It's a record that marks the time when the "Gucci Gucci" rapper's homegirl became notorious enough to do an album with Gucci Mane, and when Gucci Mane had fallen far enough to decide to go along with it.

His new record is another collection of effortlessly gorgeous ruminations on hip-hop expressed through thermal updrafts, babbling brooks, and cracking twigs.

Like many spinoffs from the Odd Future machine, it's a small piece of a larger puzzle, useful for obsessives concerned with keeping their catalogs up to date.

More often than not, the contradictions between the band's knowing appropriations and its calls against jaded cynicism resolve themselves in the album's intricately rewarding attention to rich and unexpected sonic details.

Spotty, strange, all short songs and shitty sound, it's got the collagist careen of Bee Thousand and Propeller and the tumbling tunecraft of Alien Lanes and Under the Bushes Under the Stars.

A strong finish to Tesfaye's first trilogy, providing just enough closure to satisfy, and just enough mystery left to entice us back for the next round.

At times the music can get sentimental and even sappy, but it's never heavy-handed.

Thug Motivation somehow feels both airless and over-inflated, the sound of an artist trying to revisit something gone.

The new mastering job, by Frank Arkwright working with Marr, actually is really good: loud but not bomb-level loud, clear, and airy. (Hatful of Hollow, in particular, is dramatically improved from its previous incarnations.) On the other hand, Complete is a profoundly inaccurate description of this set.

Aside from one surprising flip of "Be My Baby", Papich doesn't seem as interested in transforming his source material as much as just presenting it.

Feels like music I've been subconsciously craving without even knowing it exists.

Even if the fusion initially seems unorthodox, LIVELOVEA$AP is exactly the sort of record you'd expect to hear in 2011 from a New Yorker who was 13 when "Big Pimpin'" came out.

Hazed Dream has some heady moments--the languid guitar intro to "Incense Head" and the head-nodding chords of "Mexican Wedding"--but the songs are just too mellow, understated, and lyrically anonymous to move the needle much.

Sometimes Wild One wears its influences a little too hard on its sleeve, or strives too hard to create something anthemic with across-the-board appeal.

As Sambol unravels that theme across these 14 songs, the album grows more endearing, if never quite exciting.

Fans of Stott's labelmates Demdike Stare, and all the other goth-n-screw artists out there at the moment, will be happy to gnaw on these bones.

It's a colossus of an album, the product of a band that was thinking huge, pushing itself to its limits, and devoted to breaking open its own understanding of what rock music could be.

(together) is borderline unlistenable taken as a whole.

There's little on Lioness: Hidden Treasures that sounds throwaway, or like it should have never been released; but there's equally little that sounds absolutely essential.

His art is 144,487 times less remarkable than his first week sales numbers would have you believe.

This is the product of a dynamic and assured vision, one that retains an alluring sense of mystery.

What makes Last Day of Summer engaging has as much to do with White Denim's potential future as it does its roots.

It's all lovely and certainly more immediately engaging and compact than Jónsi's mostly-instrumental Riceboy Sleeps multimedia project from 2009.

On the whole, Stage Whisper is enjoyable, but the live portion is dispensible, and the new studio tracks, which will likely please anyone taken with IRM, are the real draw.

When they go for manic instead of mellow, Canyons do bring something new, even if it's just intensity, to the 80s retro party.

Like their namesake, Quilt's music feels handmade and stitched-together, as though its creators were sifting through a collection of musical hand-me-downs and collating the bits that spoke to them into something new.

Tumble Bee is a welcome addition to contemporary children's music, not only because it's sufficiently involving to appeal to adults, but also because it further demonstrates that songs for kids don't have to be cloying or sanitized.

This isn't the Roots' most accessible album, and it's definitely their most downbeat, but it comes from a place that isn't always easy to dwell.