Impossible Spaces isn't simply the most accessible and immediately rewarding album to bear Sandro Perri's name, it also serves as a handy musical roadmap to its maker's sinuous creative course.

If all of this sounds more geared toward Eno completists and poetry fans than the general listener, that's about right.

This is music that digs deeper and burrows beneath the level of shared associations to discover the sparkling emotional potential of carefully arranged vibrations moving through the air.

Bigger, stranger, and just plain heavier than any Circles disc before it, the first 35 minutes of Empros' empyrean, oblong alien-prog finds the band once again wrestling their grand ambitions into impossible shapes.

Its quality is mostly a testament to Pusha's connections and his ear for beats, but the rapping is sufficiently competent enough that the album never drags, which is less of a backhanded compliment than it might read.

His music nurses a profound ache, and he's now made enough of it that it's become a whole corner to visit, a unique transmission that feels like its own sentient being. As an artist, it's hard to aim higher than that.

The worthy additions in this "super deluxe edition" are nearly all visual.

There are a handful of solid songs on Humor Risk, though, without an outright dud in the bunch-- and if that represents a disappointment, then in the end, the joke might be on us.

The Misfits' schtick should stand the test of time. But The Devil's Rain makes supernatural feel like fairly workaday stuff.

Unfortunately, none of these songs actually feel like songs. Only a few have choruses or any significant chord changes. Instead, they're set pieces, which makes sense.

Parallax feels like a more complete work than any other Atlas Sound record, with the differences between the songs less distinct and everything flowing together more naturally.

Admittedly, the album's moves are exceedingly well-worn, yet like fellow 21st century synth-poppers Junior Boys, Pallers' precise craftsmanship means they're also able to elicit many of the same deeply affecting moods and sensations as their forbears.

His gleeful love of words not only elevates some pretty heavy subject matter; it also helps distinguish XXX as one of the most compelling indie rap releases in an already strong year.

After a point this lightless gloom can get a tad oppressive, but Evangelista are able to leaven the mood somewhat through consistently inventive instrumentation.

The Vision seems to be exactly what Joker wants: UK pop R&B of the vainest and most vacuous possible variety.

Everything is fast-moving, breezily entertaining, and patently ridiculous.

And yet all these reworks and revisions stay in the general vicinity of the original album's tone of massive yet starkly open spaces, adding a few new facets but always staying close to the fine line Waiting for You treaded between bleak and euphoric.

Instead of Lungs' largely charming yet discombobulating diversity, Ceremonials suffers from a repetitiveness that's akin to looking at a skyline filled with 100-story behemoths lined-up one after the other, blocking out everything but their own size.

What's here is brilliant, beautiful, and, most importantly, finally able to stand tall on its own.

Audacious to the extreme, but exhaustingly tedious as a result, its few interesting ideas are stretched out beyond the point of utility and pounded into submission.

This isn't the sound of a band closing up shop so much as tidying up the workbench before stepping out for a while.

A Very She & Him stands guilty not of being oppressively adorkable, but of being not nearly adorkable enough.

Deer Tick try to score points simply by sounding like they could drink all those bands under the table, and the self-absorbed and even downright hateful Divine Providence ends up drinking at you, not with you.

Apokalypsis turns out to be a kind of book completely different from what its cover promises.

If Bruiser's more straightforward rock turns mostly disappoint (one notable exception: the late-game adrenaline shot "Everybody's Under Your Spell"), the album does find the band showcasing its dynamic range in new and intriguing ways.

While so many bands at their status revert to bloated contentment or some vague idea of rockist salvation, Mylo Xyloto finds Coldplay successfully continuing to explore the tension of wanting to be one of the best bands in the world and having to settle for being one of the biggest.

Cloudy and labyrinthine at times, airy and placid elsewhere, People cuts a pretty wide swath, an approach that feels a bit more mature and confident than the bending over backwards he sometimes had to do to reach the disparate genres on his earlier solo records.

They spent all their daring on concept, with little to spare for execution. Even for a duo as image-conscious and savvy as these guys, there is little style in their reduction.