1000 Days is a heartening record, a record that sees a young band picking up steam, playing with their influences more deftly than on their prior LPs, and bringing a thoughtful approach to old and well-traveled sounds.

Like its predecessors, Dodge and Burn can leave you wishing for more interaction between the two leads--the duets are always the highlight of any given Dead Weather record, the moment when all that simmering tension boils over. But Mosshart once again handles the heavy vocal lifting with menace to spare.

Rub is the first album in her career where the music feels as foregrounded as Peaches' persona, which makes sense, as she co-produced it with Vice Cooler.

The record is not only catchy as all hell, but it’s also sweet and openhearted and not one bit cynical.

Whether asking for reconciliation ("Clearest Blue", "Empty Threat") or demanding closure ("Never Ending Circles", "Leave a Trace"), Mayberry is judge, jury, and executioner, making convincing, carefully worded closing arguments set to casually devastate.

Adams' 1989, for all its sincerity and technical execution, is ultimately hollow because it's nothing but context.

Ultimately, Caracal just doesn’t feel much fun, and even its highs are nowhere near Settle’s polished bliss.

Although Good Sad Happy Bad is certainly the band’s least polished-sounding record, the combination of the scattered arrangements and Levi’s ruminations on sadness shrewdly underline the topsy-turvy feeling suggested by the title. Even with the band’s music messily chopped, looped, and jangled, the emotional messages always ring clear.

Even as its backdrop mutates from deep-house throbs to psych-rock guitar solos, Half Free always focuses your attention to where it should be: on Remy's radiant voice and vivid storytelling.

Off record, the band’s ideas about getting free are much more urgent, inventive, and contemporary than those psych clichés. Sadly, the band's stylistic conservatism has such a blurring effect on their records that any three tracks contain its total rewards.

While the execution has at times wavered over the years, Allas Sak finds the band fully re-engaged in the sound that it has staked out over the past decade--performing music that’s still as beautiful, optimistic, strange, and singular as ever.

What’s remarkable here is how Fennesz dissolves into the bleak landscape, his signature sound rendered indistinct, a loss of identity that mirrors the album's main theme.

Even with Drake’s lazy punchlines, though, both he and Future are still great rap artists in their primes, and sometimes they figure things out just based on sheer talent. What the tape lacks in congruence, it makes up for in glimmering Metro Boomin production.

Music Complete certainly doesn’t do anything to diminish New Order’s formidable legacy, but it doesn’t necessarily expand upon it either. That being said, it still sounds like classic New Order.

His lyrics have grown more sophisticated. Humor was always part of his music, but on b’lieve i’m goin down it’s an animating principle.

There's nothing hectic about the listening experience; thanks to its relaxed pace and gently abstracted shapes, Wald is every bit as contemplative as the forest walks that inspired it.

At its best, Sleep feels like compositionally rigorous new age music. It’s a place in which you can settle for a while, with or without a pillow, and emerge only when you are ready to rejoin the restive world.

Yours, Dreamily draws spirited performances from its players, but works best as a one-off event.

Honeymoon just synthesizes ideas she's been vamping on from the beginning into a unified work. She figured where she was going long before she got there; with Honeymoon she has finally arrived.

While its ingredients are undeniably basic--all of the songs are built from a few period-appropriate keyboards and chugging drum machines, and that’s mostly it--what makes Cake Knife so consistently endearing is how effortless it all sounds.

Blackalicious is most effective when Gift of Gab’s knotty multisyllabic schemes unspool without decryption and nestle neatly in the nooks and crannies of Xcel’s soulful romps.

Have You In My Wilderness embraces the specific, rather than the eternal, and in her narrowed focus you can sense a palpable self-confidence and a hard-won precision.

The songs he summons from the synths offer proof that there were more songs left in him, but he's still digging in the same mine. Ad Infinitum might be the sound of an artist challenging himself, but it's not the sound of an artist challenging his listeners.

They seem to be stretching themselves on this record, searching to create something meaningful in an ugly world, realizing that there are limits to their subgenre-referencing sound and if they are to grow they’ve got to push themselves.

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

While Savage Hills Ballroom awkwardly stretches to make universal points from Powers' personal distaste, his personal heartache results in the most truly resonant moments.

Though many of the songs convey images of earthiness and of dirt, there's a beauty that helps the collection soar above the ground.

[The] more chaotic and caustic Sun Coming Down, but the album’s relentless drive and uncompromising attitude constitute their own special kind of thrill.