Repentless is solid--far from a classic, but the best possible outcome.

Here they sound like they’ve settled into their status as a reliable indie rock institution. Strangers to Ourselves is a pleasant album, and one that completes their transition from "inspired" to "sturdy".

Having seemingly mastered all modes of excess, you'd think The 2nd Law would be Muse's unimpeachable triumph. It's not, and the problem isn't that Muse have gone too far... they haven't gone far enough.

While JoJo sounds great on big ballads and floor-filling tracks alike, Mad Love. lacks a cohesive sound. The abrupt genre shifts are jarring at turns, but paradoxically it’s this malleability that should be key to JoJo’s continued success.

As frightful and bewildering as a Dion McGregor nightmare, Thought Gang reveals Lynch and Badalamenti’s shared drive to disrupt any through line or logical outcome, the sounds and words as baffling as dream logic.

Even if Red Yellow Blue overstays its welcome for one song, it still counts as one of this new year's most engaging and endearing indie-rock debuts.

The fundamental Gatekeeper template has been stretched and tweaked, putting one tentative foot forward into the future while the other remains firmly rooted in the past.

Corpse overcomes its moments, due in part to concision and earnest songwriting.

The complexity of the music helps to make up for the comparatively placid lyrics, but Mackey’s writing is most interesting when she zooms in on domestic bliss.

L-event isn’t a world away from the Exai material. It's not passive listening.

Perhaps most enjoyable of all is that there's something remarkably personable about this album, as though Anni Rossi is right there in the room with you, singing her heart out about beekeeping in the Himalayas, her love for freezer units, and the troubles of driving to the west coast with no air conditioning.

The flaw here is that all these songs together are too much to absorb, but Miller probes deeply without ever coming off as sappy, skillfully weaving through breakups, self-loathing, skipping school, and poor decisions without sticking to his own sadsack introspection.

Where previous PE releases this century have often sounded dated, this one often sounds forcibly modern, the sonic equivalent of your tech-challenged granddad trying to use Spotify.

Odyssey is Fischerspooner's attempt at kicking and screaming their way out of punchline hell, so it's a bit of a surprise how good everything sounds.

A few songs go a little too far with the crunching stop-start bits and displays of power, at the expense of songwriting, and the closing title track reaches too hard for a grandiosity it doesn't achieve, but otherwise, this is a good album from a band whose ability to make good albums has long been underappreciated.

Ladyhawke is brimming with ideas whose worst moments quantify this past and whose best build upon it.

Again and again, Woodstock promises a protest but delivers a party.

There is no fight in these songs, not even the faintest stab at hope. There’s just empty moaning, and a lone, feeble guitar that chugs for all eternity in hell.

Wild Nights' drab sound might have been saved if the lyrics had some life to them.

Pigeons feels less divorced from the bedroom freak-folk of the project's self-titled debut (recorded by Temple all by his lonesome, with the assistance of a looping pedal or two) than it seems the logical extension of that aesthetic. Somewhat surprisingly, especially given the debut's minor faults, the woodshedded feel of Pigeons is a good look for the band.

His soft Ben Gibbard geekiness is an odd, if timely, fit for the swinging material, and flourishes of Jeff Buckley throat rattles don't help.

The unnatural and unnerving smoothness of Canopy Glow shows that if there was any one Anticon record that deserved to be called Alopecia, it's this one.

Neither reinventing pop nor changing the course of dance music, it’s a vacation of an album that doubles as the producer’s own stopgap until his next wave comes along.

Unlike many albums to come from its synth-pop cohort, Flux resists being taken apart for playlists. Set almost any similar song against it, and you realize how heady a spell has just been broken.

It is an album of well-portioned, difficult grooves that owe as much to craftsmanship as they do to scholarship, the sound of a chronic disciple slowing learning to make his influences work for him.

Taking into account the sometimes spotty songwriting and its overtly dreamy similarities to Mojave 3 (like if they'd had a back massage and 1200mg's of Valium), there isn't much to save it from solo slump status.

The band's sound benefits greatly from DeLaughter's realization that not every instrument always needs to be playing at once.

This Is for Real has its moments, but it's not the sex-punk triumph these Sheffield-based narcissistic debaucherists seem to believe it is.