His masterful way with configured elements provides the illusion of a story without dictating the narrative: Here, you decipher the tones and rhythms, and conjure your own ideas of good and evil.

Rebel Heart grows confusing and irreconcilably uneven as it progresses.

The music evolves so gradually, it's easy to find yourself wondering how you've wound up at a given point; there's a sense of traveling without moving, of zooming in and out between broad strokes and pinpoint details, toggling between distracted reverie and close attention.

Even with the decibel meter dialed down to accommodate his wounded croon, Mendel struggles to assert himself, flattening out the album’s dynamic variation in the process.

Empire is a wonder of absurd tricks and unforeseen turns, but the ultimate goal--rendering its music as something more than just a side platter to gripping TV--proves elusive.

It would be hard to call the album unsentimental. At times it feels as though Cantu-Ledesma is fighting his way through the fog, swinging wildly, exhausted but determined.

SOL has less gravity when it steers away from its majestic solar themes and tries to put its abstract sensations into words. Eskmo's vocals, while delicate, still feel intrusive.

It's all crunchy and cloying and probably better if you're high, but that just makes Wasted on the Dream something like a store-brand version of your favorite cereal; it's close, but not there, usually a matter of texture and feel.

On their first full-length collaboration, Late Night Endless, the two draw on their formidable pedigree, yet at times the album feels cluttered with sound.

Thanks to its pared-down gear list and capricious flow, Levon Vincent feels like the work of someone left alone in the studio, sketching in real time with what's at hand and moving on. And that spontaneity gives it an even greater sense of intimacy.

What's refreshing about Kennedy's tracks--alluded to in Madak's quote above--is the amount of fun he wrangles out of such a sparse and austere template.

This is an inspired collection of songs, even if you do get the feeling Hopkins prefers to spend his late nights alone.

Melbourne, Florida is an exciting progression to old fans, and a solid entry point for new audiences.

Eat Pray Thug isn’t lacking in ideas, just focus, and there are long stretches where it’s much harder to connect to Heems’ persona.

Here Segall and his band perform the songs pretty much as written, only louder. It isn't Segall's best record, but it's worthwhile if only in that it documents the whole crew playing together at the peak of their ability.

Even those who decided years ago that this album was going to be great will be hard-pressed to find a great rap record here, only a sporadically enjoyable one.

Throughout Ripe 4 Luv you can sense that it’s taking every ounce of discipline Cook has to play these pop songs as straight as he does, so he can be forgiven for indulging a little kitsch at the finish line.

Acollection of songs that may not necessarily venture into any new sonic territory for the venerable band, but ultimately doesn’t really need to.

At times, White’s knack for simplicity lapses into the slightly generic.

It’s harder not to fixate entirely on the formal elements of the music, rather than the things that might make it personal. That leads to records where you listen to and admire them from a distance instead of getting immersed in them.

While Jack Ü doesn't exactly roll the ball forward, or do much else to make listeners rethink the principal actors here, it's dumb, loud fun from two architects of the dumbest, loudest fun of the 2000s.

Policy's highlights maintain a precarious balance between classicism and cataclysm, but the album often tips too far in either direction.

The quieter work here may suggest a way forward, but Wild Strawberries has a transitional feel.

This is music that proudly exists as sonic information, music that invites you to meditate on how a simple tone with a halo of white noise, pulsing along in medium tempo and working through different melodic combinations along a major scale, makes you feel.

After clocks in at a solid hour--and it's an hour you'll feel, because while After boasts a stacked lineup of well-crafted songs, it's a choppy ride to make it through them all.

None of the songs on Shadow of the Sun sound new, but the familiar sounds create an atmosphere of safety that allows the more unexpected elements of the record all the more noteworthy.

Ultimately the music becomes another mask, another thing Barnes is trying to untangle, in a great chapter in the lengthy, wonderfully ornate Of Montreal compendium.

You've really got to fight to make your way into You're Better Than This, to carve out a little room amidst its unstable rhythms, its twining guitars, and Maguire's screams-of-consciousness. But that's precisely what inspires such devotion in Pile's growing cohort.