Ashworth takes us on a joyride with a succession of mostly doomed outlaws and derelicts, with a couple of side excursions into familiar disaffected-slacker-ballad territory. It all adds up to easily the most mature and thematically ambitious Casiotone release to date.

Where SS1 felt rambling and uneven, there is a clear sense of purpose to SS2, applying the cohesion of Barter 6 to SS1’s pop promise.

More than any Markers record before it, the trio seem to be communicating deep within the subconscious, tapping into soul that's been hiding behind the noise for years.

If you've liked anything Toth has done in the past, whether that's the tunes he's written or the textures he's conjured, Blood Oaths offers both, perhaps better than ever before. If you've dismissed him, though, this is the sound of one musician's prolific and mercurial path, reaching delightful new highs.

Case remains her own best muse, a strong, feminine presence who demands you meet her songs halfway (she calls herself a control freak in every article I've read), but her band deserves credit for creating the ambient, dark-night setting in which her tales of murder and animals sound natural and compelling.

Even the least-crucial songs feature a tough backing band and a powerful, raspy performance from Candi.

His music nurses a profound ache, and he's now made enough of it that it's become a whole corner to visit, a unique transmission that feels like its own sentient being. As an artist, it's hard to aim higher than that.

There's plenty here for musicians to analyze and dissect with envy, but first and foremost, this is an album for the body and the soul.

Without abandoning the conundrums that made Obsidian so emotionally indelible, he’s embellished the worlds of his songs with color from the dreams in which he’s immersed himself over the years. The setting may not be real, but the sentiment rings true.

Part of the revelation of Boots No. 1, then, is witnessing Welch’s music made mortal, to hear her navigating her many influences with a young artist’s enlightened uncertainty, and to hear imperfect recordings that may not necessarily conjure universes on their own accord so much as they recall old-fashioned country music that’d sound at home on the radio.

O'Neil's certainly made her share of enrapturing, enveloping music. But I'm not sure she's ever made one quite as transportive--or, for that matter, as alive--as Where Shine New Lights.

Disbanded in their prime before they grew stale or flat, they still feel pregnant with promise, tantalizingly unfinished; like an actor cut down in youth, they've remained an irresistible lure to the imagination of pop romantics ever since.

The contrasting styles don't always sit comfortably, but individual tracks sparkle with creativity and the newfound dark side is a surprisingly pleasant fit.

As extroverted as these songs sound, you really never get a full sense of Hooray For Earth's personality.

With Disaster Trick, Horse Jumper of Love subtly expand their sound without losing the instinctual, otherworldly interplay of their melodies, dizzying guitar lines and serpentine rhythms blurring together in a narcotic ooze.

Detractors will be sure to note that In a Safe Place can feel numbingly repetitive at moments, but all that expansive diddling contributes equally to the record's allure: Like rolling past the North Pole or through West Texas, this record plays with its own redundancies, building an entire universe from strange, barren pieces.

Re: ECM stands out not just for its depth but for its variety, for the sheer number of musics it incorporates.

Still Life is steeped in Dylan's back-to-basics period at the turn of the '70s, carefully adorned but never skeletal; from the beating-heart bassline that sits underneath "Drowning" to the drunken horns that close out the eight-minute "Amen", Still Life is sumptuous, slightly rickety, offhandedly gorgeous.

Crain and company use Ra’s music as the platform for some of their most accessible, pop-adjacent music yet. They’ve never sounded so interested in melodies, chords, and song structures as opposed to hypnotic loops. This rigorousness belies the album’s stoner-bait trappings, and if these interpretations are usually unrecognizable until the melodies come in, they’re at least honest and thoughtful about how to bring Ra’s music into a synth-centric context.

Don’t Lose This sounds like an excellent entry point for newcomers and casual fans, a gateway to exploring the Staples’ vast catalog.

Diaphanous of texture but heavy of spirit, Safe revolves upon this tension, the pressure point of a soul under strain.

The music hammers with industrial heft, vibrates with nervous pulse, and envelops with tactile atmosphere. Even when her songs achieve moments of transcendence, they still strike you directly in the gut.

ADULT. still do a convincing showroom-dummies impersonation, but they’ve never sounded more human than they do here.

La Forêt... backs off dramatically from the pop side of Fabulous Muscles to expand upon its quiet, murky dimension.

blue water road is Kehlani’s most mature album, as well as their most musically and thematically challenging.

The record keeps moving. Sometimes it moves with warmth, and sometimes with motorik rhythm.

These 15 tracks were certainly worth the almost-decade-long wait.

The result is some of the most direct, spontaneous music in James’ catalog. Tracks feel less like songs or compositions than tone poems, mood pieces that flow naturally from one to the next, like clouds changing shape high overhead.