Callahan's work seems of its time and makes you aware of the artist behind it. And Rough Travel, though ultimately only for established fans, turns out to be a very good snapshot of where that artist's music stood at the end of the last decade.

Where club culture mythologizes a circuit of endless nights and after-parties, Passed Me By suggests physical and spiritual exhaustion, Sisyphus collapsing beneath the dead-eyed twinkle of the disco ball.

Wilderness of Mirrors isn't groundbreaking in general, but it is new territory for the often-cerebral English, and he puts an engaging, commanding stamp on this style of ambient overdrive hymn.

Africa Express keeps it to a bite-sized 41 minutes, and every one of them includes something to savor.

Knowing that this is Dre's finale, there's a pleasant melancholy that frames Compton, and with the music in our ears, acknowledging that maybe that's for the best.

For the most part, Me is a requiem for a doomed romance, and the greatest measure of Rodriguez's confidence is just how candid and vulnerable she allows herself to be here.

Ohren’s mix is beefy but not outsized or over-processed like so much modern metal can be. The music reveals endless contours over repeat listens.

Even while making a turn towards formalism, Golden Retriever remain as inventive as ever. Rotations is also richly emotional.

Puff may sound as slight as its name suggests--but this idiosyncratic and inventive record is anything but lightweight.

Big Bad... is yet another example of his continued career elevation, signaling what is possible if you stick to your guns while caring little for what others think.

The first dozen times through, I had trouble making sense of the overloaded midrange and upper register: the horns, guitars, call-and-response vocals, and insistent shakers and maracas. But eventually, it all settles into place, yielding both a rich diversity of complementary styles.

Bubba is another set of coherent, well-sequenced set of tracks without any major drop-offs, all the more impressive as the album runs more than 50 minutes. It’s flexible, ever-moving, a dance record that could have come from no one else.

They mostly tuck the dissonance and bedlam beneath the surface of these tunes, like a weapon hidden between hem and skin. That restraint highlights the band’s surprising breadth on their most diverse set of songs yet.

ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH is an intensely beautiful, intensely difficult record.

Metal Bird feels blissfully unmoored from any sense of time and space, its astral Americana hymns hovering somewhere between the dirt and the stars, between a bygone golden age and our tense present, between raw intimacy and dreamlike splendor.

Her tracks might be improvised or labored upon. They feel both sui generis and tossed off. You can hear her hand, and it makes you wonder, and in that way her recordings are empathy machines. They warm and flatter as they fill the air around you, silk scarves just out of reach.

Where 925 was thrillingly inventive, but often kept the listener at a cautious remove, Anywhere But Here uses deeply felt storytelling and intimate vocals to usher us much closer.

The album burns brightest on a pair of songs in which Marea recognizes the limits of his grace in the face of emotionally unavailable lovers.

Though he’s preternaturally funny and frequently debonair, only a portion of these songs approach the vim and vigor of his generation-defining anthems.

Not only are the dimensions bigger than ever, but the songwriting’s more varied.

Holo Boy doesn’t go out of its way to experiment or provoke, but its emphasis on reinterpretation is strangely moving, particularly at this point in Amos’ career.

Despite the outward sameness of the music, there’s a wealth of detail to be discovered.

This is the best way to approach the album—as an impressionistic work that rewards the questions and ideas it stirs, rather than a puzzle demanding a solution. Its knotted discussions of agency and morality take a backseat to how alive its characters feel in this illicitly exciting world.

At its best, Human Performance is Parquet Courts in a mellower, heart-stopping Velvet Underground mode, but it is also at turns upbeat and funny, sensitive and odd. Compositionally, these are the most dynamic Parquet Courts songs yet.

He gives himself over to memory’s full sway, until the project feels a little like thumbing through a souvenir album, Chapman singing about the postcards that help remind him of places held dear.

Their most focused and fully realized effort yet-- an album that adds an imperial hugeness to the teen noir and garage-y psychedelia of their past efforts-- and one of the better pop records we've heard this year.

JT plays like an album of first takes. It’s multifaceted in its messiness: a leather hide wrapped around a tender heart. That loose quality plays up the differences between father and son.

Reason in Decline doesn’t pose. Instead, these 10 tightly coiled songs rightfully treat those former concerns—bitter character studies of lovers and townies, jilted analyses of the overcrowded underground—like Clinton-era trifles, conflicts of no consequence in a time of autocrats and prospective apocalypse.