Hotel Morgen may be beautifully produced, but despite its expert attention to detail, few of these tracks truly engage in the way they seem meant to.

Sounding like a profane camp counselor telling stories by the fireside, Rollins' naturally animated raspy voice is the perfect chaperone through eleven tracks of commentary.

It's Svanangen's record in miniature: It preserves what was fleetingly great about Loney, Noir while proving that Svanangen has more tricks in his bag than most people thought possible.

We Are the Champions might disappoint some diehard fans, but it's also proof positive that JEFF the Brotherhood can play with the big boys.

Concert albums never sound like the concerts they're supposed to capture, and with a band whose presence can stifle trite conversation like High on Fire's, it's a disservice.

Revealing Rattling Trees as a soundtrack from the jump puts the Llamas at an advantage and a disadvantage. It helps to explain the structure of the album, which kicks off with an overture that touches on all the melodic themes to be heard later, followed by quick instrumental bits that precede actual songs. But without the full text of the play or a chance to see it before hearing the music, these pleasant-but-slight songs become more negligible.

Many of the songs here sound not just derivative but generic. Compassion still feels like the album that Lust For Youth have been working toward this whole time--it just turns out that the journey may have been more rewarding than the destination.

Madness is a spacious and satisfying record: what it lacks in standout moments, it makes up for in coherence.

When tested to come up with his most insightful work and justify his missteps, he delivers compelling alternate truths. Wins and Losses shows the rap game is much harder to score than one might think.

Unlike a lot of ambient-leaning electronic music, this doesn’t necessarily work as background listening: Its moods are too mercurial, its changes too nuanced. You need to be paying attention to really appreciate the subtle mutations in his sound, yet there’s also something about his queasy tones and grizzled frequencies that keep the listener at arm’s length, emotionally speaking.

Despite such extraordinary highs, Ballet Slippers is not essential. If you’re not a zealot, chances are that these recordings—as with most live records, a tad distant and dependent on the power of suggestion—won’t convert you.

When he’s not over-intellectualizing his emotions, Caesar can be disarmingly raw. If only he didn’t write like a cyborg the rest of the time.

It's fun to hear Black Dice go straight for the jugular throughout the aptly-titled Load Blown, and hit the mark every time.

This might be BMSR's most accessible effort, but if you couldn't get past the vocoder and voodoo before, it's unlikely that you will now.

Thug’s rapping itself, known for its unpredictability, is sharper than ever; his voice feels clarified, strengthened.

In the end, 13 isn't what every Sabbath die-hard dreamed it might be: a true pick-up-where-they-left-off comeback for the group's founding quartet. But the record does belong in the view of every metalhead--not just because such a seminal band still deserves obligatory props, but because, imperfections aside, the record embodies the kernel of the original Sabbath idea.

Make Sure They See My Face is overdressed to impress when easing up may have been the best way to ease back into the public consciousness.

While the amount of raw material here may be daunting for some, there are plenty of surprising melodic moments to indulge in.

All 11 tracks are paced somewhere between 120 and 125 beats per minute; all of them follow pitter-patter house beats; all of them use the same palette of cool jazz samples and Chicago house basslines and warm, watery keys. But if you're a fan of this kind of thing, A Minor Thought proves that sometimes variety isn't the most important quality in an album.

Decent enough—and certainly the strongest project Nas has released in his current era—yet seldom amounting to more than nostalgia bait for the 40-plus contingent. It’s meant to be a celebration of these two rap titans’ respective careers, a goal the album modestly achieves, but it spends so much time dwelling on the past that it’s hard to know precisely what Nas and Primo wanted from the experience.

If in the past [Fallon] managed to transform similar icons [Ginsberg, Van Morrison] into a communal mythology, here it too often sounds like regurgitation, as though the reference were an end in itself.

Ultimately, the album's song-oriented material is the most memorable.

Its hard-psych is ugly, alluring carnival music that warps and melts before us just as we begin to trust it. Through it all though, there’s an undercurrent of humor and fun; Turnbull’s active imagination stretches out for miles and he comes across as a twisted visionary on his most accomplished album yet.

To make the personal sound universal is no small feat, but there’s a fine line between universality and sounding like your songs could be anybody’s.

Catamawr Yards, then, gets better as it gets more adventurous, and it gets more adventurous as it leans more on that backing band.

Whine of the Mystic is musically plainspoken and direct.

The project doesn’t feel uninspired, exactly, just rushed. The best songs on Purple Reign still capture that shivering, waking-nightmare energy.

Campaign outpaces his recent efforts like $ign Language and Airplane Mode but, still, mostly just preserve Ty’s musical bottom line.