His debut album, Knockin' Boots, could actually be the best LP-length statement to come out of house's reawakening.

She is deft and adaptive, at once inspiring dancing and melancholy reflection: La Havas is always in motion.

Where previous PE releases this century have often sounded dated, this one often sounds forcibly modern, the sonic equivalent of your tech-challenged granddad trying to use Spotify.

The production is dense, thin, and minimal, the guitars and drums pushed tight to give all these lyrics extra oomph.

A 29-track, 93-minute rock opera that immediately restored their claims to outsized ambition, as only a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera might.

With this crystalline collection, Watkins Family Hour offers a more compelling insight.

You can quibble with the inclusion of familiar material in a Bootleg Series package, but you can't argue--not yet, at least--with the unreleased depths of the Davis vault.

Seraph might be shifty, but Arsenault still works with blunt force.

The aesthetics of her songs with Hershenow remain timid and careful.

It's not exactly Sic Alps Mk. II, but there are some clear similarities. The record's eerie psychedelic pop strikes a similar balance of order and chaos, with songs that rev up only to be subverted by detours into dissonance and static.

Throughout it all, his arrangements burst with a vitality that belies their modest construction. The sounds may be humble, not that much more hi-fi than his early demos, but their vision of funk as lifeblood is never anything less than radiant.

Star Wars is their strongest record in a decade.

Mable might not be a knock out of the park—"Bench" sounds like lukewarm Weezer, and the five-minute "Out of Body" seems out of place--but it might be one the catchiest sets of pessimist punk songs since Fireworks’ Oh, Common Life.

Locrian chose to slow down and create consecutive meticulous albums. They are isolated and involved worlds of sound.

They are a powerful outfit, and Subjective Concepts is cohesive and fierce.

Future was always straightforward, never ashamed to confess his depression or infatuation, but the narratives never felt so focused, nuanced, or vulnerable than here.

Barring a couple of forgettable, filler-feeling tracks like "Don't You Think I Know?", the biggest drawback of Does It Again is the production. It doesn't sound bad, but the washed-out reverb and pushed-to-the-front keyboard creates a distance that the band sounds like they are constantly fighting to push through.

This set is the document we've been missing of the onstage Family Stone of legend: the tightly knit extended family that sang and played together, the group that magically united black and white audiences. If it doesn't quite live up to their radiant reputation, it comes pretty close.

Like so many country albums, especially recent ones by Monroe's friend and bandmate Miranda Lambert, The Blade could be stronger if it was more streamlined and sequenced with some kind of overarching narrative in mind, but that's almost beside the point when the album sounds so damn good.

There are solid hooks scattered all over No Life For Me, and they sound like they could've been knocked out in five minutes--each melodic note notches in the expected place over thrumming power chords and steady drums.

This is Ducktails’ most discriminating and tasteful album, but the project is at its best when there's a certain amount of exploration even within its narrow parameters.

There are moments on Gold and Stone when it seems like these songs long to wander off, to further explore some of these textures and moods, but not a single track extends past the four-minute mark, almost as if out of fear of throwing the album off its tight schedule.

It’s not that the album is bland, it’s that it doesn’t really do anything or go anywhere.

Here, and on the album’s other highlights, the air of mercantile anonymity feels generous rather than cynical, the music as anxious to accommodate its imagined audience.

The moments where things sound like they’re spilling over, bleeding outside of the track's imaginary lines, are when LP is most thrilling.

The strangeness and slightness of Instrumentals 2015 is admittedly refreshing in our age of overdoing it, and it does fit with the whisper that is Pearce's overall career arc, but when placed next to Flying Saucer Attack's best music, it still comes off like a faint echo.

Echoes is more of a grab bag: Enormous festival fillers and hard-nosed club bangers rub up against wondrously bizarre studio experiments and some of the best pure pop songs Rowlands and Simons have ever made.

Instead of opening up new possibilities in the originals, Beam and Bridwell unwittingly demonstrate how limited certain songs can be and therefore how unsatisfying certain covers can sound.