Personal Life is hardly a failure; much of it is excellent. But it's also missing that anger-meets-energy urgency that made the Thermals' early albums so undeniable.

Halstead's performing reinvents no wheels but never is anything less than well-done regardless, and the full performances can often find their own impact.

It’s all exceedingly pleasant, which is a bit of a curse. They’re songs with ingratiating hooks—tracks that would benefit from the ambient exposure of a grocery store or a doctor’s office, where they’d worm their way into the subconscious leaving no trace of entry. It’s so comfortable, in fact, that it hardly feels creative.

As a full-length listening experience, Violent Hearts is a little much-- it runs just under a lean half-hour, but the relative lack of stylistic breadth covered makes a front-to-back spin feel longer.

Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors is on the one hand a genre-busting statement of artistic restlessness but it's also a mess.

The Solution is a deeply schizophrenic record, one that completely divorces Beanie's cocksure swagger from his introspective depth.

As down-to-earth as Secret Cities can be, at points you wish they'd be more direct: "Vamos a La Playa" and "The End" play so loosely, they border on disintegration, rounding out Pink Graffiti in overly cloudy manner, both sonically and lyrically.

Presley finds melodic inspiration in classic rock, but blurs his reference points toward punk by coating the music in lo-fi grit. His third proper album, Family Perfume, doubles down on those zonked out inclinations.

Departed Glories’ strongest individual tracks are uncompromisingly abstract. ... Less profound, on their own, are the tracks that let edge-of-intelligibility vocal collages in the manner of Julianna Barwick do most of the work. But they play a flattering role in the album as a whole, which is how it should be heard

Even if his latest offering is considerably dimmer than his most golden works, it’s still a confident assertion that, even at 77 years old, his pursuit of the sun’s life-affirming light shows no signs of wavering.

From the outset, Saturday Night both plays to expectations and subverts them.

On his own, he’s not a particularly compelling songwriter. The album aspires to cult-classic obscurity and lands in the realm of the tolerably generic.

The haziness of Free has its share of frustrations—as alluring as the pensive soundscapes are, it’s hard not to wish they were occasionally more sculpted—but there’s something curiously human and appealing about its ungainly nature.

Broder is better at details than broad strokes, and Ditherer contains some excellent ones; they're just buried in the piecemeal and decidedly indelicate songwriting.

Blood Bank certainly dispels concerns that Vernon's accomplishment was somehow environmental--that "For Emma's" poetic circumstances, and not its contents, were responsible for its success.

The most surprising takeaway from Tha Carter V, it turns out, isn’t that Wayne still has music this vital in him. It’s that after all these years, there’s still more to learn about him.

Take It, It’s Yours may be one of the comfiest cover-sets in recent memory, but beneath its chilled-out façade lurks an identity crisis.

Despite the lyrical punch, Yours Conditionally is hamstrung by Tennis’ drums. The keys and bass on the album are unfailingly warm, but the shabby percussion is one-note, almost the work of a different band.

In track after track, he mulls over memories of neighborhood characters and late-night hijinks, contemplating all the ways that the city can grind you down. The lone exception is “Riding Cobbles,” a lighthearted fantasy of European idyll. Several Songs About Fire plays out like a long, messy divorce from an adopted home. Musically, though, there’s nothing shaggy about Several Songs About Fire.

What’s most exciting about GLORIOUS is its idiosyncrasy. Expanding beyond playlistable trap prerequisites and the wistful soul chops that signal A Serious Rap Album, GloRilla channels the music of her youth, cycling through crunk and gospel with aplomb.

By ABBA’s own imperial standards, this is more ABBA Silver than ABBA Gold. ... Still, a second-string ABBA record is far better than most pop groups can muster, and Voyage is the rare post-reformation album to build upon the band’s legacy without abandoning what we loved about their classic records in the first place.

For the most part, the music gives the illusion of being something sourceless, something created without effort--not product, but pure being; not labor, but freedom.

Urban Turban feels especially emblematic of a band that's fully liberated itself from any commercial or audience expectations and shifted its experimental ethos into overdrive.

Everything Everything's debut LP, Man Alive, is proof that enthusiastic experimentation can't save your end product when the underlying elements are so incompatible and unappetizing.

Following the "haunted murk" of Amaranthine, Youngs takes a drastic turn on Summer Through My Mind, an album of slightly unhinged but almost relentlessly tuneful Americana songs.

Irreal is a deliberately exhausting listen. The band dares you to see how far you can stomp behind them without a melodic phrase or a lyrical narrative to grab hold of.

Mullen’s personality goes a long way in setting him apart from the pack. The same goes for Suffocation as a whole, whose staying power on ...Of the Dark Night is undeniable.

What Chimpanzee could use is simply more music. The EP works well as a compact statement, and even in its short form it’s more fulfilling and inspired than any of the last half-dozen lengthy Depeche Mode albums. But it feels incomplete.