Brisk, 47-minute runtime aside, Post Self is a daunting listen, as well as an essential one, even by Godflesh’s sterling standards.

Despite the blatant bid to sound modish and rejuvenated, U2 cannot help in certain respects but sound the same.

On War & Leisure, he sounds unconflicted and ready to rumble. The freedom he promises his lovers in his music extends to himself, and he’s better than ever at just letting go.

Morning After challenges listeners to assemble their own puzzle, pull fragments from it, and draw their own conclusions. Trust, aloneness, insecurity, hundreds of nights worth of feelings: dvsn puts them all in the air for you to grab at any moment.

An explicit testament to Lo’s chaotic love life, an unashamedly sexual and emotionally impactful piece of work. Lo ends up baring much more of her soul than her body.

Though too scattered to stand alone, The Greatest Gift adds new dimension to Carrie & Lowell.

Who Built the Moon? feels like the sort of album where Noel spent way more time mapping out the sounds than writing the lyrics. But “Keep on Reaching” whips up enough manic, soul-stomping gusto to forgive its obvious Stevie Wonder swipes (”Keep on reaching out for that higher ground”), while “Be Careful What You Wish For” oozes enough creeping menace to elevate its title from clichéd phrase to prophetic threat.

At times this sunny, heart-on-sleeve temperament seems harmless and even quite endearing. More often it simply grates: he’s too precious, too twee.

His signature restlessness tends to enhance the Oh Sees’ concussion-inducing material; for the past 10+ years, it’s sometimes seemed like the faster Thee Oh Sees produce, the harder they hit. The approach doesn’t work such wonders here.

It’s to her credit that it [final song, “Call on God”] doesn’t sound like a farewell. Instead, the song—the entire album, in fact--is a poignant statement of the determination that motivated her all along.

At 72 minutes, this is the longest studio album of her career. Björk doesn’t find love with three chords and the truth, she finds love through an endless interrogation of every note there is.

While there are some musical highlights--like the 8-bit ambience of the Ricky Eat Acid-produced title-track--the album is constantly in pursuit of a voice it never finds. Which highlight Smith’s writing, some of the worst in rap this year. His lyrics are crass and half-baked and insulting to one’s intelligence.

Idle No More, released in 2013, was his first real adult album, with a real U.S. label and a sound that buffed away some of the rough edges but maintained that sense of the ridiculous. That charisma comes through on Murderburgers, his debut solo record and the first on his own Khannibalism Records (an imprint of Ernest Jenning Co.), although it’s more muted and even more mature.

A few songs are some of Morrissey’s most engaging, exciting work of the 21st century. Other songs get your attention for the wrong reasons. ... His political musings all arrive with a crushing lack of subtlety or nuance.

The group balances tension and relaxation with the timing of a master storyteller. It’s a talent Bitchin Bajas has shown on previous records, but here they’ve perfected it, instilling direction and purpose into what could easily be aimlessly pleasant music.

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.

Their music stands now as both a crucial piece in the roiling Seattle scene and as part of a noise-rock continuum that includes like-minded outfits such as Scratch Acid and Butthole Surfers.

Yes, Heavy Light is destructive music, streaked with shrieked lyrics about prey and death, age and tears. But it’s also an inspiring, instructive record, too, where two brutal bands find solidarity and something to celebrate in the darkness. Even if every thought here isn’t complete, Heavy Light is as exciting as either band has ever been.

On Rest, Gainsbourg doesn’t just reveal her pain, but monumentalizes it, lays out a red carpet, and invites people to watch. Her refusal to be sequestered by grief is, quite literally, a death-defying feat.

The eight songs on New Shapes of Life clock in at a tidy half hour, and sometimes you wish he’d give himself the space to stretch things out further.

A singer of remarkable power and expression, Staples essentially rewrites these songs simply by singing them, imbuing each line with fine gradients of emotion and authority. She emerges as the active agent in the project, delivering these songs from her perspective as a black woman, as an artist, as a daughter and sister, even as a Christian.

What a pity, then, to find the band more or less dozing off after their spectacular opening tantrum, drifting aimlessly in a space-rock black hole for the bulk of Interiors.

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.

As much as Golden Teacher absorb the adventurous dub sounds of the past, their exuberance can’t quite make up for the fact that sometimes they still sound like students.

He’s found his voice as a musician, but he’s still searching as a writer, trying to find the sweet spot between autobiographer and novelist. It’s no slight to say that Ewald is still best at his most transparent, singing to the person right in front of him.

If the demos collection presents the fables of R.E.M.’s deconstruction, its concert-disc complement—capturing the only show they performed in support of Automatic for the People—is an essential document of their onstage chemistry. ... It’s an album that—in surveying a fraught political landscape, the fragility of our mental health, and the fate of our planet—still speaks emphatically to our current condition.

Lean, at some point, gets lost in the wall of sound. And still it feels like the most essential music of his career: no longer an outsider looking in, but an artist fully embodying himself.

Even in unvarnished recordings, some of the earliest tracks here--the innocent teen angst of Hart’s “Can’t See You Anymore” and “Sore Eyes,” the handclap-abetted “The Truth Hurts,” and Mould’s studio outtake “Writer’s Cramp”--show an attention to and ease with pop songcraft that later became a hallmark. ... By the time the set gets to the 1983 studio debut Everything Falls Apart, it’s a little like Dorothy stepping into Technicolor.