Rigorous but rarely hermetic, the album is a small testament to his sustained excellence.

Meticulous as the sound palette is throughout, favoring sustained organ chords, close-mic’d guitar strums, and the patter of hand drums, the effect starts to smudge everything together.

A Distant Call is an album with depth of production, more deliberate songwriting, and a commitment to style.

Blumberg asserts that even for the creator, a song can be whatever you need it to be in the moment, a vessel for self-exploration. On&On shows that he’s wholly enmeshed his songwriting and improvisation in a way that feels unique to him.

Too often, she jumps to John Hughes-isan climaxes without laying the foundation that would grant them the proper emotional heft. But Kristi shines as a guitarist and a composer; even the sternest skeptics might be forced to headbang once the power chords crash in on a particularly distorted chorus. Beabadoobee needs to punch up her script, but the set is perfectly lit.

With this album’s unpredictable forms, the trio moves confidently beyond its acuity for cultural synthesis, stepping into stranger, more scintillating territory where unexpected shifts and mercurial sounds are the standard. The beauty of Afternoon X lies in its unusual balance of chaos and calm.

It’s too frantic, too kinetic, and has too many places to be, which over the course of the album makes the essential beauty of Greep’s singing and the featherlight precision of his band feel like a front they’re tiring of holding up. It’s fitting, even artistically admirable, that such strain makes The New Sound’s music an appropriate wingman for characters who struggle to maintain basic human kindness. But it sure makes for an uncomfortable conversation.

With that in mind, the album is perfectly titled, as Actor proves St. Vincent as an artist capable of crafting believable, complicated characters with compassion, insight, and exacting skill.

It doesn’t have the teeth that really gnaw into one’s consciousness, lacking the bleeding heart and pleading lyrical hooks of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Instead, Out of Range dishes out good feelings and Zen calm—more East than West. These days, we all need that sort of thing, regardless of your stance on sound baths.

The ultimate compliment for Life Under the Gun wasn’t “catchy,” but “punchy,” their songs direct and delivered with a stiff jaw and clenched fist. The exact opposite is true on God Save the Gun; half the time, if a song reaches two minutes, it might as well add a bridge that gets it to three.

On occasion the music feels market-tested, straddling a few too many demographics at once—chords and vibes still take precedence over ideas.

It is a record that is whimsical and sensual; weird and romantic.

This is an imperfect, imprecise project—but that’s the beauty of it.

Bound Stems have the rarefied ability to make that mess sound gorgeous, as if all were in its right place even when it's held together by chewing gum in some spots.

Where Stetson’s solo albums use dread and paranoia to undercut his careful attention to post-rock’s sense of limitless possibility, Hereditary feeds off of his darkest impulses.

An unusual mixture of hard funk and soft pop, like Zapp and Burt Bacharach stuck in an elevator together, Cole's is a sly, jubilant sound; it makes good use of the way funk also thrives upon a sense of wrongness, a screw-faced delight at things gone awry.

Diaz’s voice is resonant and emotionally rich—sometimes pleading, sometimes dejected, sometimes a gentle whisper and occasionally a powerful belt—and her ear for melody is exquisite, filling her songs with crisp, memorable hooks. This combination helps make even her broadest gestures, like the waltzing breakup ballad “Don’t Do Me Good,” a duet with Kacey Musgraves, feel lived-in but not overworked.

Wiltzie spends a lot of the album’s runtime in his orchestral-drone comfort zone, but whenever the terrain threatens to sound too well trod, he pulls out something like “Dim Hopes,” with its twinkling constellation of vibraphones, or “Stock Horror,” which seems in the process of being ground up and devoured by the earth.

The group could have delivered 10 variations on “Clearest Blue” and made (relative) bank. Instead, they let their influences sprawl widely. ... Better yet, they finally build on the darker parts of 2013’s The Bones of What You Believe as they excavate their own career.

Reality Testing stands as one of the year's best, most luxuriant, and accomplished electronic albums, more proof that when it comes to forging a new future out of what’s already taken place, Cutler remains at the top of his game.

The album exists so thoroughly in the moment that it winds up obliterating the group’s fetishization of the past and just delivers pure, uncut rock’n’roll fun.

The ceaseless lull of her voice accounts for the record’s ambient feel, but it also makes She Walks in Beauty seem like an actual poetry reading that drags on for a quarter hour too long.

If not all of Lullaby’s fusion experiments succeed, there’s enough inspired alchemy here to earn Plant the right to bring it on home.

The cumulative effect of Shut Up I Am Dreaming surpasses "I'll Believe in Anything"'s ostensible perfection. That's a brilliant song, yes, but this a brilliant album, ballooning with those sorts of moments on repeat.

Vol. 2 proves there’s more than enough country funk out there to fill a good Vol. 3.

There was already a disarming openness to epic, and the best covers find new horizons in these songs still.

For an album where most tracks don’t extend past three minutes, and from a band with such a breakneck spirit, Visitor feels a little too languid.

It picks up right where Thickfreakness left off-- outside the bar in the gravel parking lot, swinging aggressively with Dan Auerbach's ferocious six-string and Patrick Carney's cymbal-and-snare seizures-- and brings the noise one step further.