Armonico casts the molten steel of meaningless syllables into machine-gun bursts, sonar echoes, radioactive dirges, and girl-group coos of the group's best work.

Although the sensitive side it reveals is less developed than their established one, it's just as intriguing.

A polished assortment of tidily global-sounding, mid-tempo pop tunes that seem to end before they ever kick off, strung together by a checklist of semi-impassioned capital-K Keywords: Youth, Machine, Riot, Fame, Freak, Pirate, Keepers.

Lost in Space leaves you feeling that she's already covered this terrain.

It just feels like empty tribute, lip service for someone who really does deserve something more: the dignity of being left alone.

You get the sense that pretty much any style could be Ware’s if she commits to it, but for now it’s nice to hear her explore a level of sophistication as her star continues to rise.

Indeed, there are lessons to be learned from Automato's debut, the foremost being that the golden touch of Mssrs. Murphy and Goldsworthy can't save a band from their own indie-rap dullness, horrible cybernetic-produce bandname, and absolutely atrocious MC.

Harness doesn't deliver many surprises or follow through on the promise of the debut; it simply refines the sounds they explored and digs its heels in a little deeper.

Thing of the Past is a perfectly pleasant, well-produced album that offers an authorized version of what Vetiver fans already unofficially know about the band.

Old Days features all the objective elements of useful rarities disc, but it's doubly valuable for reminding us of a Mirah that might've grown up too fast.

Clearly a children's song, it's an autobiographical account of the slowed process of overcoming loss--a big idea written for small people but, like a good portion of Tear the Fences Down, one that registers across the board.

Difficult, unapproachable, and gleefully abrasive, Verdonkermaan will be an addictive but acquired taste for those who seek out the horrendous, the inhumane, and the fucking brutal.

His vision of how to build bridges between his own music and the music others is already his own, and Mon Pays puts it on brilliant display.

In lieu of new Replacements, Anything Could Happen is a decent replacement.

Sorceress is a mature and freeing record, one that celebrates meager triumphs of womanhood even as it mourns a loss of innocence.

Ritual holds down his rock-star impulses and ties the album to a specific time and place, settling for the merely pretty instead of the all-consuming. Richly textured and carefully composed, Ritual is an impressive composition, but for Hopkins it feels rote.

Instead of trying to rage against the machine, they're appealing to its intellectual nature. Unfortunately, this nuance is steamrolled by the group's need for fan-friendly riffage.

Tonally and instrumentally, the album is a change in style, but there is no moment of surprise; it still feels very predictable.

Still, overreaching is a forgivable flaw on an otherwise accomplished debut, which usually sounds so confident in its creator's insecurities.

No one's perfect, I guess, especially when they're trying to go from one-note to every note in the space of a single record. Sadly, though, that means that the dancier stuff, though I want to like it so much, is Wild's main casualty.

Lost Themes is plenty dark and heavy but shorter on inspiration.

Iit confirms anew that Big Business remain a band without comfortable genre quarters, as indebted to power pop and psychedelic rock as they to sludge or stoner metal.

A meticulous assemblage of sequencers and synthesizers, drum machines and aleatoric percussion, small beeps and tectonic booms, Light Divide refracts and then reorders moody electronic music, creating more of a mirage than a mere collage.

This is the sound of an ever-curious, shape-shifting band finally finding the confidence to tell us who they really are. But they are not telling us anything we didn’t already know.

Arca joins a long line of musical chameleons. The emancipatory promise of Arca’s project—a world beyond binaries, categories, and convention itself—remains thrilling, even when her tottering steps don’t quite reach that wished-for horizon.

Happy Birthday is strikingly raw. Moolchan’s refusal to bend to conventional song structure or recording techniques gives the music a sense of joyful rebellion. ... But as an artist whose defining quality is economy of language and texture, she falters when her songs are packed with too much sonic stimulation.

Recalling X's boisterous male/female mantras and careering boogie by way of Sonic Youth's frosty downtown cool, The Invisible Deck is a confident and polished record built of cavernous drums, simply slithering riffs, filthy bass grooves, and high-energy dynamics.

Murs for President is such a weird album to listen to in a strictly critical sense, where it stands as a more-or-less average release.