Anno has the feel of a speed-dating workshop. You can’t deny anyone’s enthusiasm or ingenuity in the venture. But, looking at the results, you can’t help but wonder if everyone’s energy was best spent elsewhere.

Unclouded may not push her in a new direction, but it’s marked by a newfound grit and a palpable confidence.

Lean, at some point, gets lost in the wall of sound. And still it feels like the most essential music of his career: no longer an outsider looking in, but an artist fully embodying himself.

On a technical level, these songs offer the best performances of Sampa’s career, but in terms of style and emotion, they fall short. Despite the homecoming mood, Sampa often sounds distant, her rhymes functional and indistinct.

While if i could make it go quiet is an occasionally uneven listen, it’s a strong declaration of conviction. Although Ulven is still fine-tuning her approach, her eagerness to explore hints at promising potential.

Its demanding hour-and-a-half runtime never pushes Dawson’s music to places it hasn’t gone before, even if it’s all executed with his typically handwoven sense of craft. The insights feel slightly stunted, as Dawson trades out the pained, everyday compassion that he’s conveyed so deeply in his more earthbound music for dystopian scenarios that can’t quite settle on a clear premise.

Sadly the two best (read: different) tracks come at the end, a shame because you'll have probably put on something closer to actual music by then.

It's actually refreshing, then, to hear a record like Raphael Saadiq's unabashedly retro The Way I See It, which doesn't try to "update" old soul sounds to a hip-hop world and a white singer.

The band's self-titled debut record is the heaviest, most dissonant music that Moore has put together in recent memory, easily out-skronking Sonic Youth's 2009 LP, The Eternal.

He's a skilled enough songwriter that he could probably pull off an entire sobering album about this stuff. Instead he made a really fun, self-effacing one.

White Denim's inherent restlessness means that all the band's releases feel transitional to a degree, but D's measured restraint points toward the best possible direction for them.

Their second album, Rock Island, shows Palm working harder than ever to unburden themselves of the influences heard on those earlier releases, from Slint and Sonic Youth to Battles and Animal Collective.

On the closing title track, she attempts to wind her own emotional experiences together with her father’s. ... it introduces the album’s most interesting material right at the end. If she had threaded it more steadily throughout, the album would have been a more keen statement than the respectable pop offering that it is.

Delta Kream is best seen not as a retreat to the Black Keys’ beginnings but rather a signpost on their journey. By spending the time playing the blues that’s buried deep in their soul, the Black Keys reveal how far they’ve gone in a space of 20 years.

Good as some of these songs are... they're not quite enough to foment a revolution

Whether Herren is using Surrounded By Silence to spread the word about some of his favorite acts, or to insta-build a portfolio of outside production work, or a little of both, it's a much different-- and far more inconsistent-- affair than previous Prefuse efforts.

Solar Power sounds more interesting when it bottles the jasmine air of Laurel Canyon folk, less interesting when it emulates that sound’s descendants in early-2000s soft rock (Sheryl Crow, Jewel) without any of the hooks or energy of radio pop.

Call it retro in service of sweat and smiles, celebrating the ridiculousness of dance music at its loudest and most unmannered.

K.R.I.T. Iz Here captures K.R.I.T. the same as he always is: perfectly likable, admirably sincere, predictably dependable and dependably predictable.

Despite these moments when PE shows their age, they have largely prevailed with Revolverlution by revamping the very structure of how we digest music.

There is dark humor and interesting angles--even joy--to be found in basic realities and mundane commitments.

Ironically, if there is one thing holding these songs back, it's Lyrics Born himself. Shimura spits sparingly, often just to shake a little life into the imaginary crowd once the groove settles.

In fact, despite the thoughtfulness of the arrangements, it quickly becomes clear that nothing truly surprising will ever happen.

With Dawson, the focus is on the lyrics, with her music tending to serve as a mere platform for sprawling, humorous stories whose serious subject matter contradicts the childlike catchiness underpinning them.

Once the allure of hearing Grace so stripped down wears off, the record begins to sound like what it is: glorified demos for an Against Me! album we'll never get to hear. Even at its most vital, Stay Alive never escapes the sense that the pandemic has one again cheated us out of something better.

While Brettin’s singing is greatly improved--lazy but more present and self-assured--his lyrics are at best inscrutable and in general lacking in substance.

Dyer and Sanchez are the sort of artists who will continue to challenge themselves at every turn. As long as they can keep that boundless creativity from going in a million different directions at once, their listeners will reap plenty of rewards.