchy melodies. It would be offensive if it wasn't so obvious that Cracker doesn't aspire to much more than this sort of rustic middle-America mediocrity act.

Sounds like a step backward.

This is the band's most autopiloted effort yet, a hacked-up last-gen rehash of said space jams, only now with greater emphasis on glitz and glam. Somehow Muse, always loveably lame, have managed to take a turn for the lamer.

While Lerche remains a promising young songwriter, Phantom Punch doesn't quite fulfill that promise.

Like so many debuts, Hats Off to the Buskers is ultimately a document of a band searching for their own voice in those of others.

The Killer works slightly better than either of its predecessors as an album, with the promise of what is to come relieving the earlier stretches of some of their grimness. The gaseous (and Gas-eous) ambient interludes, too, are perfectly sequenced, offering soothing counterpoints to the album's most pummelling efforts.

Even if it doesn't quite match the heights of Everyone Must Touch the Stove, Enterprising Sidewalks gestures towards the more obscure corners of the band's (and the label's) back catalog.

The Roxette and Cyndi Lauper-referencing, soaring keyboard pop of Heartthrob is a welcome stylistic reconciliation, if one that sacrifices their sonic weirdness.

Call of the Void are no exception, and they're proving that Denver is a hotbed of serious vitrol and passion.

It takes a good deal of bravery to write and record songs that are so naked and unflinching, and it pays off: Savage's courage and palpable investment in the material makes it easy to connect and empathize with his subject matter.

There's a sweetly consistent mood throughout; it’s something you can put on and treat as ambient sound, but there’s also a clever subtlety in their process.

The tracks vary greatly in span, but beyond that there’s not as much of a dynamic as on prior Jesu full-lengths.

It's thanks to these big highlights that II becomes a record you walk away from only remembering the best parts, as they largely overshadow all else.