Valentine pours a generous splash of funk into the homebrewed elixir, offering one of his most accessible entry points in years.

For all its oblique melodies and wobbly production, Your Day Will Come evokes a strange kind of beauty.

The sound of Bar Scene is the most full-bodied of Bryan’s career, building upon the heartland rock that he explored in his 2022 major-label breakthrough American Heartbreak and the self-titled follow-up from last year.

Inconsistency or complexity? Depends on how much you believe in this music as sincere self-expression versus its status as smartly crafted, artist-as-listener-proxy pop.

SMD's excellent debut album as a stand-alone group, Attack Decay Sustain Release, is for dancing, not moshing.

For Now I am Winter is competent, reasonably varied, and efficiently rousing.

It doesn't require your full attention, but it tends to capture it. I like to imagine what it would feel like to stumble across the piece on the radio, late at night, perhaps in your car, having no idea what you were hearing, or why.

The Wink is a high-wire act that may find more fans among, say, free jazz listeners than conventional rock lovers. But even if the scratchy destination lacks home comforts, the journey is its own thrill.

Like Wonder, Guilty has its share of up-tempo tracks, yet its real pleasures are idiosyncratic, revealing themselves the more attentively and often you listen.

It offers no new narrative or stated focus and thus represents nothing more than the second gleaning of tracks from the cloistered minimal wave universe. Still, there's something undeniable here.

The downside of Belong’s greater tilt toward pop and feelings is an occasional lurch into treacle.

Past Time certainly isn't background music, but the vocalists' missives might be understood as simply the core of the band's sound--and perhaps something more, if you're able to divert your attention from the charms of the music.

Take the sophistication out of sophisti-pop, and Lo Moon is just another L.A. indie R&B act who tries to bring us a higher love but can’t take things much further beyond bed and bath.

The feels remain noxious and suffocating, but as she embraces the delirium, the “ughs” slowly turn into insights.

Here, the Feelies simply dig up The Good Earth's pastoral, post-Velvets power-pop -- a sound that ruled college radio airwaves in the mid-80s but which boasts few notable contemporary adherents -- and blissfully strum away as if they were performing in hammocks.

Emphasizing the notion that this is brainy music would be ignoring the fact that PVT frequently achieve melodic catharsis on Church With No Magic. A lot of this is due to Pike's considerable vocal register, which can convey low resonance and high-frequency wailing alike.

The Bears for Lunch, however, is the most consistent of this year's trifecta. It may not boast an instant, indeliable earworm like Class Clown's "Keep It Motion" or Factory's "Doughnut for a Snowman", but there are no buzzkill duds like "The Big Hat and Toy Show" either.

While neither as frenetic as the group's debut or as stylistically curious as Tributes, World boasts smart pop sensibilities all the same.

What makes Pan Am Stories worth returning to is the scope Knight works within, where elements of prog, folk, and psychedelia blur in and out of focus.

Miami shows Brandt Brauer Frick to have reached new heights of imagination and technical accomplishment, but it’s undeniably a challenging listen. Break through its forbidding surface, though, and the rewards can be considerable.

Good to Be Home's recollections are only meant to be alluded to, a summer-jam album riddled with familiar nods to shared experiences but still walled off from observers who think they really know Blu.

Unlike 2015’s Pagans in Vegas, where the band went fully synthpop at a time when seemingly 75% of the music world population was doing the same, Art of Doubt is decidedly rock: guitar and bass loud in the mix, first riffs in the first seconds.

Reading his explanations for choosing the guest rappers, it’s clear they moved him, but he might’ve been better off simply ceding them the space and stepping away. With this new tape, the Streets are officially back, but Skinner never convinces us why they should stay.

While We Are the Pipettes often swells and soars... it doesn't come near the symphonic grandeur of the best of 60s girl pop. At its best, however, these pocket-sized songs still burst with verve and vitality, mixing heart-pumping melodies with carefree, almost conversational vocals.

Avi Buffalo are trying and failing to act their age on At Best Cuckold, and ain’t nothin’ wrong with that either.

The band has pretty much stayed the course, adding some orchestral flourishes to a few songs on new LP Threadbare, but generally hewing to its acoustic guitar/secular spiritual awakening formula.

The question for the producer going forward is whether any of these strong, statement instrumentals are more restricted by or benefit from collaborative effort. Because sometimes he's better off dancing on his own.

Young's music is so rooted in the past, specifically the spirit of the 60s, that his stabs at contemporary relevance sound awkward and even curmudgeonly.