Summer of Hate felt meek at times, content to retreat into its own shadow; Sleep Forever's many oversized melodies and wider-reaching sound prove that these guys do a lot better taking a few steps into the light.

The highs on Kidnapped are incredibly high, the lows very low, and there's not much in between.

SSLYBY have every right to feel like they have a chip on their shoulder, and if they can somehow manage to inject some grit next time out, they could be looking at a success that's an even greater revenge than "Critical Drain".

What’s most satisfying about Before Love Came to Kill Us isn’t that Reyez whizzes across multiple genres—these days, who doesn’t?—but the skill she displays at each. No matter the arrangement, she powers across it at full force. ... Like many recent pop records, the album is overlong, and the extraneous material tends to be the kind of filler that Reyez is well above.

Even if it’s stretched thin and unsatisfying in spots, Four is our most distinct glimpse of Harvey yet.

Even on the merely good ones, there’s always the sense of someone living in Clark’s lyrics, making decisions about how to transform those feelings into melodies and rhymes.

The record is expertly mixed and produced: It brims with fully realized moments, like a synth bit on “Anxious” that conjures the exact feeling of seeing an ex like someone else’s post on Instagram; the portamentos on “Slow Burn” should come with a vertigo warning. But the album’s mood is just sour.

Victorious is filled with moments that give you glimpses of the club in heaven, but like the afterlife itself, it’s always out of reach, distinct only in brief flashes and in feverish moments.

Now, he finally has some good music of his own attached to his name. It may or may not be enough to catch up to the rapidly accelerating talents of his younger peers-- but it's certainly a start.

Anything that keeps this compelling musical in the foreground of popular consciousness is worth something, and if a fan of Hedwig happens to be an indie rocker as well, this compilation is a delightful wedding.

Perhaps they figured dark times call for bright music, but this overly polished record often feels like a missed opportunity.

Raw Money Raps is immaculately constructed as identity crises go, and there's an uncontrived honesty that feels more like someone working through a multifaceted outlook on life than testing his options for which crowd to play to.

It might still mortify some of his more purist fans, but there's little on this record that a few instrumental-version substitutions wouldn't fix.

Ryonen is an engaging first strike.

Book of Travelers seems stuck in limbo about what it values most, about what it should accept or abhor. Both album and country teeter on a precipice above that inhospitable canyon, even as they keep chugging like trains along its edge.

Though it’s clear the band is refining their songwriting and getting more personal in the process, the record feels wilted instrumentally compared to their previous releases.

And yet, as loaded as the subject matter is, it does amazingly little to diminish Hatfield’s bright spirit. Even on this, her angriest record by a landslide, the singer retains the intrinsic tunefulness that’s marked every record she’s made since she was a teenager.

There's definitely a lot to like throughout this disc; the band has boatloads of talent, and the eclectic spread gels much better than you'd expect.

More often than not, ColleGrove plays out like 2 Chainz pulling his friend and mentor up by his bootstraps while ceding a bit of the spotlight in the process. It’s a generous gesture, but a costly one.

It's an impressive influx of new talent, but you would be hard-pressed to hear it for most of the album.

Running a mere five songs and 15 minutes, AHJ is a wholly fat-free effort that favors tight, snappy, emotionally direct songcraft over the genre experiments and instrumental excursions of ¿Cómo Te Llama?

Yet like last time, there are plenty of sturdy, major-key melodies that go straight for the jugular. But whatever sing-along quality they have, their effectiveness is almost always determined by context.

In Calder's songs solace proves elusive and fleeting, but when she finds it, it's always during moments of calm.

You, Forever isn’t a soft-rock record, but it is a record that reframes a certain kind of softness as strength.

Now and then, Wild Beasts break beyond the surface to offer a few sharper observations.

It works both as something to take to heart and a to-date career statement, as the making of Honeyblood turned out all right, after all.

Sleater-Kinney has made heart-stopping, philosophically challenging rock music. Path of Wellness takes a more pacifist stance, content to let life happen around it.

While Obits may have ditched the buzz and scrape of their roots, that music's sweaty abandon, or the pursuit thereof, is still deeply embedded in Obits' sound. And that never goes out of fashion.