It’s the kind of record for the times when you’re lost in thought about someone you might’ve known for a little while, wondering where they are and if they ever think about you.

Glider 's derivativeness and inertia put a cap on its capacity to astonish, but it has a protracted shelf life. It's consummate mood music, which goes a long way toward compensating for its shortcomings.

Weaves is most compelling when it’s thrashing right along with Burke, giving into the urgent hunger for connection. It grates when the band is more intent on pleasing itself with quirk for quirk’s sake.

Every so often, the album strikes that tricky balance between queasy and cute.

Still, for an album that pushes the limits of how much you can say about so little, the stuff that's said rarely fails to be entertaining in the pure linguistically structural sense.

Get Up Sequences Part One is often sweet, but it only rarely breaks the skin.

Host proves the duo can reinvent themselves within a static framework; by revisiting the sounds of their ambitious, albeit thinly produced debut with bigger and bolder instrumentation, they’ve emerged from the afterglow of 2010s virality as a more robust and rooted ensemble.

Jaar and Harrington’s individual visions only grew more vast in the eight years leading up to Darkside’s return with Spiral, a work of unexpected and even unprecedented familiarity—less a portal than a kiosk existing entirely within the boundaries set by Psychic.

[Listening to the album is like] a reunion with an old friend, but not necessarily a close one. For half an hour, you think "why don't we do this more often?" until it ends and you remember how frustrating they can be.

Even at its prettiest and most accessible, The Western Lands is still a very insular, sometimes uncomfortably intimate album, and listening to it is akin to sharing a tiny but comfortable space in Talbot's closed little cocoon.

This is an album built for slow weekend mornings spent in bed with a loved one more than brisk, early-morning runs.

Some songs bleed into each other, but the album also has gaps between many of its tracks, making it feel like a more traditional rock album than an experiment in fusing genres. Two of its best cuts together feel like one evolving piece.

This music is as simultaneously functional and pleasurable as Luomo's more active house tracks, only it's for an opposite function--and a more sedate set of pleasure centers.

Murs for President is such a weird album to listen to in a strictly critical sense, where it stands as a more-or-less average release.

It's lovely, it's pleasantly unsettling, and there's a hell of a lot of it.

While Lost Friends’ slow-building ascents and soaring choruses function as necessary release valves for the unrest bubbling up from Joy’s lyrics, over the course of 12 tracks, a certain identikit quality takes hold.

Its fusion of Brian Jones-era Rolling Stones paisley pop and Spectorian pomp pushes Khan and the Shrines beyond their usual JBs jones, but the album’s title speaks to a burgeoning social consciousness.

The best songs on In Times New Roman… are hiding in the back half, resulting in an unusually lopsided experience.

The strongest songs sparkle with a morose charm. On “Dumb Guitar” and “Shipwreck,” Balency-Béarn’s plainspoken singing wafts over murky lounge-pop, giving The Sunset Violent some much-needed friction.

She does so much work on Get Gone that you wind up hoping she follows through on her promise.

You get the impression he isn't really trying that hard, that bettering his bests isn't a notion that interests him, 20 years after the release of Red House Painters' debut album. He's the kind of talented songwriter that can mostly pull that off; though for a record so spare and simple, Among the Leaves comes off as strangely confrontational.

As a pure lyrical record goes, Pro Tools doesn't disappoint, but fans who want everything to be a banger will be let down to find that there's not a lot of headknock here.

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

Often, Costello just sounds prissy and uptight in these more relaxed environs.

There's a wealth of great material here... all diminished, to various degrees, by genre affectations.

Stereolab engage in the funkiest, heaviest music of their career. While monotony still remains a passion, subtle psychedelic flourishes and thick percussion pumps add much needed verve.

HMHAS is just another good record from Billie and Finneas—certainly tasteful, and arresting sometimes, but all the session musicians in the world can’t make it a masterpiece.

An odd, pleasingly unclassifiable instrumental record that was inspired, bizarrely enough, by a hurdy-gurdy performance he saw Keiji Haino play 28 years ago.