Knowing that this is Dre's finale, there's a pleasant melancholy that frames Compton, and with the music in our ears, acknowledging that maybe that's for the best.

Jessie Jones is a well-rounded introduction, one that holds little back.

Fortunately, Body Complex never gets bogged down by ambient music's wallpaper associations. This isn't music for living rooms; it's music for living in.

What Love Is Free does so well, and so simply, is hone in on just the beauty of finally letting go, physically and mentally.

It’s evident that Deaf Wish can adopt just about any sound or style that they want to, and that’s what they seemingly tried to do on Pain. For many other bands, that approach could muddy the waters or create a convoluted listening experience, but this doesn’t happen here. They choose to be themselves--each one of them--and it works.

Works is a crisp, punchy-sounding record, not far from the unfussy, live-in-a-room feel of early triumphs like Prairie School Freakout.

The songs are long and dynamic, pushing their boundaries to the limit while maintaining spaciousness.

More deadening than the suffocating arrangements and production or the nonexistent hooks is a tiresome perspective that goes beyond the Weeknd and connects to a celebrated lineage of male authors who assume an inherent profundity in treating a psychosexual crisis of mid-twenties masculinity as miserably as possible.

Some may find that the new transparency makes his work a bit pedestrian, the work of another guy with a guitar and a few chords sharing simple sadness. But Ahmed’s senses of song and arrangement remain highly idiosyncratic, where verses spill into choruses and solos in unpredictable fashion.

River runs so well as a unit that, unless you’re able to spot the tunes or sleuth the liner notes, you likely won’t detect that Bachman didn’t even write two of these numbers.

In Slim Twig’s incessant and overbearing winks to the camera, he’s lost sight of his own potential.

Intimate and slow-moving, Woman is good but underwhelming.

Whine of the Mystic is musically plainspoken and direct.

Some of the songs may even leave you thinking they could use another element, but in the end, it's nice that they remain as spare as they do, the edges left soft and fuzzy, the way you see things in the dark.

The undercurrent of darkness in La Luz's music is what makes their work so fierce and intelligent. You could blink and miss their sneaky, underhanded way of slipping unease into their cheerful-sounding songs.

If you like DeMarco, you'll like Another One. It's like a novella, or a made-for-TV movie--something to chew on while we wait for the next major project. It riffs on his established formula.

Cooper and Hoare's deceptively simple interplay slowly worms into your synapses, as their seemingly anonymous melodies gain personality.

On much of the album, repetition crosses into redundancy, especially true on the two Modeselektor-produced tracks, "Tawwalt El Gheba" and "Enssa El Aatab".

After a while, even unremitting noise and relentless nihilism becomes rote and, frankly, kind of boring. Without the occasional beam of light, it's hard to actually appreciate how dark--or how good--a band like HEALTH can actually be.

Y Dydd Olaf is a crucial minority language record, but Saunders' beguiling melodies and execution also make it one of the best British debuts of 2015.

Living Legend isn't bad, exactly. It's a consistent release with no substantial misfires, full of densely packed verbiage and grand gestures, reminiscent of a time when technique, style, and personality seemed inseparable, interrelated qualities in a rapper's arsenal.

It might be their weakest album, but Presence is among the most special; none of these songs sound like they could have come from another record.

Zeppelin's most singular record, if far from their best.

Coda is a great listen with a skip button close at hand.

The rhyme skills and lurid way with imagery that first brought the group to national attention remain on display throughout the album, but YRN's warring agendas suggest a few more tries are in order for the Migos to get their formula sorted.

This is sparse, windswept music, full of warm, circling guitar plucks, gathering echoes, and long, slow fades.

Rather than build off each other's styles and arrive at a cumulative, comprehensive sound, Teenage Time Killers' revolving cast have conflated quantity with quality, resulting in a pedestrian product that, at best, offers a decent soundtrack to throwing back beers at Punk Rock Bowling.

On Cascade, he’s back to forestalling that knowledge through repetition, which is what gives his abstract pieces their surprising sentience and unaccountable melancholy. The machine is doing the work, but the composer has done the thinking and feeling, and that makes all the difference.