Just as Mandy strikes a nerve with nihilistic noise, he sweeps back to a gorgeous, heart-rending theme, like “Death and Ashes.”

Dying’s sinewy strangeness may come at the expense of the immediacy that was once Harvey’s strong suit, but this is how PJ Harvey albums work now: You feel them without being able to explain them. Where her early records pummeled the gut, now she toys with the mind.

Squid’s most wide-ranging album yet, and somehow still the one that hits closest to home.

Greatest-hits compilations in general are something of an endangered species, given that streaming-service playlists can now generate them for you, but there's still something to be said for getting a band's own take on what they deem essential.

It is her most personal record to date, telling the story of her father’s incarceration and her own fear of parenthood. It is delivered entirely in costume. The best and truest moments on Daddy’s Home are when Clark refuses to play wife or mother.

It’s a confident debut LP from a young band seizing its moment and cutting the tension with a chuckle.

Girls Can Tell is more mature and accomplished, but at the expense of the spark of spontaneity.

Fans of Stott's labelmates Demdike Stare, and all the other goth-n-screw artists out there at the moment, will be happy to gnaw on these bones.

If the concert starts off jittery, with the frenetic 13-minute “Invitation”--the band seems almost too hyped-up--the remaining two-hours are a seamless, pitch-perfect display of A-game professionalism married to virtuoso sparkle.

The sprawling Late Registration is the year's most accomplished rap album, and in turn, he's done something that his heroes-- the Pharcyde and Nas, and father figure Jay-Z-- couldn't do: deliver on a promise the second time around.

Impossible Truth is Tyler's second richly satisfying and absorbing record of solo guitar in three years.

When it works, it’s brilliant as ever; when it doesn’t, it can feel unknowable, disjointed, a series of red herrings taking the approximate shape of a song.

While they continue to prove themselves a more convincing classic rock act than should be possible in 2008, there's a tension in this album's lyrics between old-fashioned storytelling and breaking down the fourth wall. Stay Positive is their mostly successful bid to have it both ways.

Shot through with seemingly innate bravado and the experience of a childhood spent near the pulpit, Shane had a pitch-perfect sense of when to stir up the dance floor, when to bring things down, and when to bring them up again.

A collection of mosh-pit conductors, crowded songs, and fleeting moments of delicacy. Outside of the clear-eyed admissions of Abstract, the vocalists often get swallowed in the heavy mix, making the absence of Vann, their sharpest MC on past releases, noticeable.

As a compilation, Greatest Hits offers few surprises other than that Grohl somehow resisted the temptation to title this thing The Best of Foo. Though the record conspicuously lacks the band's breakthrough single, "I'll Stick Around", the first 13 tracks make good on the promise of the title and provide a relentless hit parade of modern rock radio staples.

Sullivan, better than singers and songwriters in almost any genre, creates worlds where relationships take on more complex dynamics, but are immediate in their effect.

There are few forces more powerful than the feeling of belonging. In creating his stunning Miami rap opus, Denzel Curry taps into that, demonstrating that he belongs among its most distinguished representatives in the process.

Classic rock is a genre that’s endured through its mythology. With Western Cum, Cory Hanson gives us some new myths to believe in.

Though briskly paced, Bleach is a front-loaded record, the maniacal/melodic contrasts of its stellar first half--anchored by the epochal anti-love song 'About a Girl'--ceding to the more period-typical grunge of its second.

In balancing the stridence of his politics with the aesthetic overload of his many influences, All My Heroes reintroduces JPEGMAFIA as an imagineer as well as a provocateur. He remains a hellraiser, but also comes across as bubbly and inventive, technicolor and cyberpunk.

They don’t reinvent the band’s image so much as carefully muss its hair a bit, unfasten one more button on its shirt collar. They are still a good dinner-party band, but now they’ve made the album for when the wine starts spilling on the rug, the tablecloth is rumpled, the music has imperceptibly gotten louder, and all those friendly conversations have turned a little too heated.

When measured against Four Tet's prior output, this latest effort does come as something of a disappointment; but by most other yardsticks, it's downright brilliant.

It takes a colossal effort to back Molina's candor, and given what a departure this record is for the band, it's not surprising that some of the songs get bogged down here and there. It's also not much of a problem.

Murs' strongest all-around album.

For its moments of gravity and excellence, Hail to the Thief is an arrow pointing toward the clearly darker, more frenetic territory the band have up to now only poked at curiously.

The pity of The Lost Tapes' overambition is that it could easily be condensed to a single, first-rate album of genuinely new-to-record material.

The detail-oriented approach that delighted on the Weather Station’s early records reappears on Loyalty.