Liberman is excellent on its own. Carlton's voice is the key attraction on songs that register between low-key pop, rock, and folk.

Many Moons works as a remarkably cohesive album, meandering its way across themes of past and present to a state of aching clarity that's modest, but no less genuine for

Strip the clever vocal snippets away from Vibert's productions and you're left with those choice drums and goofy melodies, but there's little beyond that to mind.

Leave it to VHÖL to find another dimension to the ever-bountiful combination of hardcore and metal, where the cerebral and the primal stomp heads next to one another.

The soundscapes he's constructed on his third LP, Howl, are spiky and imposing, too solid to sink into. The music is always shifting, so it's impossible to lose track of time while listening.

It’s as unhinged as it is straightforward; as it acquires mass in the choruses it seems to list off the ground into some new, uncertain gravity. For all the blur and motion of their music, this hint of deeper chaos might be the album's most exciting moment.

At a relatively brief nine tracks, the record is a perfectly paced blast of dark pop that deftly reflects Fortune’s growing prowess as a songwriter.

As If leans a little too heavily on the groove in the middle, with moments like "Funk (I Got This)" fading into the background, but it's reinvigorated towards the end by the riveting "Lucy Mongoosey", which uses another singalong chorus as an anchor, an introspective pause among all the dancing.

Give Life some time and you might find it infecting your synapses, too.

It’s 46 songs of verbose, intricately delivered raps, spun from a story with enough character to have already made it a New York Times best-seller. There’s a lot of ground to cover regardless of medium.

This tension between plain old songs and structures and an interest in omitting details and accessorizing sounds enlivens Over and Even from start to finish.

Greatest-hits compilations in general are something of an endangered species, given that streaming-service playlists can now generate them for you, but there's still something to be said for getting a band's own take on what they deem essential.

Unless you approach Electronica 1 as a collection of unrelated songs designed to be cherry-picked for playlists--and given the generic title, maybe that's the point--there's little to hold it together.

Divers is not a puzzle to crack, but a dialog that generously articulates the intimate chasm of loss, the way it's both irrational and very real.

Thank You is still undeniably a Beach House album, a familiar mix of warm tones and chilly sentiments. With the imprint still fading on Depression, Thank You’s impact is undeniably dulled, causing a strange "too much of a good thing" problem.

Future is YACHT's would-be critique of our pre-dystopian, post-Internet culture, but it rarely comes off as more than a charismatic cover band singing us yesterday's news.

With an album replete with Spanish guitar jams, wide-eyed hip-hop, and psychedelic rock k-holes, there isn't much ground left for Raury to cover. Now, he must figure out how to do it all just a little bit better.

Alone is less stripped-down than Impersonator, but it feels less confrontational, too.

The production values are higher, and there’s even more of Palomo's queasy pitch-shifting, 16-bit synths, and disembodied samples--more of everything.

The Documentary 2 solidifies him a grade-grubbing student of hip-hop, one with far more resources and drive than natural talent, but a student all the same.

Repetition is key to this music, but after several cycles, tracks begin to plod, broken up only by Khan's vocal work. The Sexwitch interpretations lose vital elements from the originals like horns, organs, and bells.

She expresses no hesitation here, and for that, her band has never sounded better. Sure, you can come for the twin guitars and the loaded rhythm section, but at last, Cottrell has made it clear you’re staying for her.

The result sounds like something that's already been comp'ed to death by Putumayo.

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

No No asks a lot of listeners, that we unpack all of these fun inferences even as we're being assaulted by the 143 different sounds Co La casted into the vestige of a snare drum. No No, on balance, is worth the effort.

A pristine dream magic seems to inform Apologues--the fluid serenity of the music projects a lulling, murmured unreality that suggests that the album is a figment of the listener’s imagination even while it is in play.

Some can't be saved, which happens when you keep expanding..... More often than not, though, the center holds, and it makes Ultraviolet look like a scratchpad for what they ended up doing here: radically shaking up their formula--from the inside out--and come back with compelling results.

Clutch work best when they keep the pulley of punchlines and pummeling riffs running at max speed, and as a result, Psychic Warfare proves a tad too meandering to eclipse Earth Rocker or Blast Tyrant