As close to a perfect hybrid of dance and rock music's values as you're likely to ever hear.

Ram is a domestic-bliss album, one of the weirdest, earthiest, and most honest ever made.

You can feel roots going down and an edifice being built. Her voice has gained depth and she sings with more force and clarity, so that's part of it. And the arrangements are more judicious and draw less attention to themselves (some tracks are just harp, others add horns, strings, and percussion, but with a lighter touch). But the bigger difference seems to be the overall mood, which is expansive and welcoming.

Led Zeppelin is one of music's most assured and fully realized debuts; individually, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham were great players, but the whole of their sound somehow exceeded the sum of its parts. But even above the instrumental virtuosity, Led Zeppelin is a triumph of production, each part clear and forceful but adding up to something even more powerful.

Benji sounds more like Kozelek relating events instead of crafting them, which makes the continuity and reflexivity of the record feel both uncanny and the work of protracted genius.

He’s responded in the best way possible: by producing a record that, in structure and scale, is every bit The Seer’s equal, yet possessed by a peculiar energy and spirit that proves all the more alluring in its dark majesty.

Here, it stands behind so many other newly apparent strengths--a testament to the leaps and bounds Longstreth has made as a songsmith and Dirty Projectors have made as a band.

They've given us something in the present tense that, these days, feels depressingly unfashionable: An Event--an album that dares to be great, and remarkably succeeds.

Their third and undoubtedly best album, U.F.O.F., a mesmerizing flood of life filtered down into a concentrated drip.

Coltrane reaches at once into the future and the place where music began. He touches the primeval and follows along with the changes.

Yes, this is shit-hot thrilling music. But it's also brainy and ambivalent, and more engaging for it.

The truth about the 2021 manifestation of Let It Be is that Martin and his engineer Sam Okell haven’t really cracked the code either. It still feels like the awkward, intermittently exciting, sometimes deeply-moving collection of misfit toys it has always been. ... So much of the material included on the extra discs—the rehearsals, the outtakes, and the jams—is uncomfortable and fascinating. You see and hear their future together and then you feel it slipping away.

Remarkably intricate and razor sharp compositions... more accessible than anything he's done before, yet it surpasses them insofar has he has shown the beginnings of a total sonic mastery of each subtle aspect of a work.

The Surrey duo have not only made 2013's best dance record so far--they've also concocted one of the most assured, confident debuts from any genre in recent memory.

Lush, melancholic, gregarious, generous, both precise and a little bit unhinged--this is the most original American dance album in a long while.

Mirrored is a breathtaking aesthetic left-turn that sounds less like rock circa 2007 than rock circa 2097, a world where Marshall stacks and micro-processing go hand in hand.

On a fundamental level, the bangers on EUSEXUA bang like once and future bangers.

He's playing the same old marshall vs shady real-or-fake game as usual and its as interesting and complex as it ever was.

That Skinner is able to coax so much from a cliché-heavy, 50-minute examination of solipsism and self-pity is a tribute to his ability to reflect and illuminate life's detail.

Sprawling and spectacular. .... The songs are immediate and inviting in ways that Cindy Lee’s previous discography has only hinted at.

One Word Extinguisher shows a range of emotional grappling usually foreign to instrumental hip-hop.

Burn, Piano Island, Burn balances so perfectly between commercial appeal and untainted creativity that it's as if the band have been digitally inserted atop a mountain no man could conceivably climb.

An uncompromising, energetic monster of a record.

Maybe that's why this album has such an incredible pull: It doesn't make an atmosphere so much as a space to spend time in, and Adebimpe doesn't become a narrator so much as a witness.

The Strokes are not deities. Nor are they "brilliant," "awe-inspiring," or "genius." They're a rock band, plain and simple. And if you go into this record expecting nothing more than that, you'll probably be pretty pleased.

You get lost in it, and if you're wired a certain way that mixture of desire and confusion is easy to map on to the wider world. For 22 years, the only way to get there was through Loveless and its associated EPs; now there's another path, one many of us never expected to find.

Insanely catchy '60s- inspired pop music in addition to sound collages, field recordings, drony ambience, cathartic noise, and outlandish production that makes Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" look like a cubicle divider.

Soul’d Out is the real deal: a portrait of a pop label at its imperial peak, presenting its unmediated vision of Blackness for a rapt audience.