The moments when the music matches the intensity of Lydon’s singing are exhilarating.... Other mid-tempo tunes on What the World Needs Now don’t fare as well.

In Pagans in Vegas, humans and machines exist in a binary relationship. The reality is both more nuanced and fertile than that.

Artificial Dance is enough to make you rethink what you thought you knew about that era--and to make you wonder what else might be out there, just waiting to be rediscovered.

Ones and Sixes is all at once beautiful, ugly, tense, warm, inviting and repellent.

It's her mastery and attention that is ultimately what, I suspect, makes her work so consistently complex and worthwhile.

What the Isley Brothers achieved can't be contained in a single album nor can it be adequately summarized in a hits collection. They seized all the tumult, all the excitement, all of the sounds of their time and turned it into enduring commercial art whose endurance and depth is best appreciated in a set like this, where the actual records can be heard in their entirety.

So while Too is at times brave, that doesn't necessarily make it compelling.

Yannick Ilunga feels like pop music's future--borderless but deeply rooted, challenging but pleasurable--and La Vie is strong enough to have earned Ilunga the right to call his revolution whatever he wants.

Repentless is solid--far from a classic, but the best possible outcome.

A casual, slightly-weirder-than-usual release with one very good R&B song (that's reportedly been kicking around in his vault for a while), stranded in the album's penultimate slot.

Versions, presented now as a complete overhaul and re-imagining of Cellar Door, nudges their Balearic soft rock tendencies back toward their dubby fundamentals, offering drastically warped takes on that underwhelming album.

These ninety-second-ish ditties are too gaunt and echo-ridden to stand alone as memorable singles, but within the tempestuous framework of the album, their vulnerability hits like a late-summer thunderstorm.

No No No may sound ineffectual after a cursory listen, but it reveals some subtle pleasures if you keep it in rotation.

The specter of mortality haunts the proceedings. Despite all of this, it's a testament to Chinx's still-growing pop smarts that Welcome to JFK is sometimes a lot of fun.

Leaves Turn Inside You, out of print on vinyl for over a decade, is Empire’s main event, the career high this entire box set series has been leading up to. But despite its low standing in the band’s discography, Challenge for a Civilized Society is worth revisiting, too.

For the most part, Me is a requiem for a doomed romance, and the greatest measure of Rodriguez's confidence is just how candid and vulnerable she allows herself to be here.

Faith in the Future is a character-driven record, even if it doesn’t restore Finn to the heights of his mid-2000s heyday.

There's no romance in the songs where the duo confront their demons (Barât has also struggled with addiction and depression), but they're still full of fight.

What's most remarkable about this album is, despite the high gravitas of the subject manner, it still manages to capture the yearning and imagination of youth, and never loses touch with the redemptive qualities of interpersonal connectedness.

Though it’s clear the band is refining their songwriting and getting more personal in the process, the record feels wilted instrumentally compared to their previous releases.

The five songs on the Crosswords EP sound like tracks that come easily to him, songs he knows how to make without stretching himself.

If Turkey just misses greatness, it's because it's just too short. The whole thing is over in 18 minutes.

Dead Petz is the definition of a vanity project, an indulgent collection of experiments that exist for no other reason than because they can.

The album's six songs work within the limits of hardcore and industrial to create a monolithic record that slyly undermines its central thrust.

On Poison Season, you can occasionally detect the dismaying sound of indie rock's greatest intellect second-guessing itself.

The Meth Lab is a posse record in practice, very much in the lineage of Theodore Unit's 718, Polluted Water, or the ultimate in Wu-Tang marginalia, Ugodz-illa Presents the Hillside Scramblers.

Remember the Life Is Beautiful isn't a triumph simply because it so elegantly captures the Balearic style; it's that it so elegantly captures its spirit.

There are superficial differences in aggression—slightly more electronic buzzing, harsher vocals, gristly guitars. It’s Foals’ raw record, but it’s still filet mignon tartare.... What Went Down is their most consistent, steady-handed work yet.