Tillman varies things up on Fear Fun, reveals an adventurous palette, and makes what may be his best album to date.

Prophet's widescreen music is wonderful to listen to; it's just hard to really feel.

"Bloom" is also what these 10 songs do, each one starting with the sizzle of a lit fuse and at some fine moment exploding like a firework in slow motion.

Urban Turban feels especially emblematic of a band that's fully liberated itself from any commercial or audience expectations and shifted its experimental ethos into overdrive.

Hoyas, sounds like a soundtrack for an ice-slicked, insomniac winter drive. Blending mumbled folk and bleary-eyed blips, lead-off track "Two Angles" sounds like the Postal Service might have if Jimmy Tamborello's tapes had gotten lost in the mail and accidentally ended up on Phil Elverum's doorstep.

Essentially perfect... It remains a landmark that hasn't aged a day.

Presley finds melodic inspiration in classic rock, but blurs his reference points toward punk by coating the music in lo-fi grit. His third proper album, Family Perfume, doubles down on those zonked out inclinations.

It's an impeccably polished and careful record. But like a shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck, sophistication can wear a guy out.

While OFF! may not have the shock of the new (or, at least, the revitalized) on its side, it still gets in, gets angry, and gets moving in a skull-crackingly satisfying fashion.

Spontaneity is woven into the fiber of every track; it's easy to hear how some of them may have begun with the same sounds and patterns before the musicians' hands worked their magic on the filters, EQ, and delay, rendering each take unique and unrepeatable.

His new EP, Meantime, is an unabashedly beautiful, even sensuous 17 minutes of music.

Oh Holy Molar, Felix's second album, recalls the starkness and exaggerated intimacy of records by Cat Power and Scout Niblett, but Chua is a far more reserved and poised individual... [Yet some songs] reveal the limits of Chua's voice and aesthetic.

[Galaxy Garden is] a wonder, his most complete statement yet, both a refinement and an expansion of the genre-of-one he's been perfecting over the last few years.

The Narrow Garden features some of the most sunny and flowering music that Kang has created, seamlessly joined with a couple of sinister threnodies.

All the more for you to swim around in. And those peaks certainly take you higher when the builds have been teased out to the limit.

Death Dreams might be equally strong [as predecessor, Muster Station], but its inability to step things up can come off like a retreat in light of how much tuneful, wooly garage rock has come out since.

[With Memory] they've developed the approach of making high-energy tracks with subdued and subtle components-- beats that move with grace instead of brute force.

If not always up to their previous heights, Mohn highlights why these guys are still the masters, while so many of Kompakt's new-school driftologists are still students at best.

The Dr Dee soundtrack is a deeply felt but difficult to love entry into Albarn's entirely singular discography.

If guitar-based music is still your source of shameless pop, you'll probably enjoy In the Belly more than most records that actually aspire for art.

What makes this, if not the most fully realized, then the most rewarding entry in RVNG's already ambitious FRKWYS series is that it doesn't sound like noise dudes just trying to make the simulacra of a dub reggae album.

Whilst there's no getting past some of the duller and more unbearable material on this record ... if she'd made a record full of songs as unaffected as these four ["Lies," "Starring Role," "Power & Control," "Living Dead"], Electra Heart could be one of the year's most acclaimed pop albums.

A cautionary tale of what happens when a "hit record" forgets to actually include hits.

[The songs] are peculiarly absorbing, and they only grow more so with repeated listening.

Modern Jester is Dilloway's War and Peace. It covers practically all of his sonic obsessions, stretching them to lengths at which he can explore every detail and tangent. The result-- seven pieces encompassing four sides of vinyl-- feels like a major statement, even if it's made of wordless, sometimes harsh noise.

The record feels wholly substantial and satisfying in its own right, and even those with no prior knowledge of YT//ST's history and elaborate intentions can just enjoy it for what it is: volcanic prog-rock colored with equal parts post-punk urgency, stoner-metal heft, and psychedelic pop whimsy.

Newcombe is a master at turning the minimal into maximal, layering myriad swirling textures into a dizzying head-rush of a tune (see: "Seven Kinds of Wonderful"), but crafty production only takes him so far.

World, You Need a Change of Mind certainly isn't a bad album, and the technical execution is first-rate. Its failure is ultimately one of ambition. This is music to be enjoyed while doing something else, not something you fall in love with.