Cooper has been tinkering with this record for years, and happily, it sounds like he spent much of that time paring it down. There’s no grandstanding in his playing, nothing inessential, nothing hidden in the fixed but flexible figures.

The point of horrorcore is to both piss off church moms and find a language and vehicle for rage and misery. But there is no aching, tortured self at the center of clipping., just three fanboys’ overworked hearts palpitating into the abyss. While you can’t deny the imagination, you also can’t fathom the point.

WU LYF’s ambitions have not abated in the slightest since Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, an album that eased its path towards the rafters with cathedral reverb sourced from an actual abandoned church. They’ve just become more clarified, stripping away the booming echo that once obscured that group’s limber musicianship, while Roberts has sheared the most jagged nodes from his trachea and, with them, a language of completely unprecedented vowel sounds.

Personality is an immediate, alluring, and frequently arresting song cycle that plays to Steele's core strengths-- his dreamily effeminate voice and melancholic melodies-- while wisely abandoning Lovers' half-hearted attempts at mod garage-rock and electro-disco.

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.

Unfortunately, the strings and horns rarely do much more than add a thin layer of dressing to the rather plain lettuce of the songs beneath.

Her vocals, even on talking-blues songs like "Sweet Side" and "Righteously", reveal a woman living through all the messy frustration and unalleviated desire she's singing about.

Dark Night is a well-sequenced and unique album that ingeniously balances its contributors' strengths with the overall theme of the work--self-examination, often under stark circumstances, in the interest of understanding one's own existence.

Davila 666's sophomore album is still rowdy enough for an impromptu weekend binge with a few friends, but it also offers enough carefully crafted tunes and feedback-streaked textures to fill your headphones.

While it might not be a satisfying goodbye, Last Night All My Dreams Came True is--like all of Wild Beasts’ albums--an artfully rendered snapshot of a band always in motion.

Nature Noir is nothing if not a well-crafted, whip-smart record, but it leaves me yearning for the days when the Stilts would put passion into trying to find the pulse. Or better yet, yearning for the days when the pulse may actually have existed.

Everyone Else Is a Stranger is all that an old fan could want. The four songs are long, expressive strings of supple lines and curves, twisting like silvery roller-coaster tracks.

Blumberg is a capable, if not particularly distinguished guitarist. He is also a songwriter with an unusual gift for sticky, familiar hooks and the issue here is that Unreal puts far more emphasis on the former.

It settles for the safe and familiar. Throw it back.

Though it rarely makes good on the promise of her earlier songs, Cheap Seats is polarizing, and by now most listeners will have already decided whether or not they can stomach Spektor's peculiar kind of verite, glass-half-full optimism.

Whether it's through casual observation or the to-the-bone identity struggles, Open Mike Eagle's overlap between amusing insights and uncomfortable truths makes for one of the most compelling indie-rap listens of the year so far.

Even in its moodboard looseness and nostalgia, Angel’s Pulse has all the charm and careful attention to detail of Blood Orange’s last two magnum opuses.

It is a bit ephemeral, but not quite as music to relax to--more like music to be bewildered by.

The best moments are when the song forms fracture a little, and Perhacs' multi-tracked voice is allowed to spiral free.

So The Floodlight Collective is a mostly elegant listen, and one whose failings are part of its theme: Like a vague recollection, it's still a little hard to hold onto after it's over-- pretty albeit somewhat ephemeral.

AI is simply another tool that will sometimes be used badly and sometimes be used well, and on Honey I think it’s used well.

These 38 meticulously prepared minutes offer dozens of memorable moments. They just demand that you listen.

Nevertheless, as much as Bubblegum evidences a lot of thought and effort on the part of the band, it still has the sound of musicians going through the motions and sticking too close to their formulae.

The best thing about Death III is that it finally unravels the narrative set up by their previous two albums: that Death was a punk band, one that in some way may have even helped invent punk.

What Love Is Free does so well, and so simply, is hone in on just the beauty of finally letting go, physically and mentally.

C-ORE isn’t a Kingdom Come-like statement of return, but it’s also not a departure. As a collaborative work, it documents multiple experiences of life on the margins of America, of music—putting it all on blast.

Affectionate but misguided tribute that’s nowhere close to satisfying.

Algiers’ audio zines, the last of which invoked the Algerian revolution to explore angst and uncertainty using thickets of drone, show that they are capable of more nuanced writing. But they haven’t yet learned to translate the political into the personal, to turn abstract ideas into matters of the gut.