For now, the musically and emotionally rewarding Anything in Return evokes the feeling of being young with options and in no hurry to figure it all out.

The Black Rock succeeds on occasion, but the weight of McCombs' past is a tough load to bear in situations like this.

Roberts' voice sounds in fine fettle as well, and his reedy, keening brogue is the type of immediately distinctive instrument that is virtually impossible to imagine any listener accidentally mistaking for someone else's.

The album simply flickers out like a candle, with the faint promise of another visit to this setting.

As an album, Lost Sirens isn't at all an embarrassment: it's a document of a band whose range and reach, rather than power, are what has been diminished.

The way that Everything Everything play against the macho, aggressive posturing of contemporaries who could care less about caring should be their strongest calling card.

Love Sign's belief in the righteousness of its intentionally big, dumb songs being big, dumb and nothing else ultimately sets Free Energy up to fail.

Django is perhaps the first Tarantino soundtrack that feels, uncharacteristically, a little too nail-on-the-head.

On Fog, Arbouretum does well by both parties [his songwriting influences: singer Will Oldham, with whom he toured as a backing guitarist, and Baltimore punk-rock-Gnostics, Lungfish].

There's plenty to love on Mystical Weapons, but it's not a casual listen, and it's best not to expect one.

A narrative concept album that runs a mere 29 minutes and is both more musically ornate yet somehow also slighter than anything Girls attempted, a deeply personal work whose arch presentation serves to keep you at an emotional distance.

To its credit, {Awayland} rarely comes across as false, but O'Brien's affinity for cleverness over clarity ensures it rarely comes across in any real way.

Light Up Gold finds Parquet Courts looking to breakout through any available means: intense reflection, resin hits, or rock'n'roll.

It may not herald another big day coming, but Fade is a thoroughly immersive dusk-to-dawn soundtrack to a dark night's passing.

["All Natural" is] the one song on the spotty, often comatose Selling My Soul that sounds like it needed to be made.

They still have the riffs, but without the snap of a snare drum to keep things in line, the chiming guitars become repetitive and amorphous.

If you've liked anything Toth has done in the past, whether that's the tunes he's written or the textures he's conjured, Blood Oaths offers both, perhaps better than ever before. If you've dismissed him, though, this is the sound of one musician's prolific and mercurial path, reaching delightful new highs.

Here, there's a sense of picking at a strand of inspiration and seeing how it flows toward a form of endgame, albeit one that still prickles with possibility.

Loyal is a hypnotic record, siphoning in and out of repeated, textured loops that soothingly chafe against each other like fingers performing a head massage.

LP is efficient, prickly, and noticeable, or not much like modern techno at all. That he is operating like this at the same time many others are is a boon, for us, so long as he keeps his blinders on.

Although Everything Touching is post-rock at its most winsome, and rarely unpleasant to listen to, closer "Murmurations" might be the key to understanding why several years of triumphant live shows hasn't translated into the ultimate debut album.

Trouble Man's scattershot approach makes it the realest album the guy could make in 2012, but that doesn't make it any good.

LongLiveA$AP delivers on and even exceeds the promise of LiveLoveA$AP. Like that mixtape, the album is a triumph of craft and curation, preserving Rocky's immaculate taste while smartly upgrading his sound

Muhly seems at home in this world, and part of the enjoyment of Drones is in how it seems to observe, from Muhly's serene remove, how others are not.

Explore suggests that while Park can produce listenable songs that do right by their influences, he's still an inexperienced talent in the process of finding his own voice.

What prevents Berberian Sound Studio from being a genre exercise is the care taken to paper over the cracks, to find some common ground between droney, Popol Vuh-type material ("Valeria's Burial (Under the Fort)") and more visceral horror soundtrack work (the positively seething "The Game's Up").

Like a lot of free internet mixtapes, The Narcissist II is compelling but ultimately shallow, and shallow is a fault, even if that's what Blunt was aiming for.

The broader fault of Ten is that it isn't the ABBA Gold-caliber wonder that Girls Aloud deserves as a greatest hits collection.