Against the Odds perfectly captures the band’s legacy precisely because it presents the history, music, and memories with an admirable degree of honesty and doesn’t try to make the story into something it wasn’t.

For all its internal contradictions, Salad Days is no more or less than a great album in a tradition of no-big-deal great albums.

Earthquake Glue meets any GBV album that isn't named Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes.

URGH is both headier and more visceral than anything Mandy, Indiana have made before. This isn’t body music or brain music; it’s spine music, homed in on the bony junction where mind meets matter.

Hospice answers silliness with solemnity, jitters with nerve. Their band name simply describes their music: a delicately branching instrument of force.

If you haven’t listened to Red, recently or ever, it’s well worth your time; in its ecstatic, expressive vocals, tart humor, vivid imagery, and tender attention to the nuances of love and loss, you’ll find everything that makes Taylor Swift great. ... Some of the vault tracks feel like they were left off of Red because they weren’t up to snuff.

Despite the summery song titles and the beach balling associations that might follow these guys around, this music transcends the notion of seasons.

Yet it still feels honest, like something said out of necessity instead of opportunity, and the result is an album that engages with the idea of loneliness in exceptional ways.

Rhye's music itself feels deeply intimate. Much of this comes from Hannibal and Milosh's deft arrangements--each of Woman's 10 songs makes its point with a bare minimum of moving parts.

What makes this whole thing work in an album context is that all the thematic and sonic pieces fit together-- these weird, morning-after tales of lust, hurt, and over-indulgence ("Bring the drugs, baby, I can bring my pain," goes one refrain) are matched by this incredibly lush, downcast music.

At its core, this is a record about accepting and even embracing the smallness of human life, and how difficult that can be, given our damnably innate sense of adventure, ambition, and restlessness.

The results were massive--the myriad "best show ever" kudos deserved.

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

He is whimsical and somber, funny and meaningful, sometimes all at once.

Shepherd feels like his most something album ever—his warmest, his most generous, possibly his most profound. It is his longest, for sure, lounging comfortably across four sides of vinyl, none of it wasted. It is a high note, fond and deep and sustained.

What the Isley Brothers achieved can't be contained in a single album nor can it be adequately summarized in a hits collection. They seized all the tumult, all the excitement, all of the sounds of their time and turned it into enduring commercial art whose endurance and depth is best appreciated in a set like this, where the actual records can be heard in their entirety.

Le Bon’s creative power remains in the circuitous jaggedness with which she navigates pop and poetry, uncertainty and revelation.

The Promise is also a good demonstration of how Springsteen mines his unused songs from material, and shows how many ways he tried to record things before figuring out how they worked best.

Shot through with seemingly innate bravado and the experience of a childhood spent near the pulpit, Shane had a pitch-perfect sense of when to stir up the dance floor, when to bring things down, and when to bring them up again.

Cohen is not a songwriter who panders; he speaks above us, sometimes quite literally to higher forms, but also to universality instead of common denominator. Topicality, to him, remains somewhere around the Romantic era. But Cohen is also keen to experiment here.

Whereas Murphy once took on all of these influences lightly and cleverly, they feel heavier across much of American Dream’s 70 minutes, with the lingering responsibilities of a disappearing history becoming more apparent. On paper, that might sound like a bit of a slog, but this is not the case.

It takes a special kind of force to get so many different voices in one place to coalesce. Maybe a common goal. Maybe a shared spirit. Sometimes, it’s as simple as having somebody at the center who’s willing and able to care for everyone—and who’s as magnetic as Sofia Kourtesis is here.

It’s beautiful and ugly at the same time and, for now, Iceage have found their own unstable sense of peace.

Perhaps as a direct result of I-Sound's presence, Music is a Hungry Ghost is a looser, more abstract affair than previous efforts.

Sometimes bludgeoning, always regal, Blue Cathedral is a calcified, hippified holy place.

The band's latest extends their newfound confidence to content as well as delivery, and stands as the finest full-length by Stuart Murdoch and his shifting collaborators since [If You're Feeling Sinister].

It's the album's end-to-end strength that speaks the most-- against hip-hop artists who fail to make solid albums and those rock idiots who say it can't be done.

Devotion marries her natural gift with throbbing instrumentation that breathes life into every single turn of phrase or sensitive vocal embellishment.