The tracks feel like true collaborations rather than features. The energy exchange feels mutual. Sebenza feels like the future, now.

Minerva's music remains an acquired taste, and Will Happiness Find Me? is not a record to convert people who've been put off by her stuff in the past. Still, it's noticeably clearer in its vision than anything she's put out before.

Although Moms is the result of its two creators' putting themselves through the wringer, it never feels overshadowed by dread.

Total Loss uses the common tools of pop expression-- four-minute songs, autobiography, choruses, confession-- to create a work of poignant and devastating art.

The album starts strong, but is uneven, dragging toward the end.

Here Ambarchi shows how sharp about-turns and starkly dissimilar contrasts can be equally potent.

Mirage Rock is so lightweight and inconsequential that it really does seem more like an illusion than a record; it's wispy and indiscernible, as if the people who made it had no vision for what it should be.

It's a soft but sinister set of songs-- the Bay Area's answer to the Velvet Underground's self-titled record. Where Sic Alps were once wasted and wobbly, they are now stoned and serene.

Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color is more of a refinement than a deviation for Brother Ali, even though there's one prominent change that could set off questions.

Breakthrough-- which it is and isn't-- feels like the kind of record his adventurous precedent has made into a familiar signature. It's the album that gets at his recent creative mode most definitively, the one people might figure he had in him rather than the one that changed anybody's minds about him.

Woods' greatest strength has always been songwriting, and sharpening the focus and cleaning up the production has only enhanced the band's welcoming melodies.

Runner shakes out as one of this band's most subtly varied albums, and it can be an immersive listening experience if you give yourself over to it.

A handful of guests aside, though, none of G.O.O.D. Music's personalities do much to justify their newfound prominence. If Cruel Summer is meant to be an argument for the label's other talent, it makes a weak case.

The group's obvious enthusiasm for the project is contagious, and together they add another memorable benchmark to Chasny's formidable body of work, clearly having a fantastic time while doing so.

While there's no question that Grizzly Bear's last two records have sounded gorgeous, critics of the band have wondered if that's enough. Shields, the band's fourth and most compositionally adventurous record, should put those concerns to bed.

The result is an album that never sounds settled or still, defined not by one or another place but by the tumultuous spaces in between.

Serpentine Path is an unapologetically straightforward statement, one that's either going to sound awesomely monolithic or numbingly monotonous depending on the listener's appetite for extreme doom. But on its own terms, the album is highly successful.

Halstead's performing reinvents no wheels but never is anything less than well-done regardless, and the full performances can often find their own impact.

Mostly, Field Report sounds a lot like his old band.

By aiming for so many different styles, settling for subpar-at-best lyrics, and trying to pay the bills with rock'n'roll, they never find a sound that's fully captivating or convincing.

on Tempest, his latest album, Bob Dylan mostly sounds insane. That volatility can yield tremendous rewards-- on the ferocious "Pay in Blood", it clarifies his nihilism, his cruelty-- but it can also be distractingly unruly, inching toward self-mockery, all wild undulation and hairball-retch. Which would be okay-- embraced, even!-- if the rest of Tempest didn't feel so rote.

A song or two here and there might falter a bit, but taken as a whole, Mary's Voice is a minor triumph.

You'll find something to latch onto in every song, but you won't always walk away from Negotiations with its choruses in your head; it's a more consistent record than its predecessor, but more orderly, too, and the highs just aren't quite as high.

If the sheer enormity of Thee Oh Sees' dense discography has proven too forbidding for you to delve into, Putrifiers II is a convenient summary/gateway, opening with a killer shot of the band's patented echo-drenched fuzz-punk delirium ("Wax Face") and closing with a baroque, string-swept lullaby ("Wicked Park"), while traversing all points in between.

It's hard to shake the feeling that the album sounds too comfortable, too familiar: It's so deeply entrenched in their comfort zone that it sounds too easy-- not effortless, but automatic and rote.

As ever, Ragon's lyrics are highly evocative if not outright provocative.

In retrospect, it seems Giant will function less as a career highpoint for either artist, and more as a historical marker of the career trajectories of each participant.

It's a placeholder album from a man who has already written 20 songs that are better than the ones here.