Someday is Today mostly succeeds in its paeans to frostbitten numbness, its flatness as wistful as the rolling plains and as familiar as the freezer aisle.

The struggle of the wealthy and talented white rapper was never especially sympathetic. And on Ben, his trials are mostly internal, the enduring struggle of man to find meaning and leave a legacy. This Macklemore is likely the most honest version we’ve seen to date.

Though this band was routinely slapped with claims of 1970s plagiarism upon their arrival, it's unlikely that many people have ever mistaken a Strokes song for one by Lou Reed or Television. So it's ironic that their mimicry can be uncanny on Angles.

Despite the looseness and the grab-bag approach, the best of the songs on Unmap feel right as rain, like these weird mash-ups were there all along, just waiting to be discovered.

Get Evens is as quiet and pretty as its predecessor, but the effortless ease is gone, replaced by a sort of busy anxiety.

On a whole, Whatever is milder and gentler than the darker Become What You Are; that comes with age, I guess. But, all said, it does feel like a return.

Even though a release like Lady, Give Me Your Key unearths never-before-heard material, it still doesn’t reveal anything new about the mercurial man.

Hiding below layers of dated synth noise, dinky drum machines and expensive effects is, surprise surprise, a solo bedroom recording. 50 minutes of structured wankery, as performed by a lone Brit with the questionable talent to put a chorus to a verse, employing a thin, laddish vocal and rudimentary guitar skills.

On the whole, this is the quietest Neubauten album to date, frequently lowering to a mere whisper, but don't let this fool you-- no album this band has made in the past has bristled with so much latent violence or been haunted by a more palpable sense of unseen menace.

Zoomer is a very, very good album, but one thing it makes clear is that the songwriting aspect of this sort of lap[pop] hybrid must continue to improve.

Every song drips with bawdy attempts at sexually shocking the listener. But just as Vince Neil screaming "girls, girls, girls" and name-checking strip bars is unlikely to whip a woman into a frenzy of amour, the Donnas attempt to titillate and fail miserably.

The disc feels more like an Insomniac Records sampler featuring Viktor Vaughn than a proper Vaughn release.

Homosapien's constant fluctuations between styles means it's a mercurial and somewhat uneven listen.

No tens here—sixes and sevens abound, for sure, a few fives, maybe an eight. Even mired among the sixes, though, you can feel the palpable yearning.

Rudimental are casting a wider musical net than their peers, which has the unintended effect of magnifying their flaws by comparison, making for a decent but ultimately second-tier effort in a crowded year for big-ticket dance-pop.

Though too scattered to stand alone, The Greatest Gift adds new dimension to Carrie & Lowell.

The best that can be said of Defend Yourself is that it isn't embarrassing; they didn't lose the plot like the Pixies, and it's better than The Sebadoh simply because they got out of that L.A. studio and back to their roots. But it also doesn't add anything to the story or feel like it needs to exist.

The album loses a little of its steam toward the end, when too many songs play up the rap side of the equation over the rock, but on the whole A Gun Called Tension is surprisingly balanced and beholden to no preconceptions of how these two styles should mix.

While the music on Land and Fixed revels in this newfound clarity, the vocals are still processed and manipulated. Where that juxtaposition worked on earlier recordings (when the two sides were still on the same playing field), it doesn't coalesce nearly as well here.

The true charm of this record lies in the way it craftily retrofits the sound of ’70s excess for our age of austerity.

Their debut album, Embrace, dispenses its earth-quaking riffage in such carefully measured, perfectly spaced-out rations, it tricks you into thinking the band is much heavier than it actually is.

In the end, One Second of Love is enjoyable but slight: its stronger moments render the weaker ones particularly forgettable.

The Bachelor most damningly lacks the charm attendant with any of those character descriptions, continuing Wolf's ability to please one's inner music critic, but too often ignoring any sort of pleasure principle.

Synthetica is something of a polemic, but Haines' moments of ambivalence are what make the record compelling.

One of this year's most remarkable "punk" albums.

Bundick embraces a cleaner and mellower sound that's more indebted to hip-hop. He wears his inspirations proudly, and throughout there's a clear nod to producers like J Dilla and Flying Lotus.

There's nothing intrinsically flawed about what's otherwise a solid instrumental record, but so much of it feels so close to many of the things happening on the radio and the pop charts right now that, 90 seconds into a song, the mind might start wandering and wondering what this kind of stuff would sound like with Wale or Rihanna on top of it.

Hot Hot Heat sound like they're playing scared and playing it safe, and in doing so fall through the cracks between their established fans and their imagined ones.