This obsession with connecting and disappearing in rapid succession is fitting for a record that finds Purity Ring trying to stake their claim at pop's center but ultimately retreating within themselves.

While the songwriting may be on autopilot, Gallagher’s decision to self-produce Chasing Yesterday was a smart one, resulting in an album that feels both intimate and expansive.

Though Krill aren’t quite ready to let go of the anxieties that inspired them to write their eccentricities in excrement in the first place, Fist suggests that there is light at the end of the sewer drain.

In spite of the formalism, individual tracks on Quarterbacks are a sharp jolt. Together, they blur to make the album more of a mood piece.

Though the busy, Reichian loops help decorate the retro palette, it's the sort of intricacy that can encase art-pop in bulletproof glass, demanding admiration without meeting us halfway. At its best, though, O Shudder's timeworn skill is to combat looming adversity with verve and rhythm, emptying the mind through the body.

This record reads like an object lesson in how former glories are sometime best served by becoming a malleable part of the present.

The result of so much suspicion is an album that’s somehow both loud and timid--all clamor and no soul.

Ultimately, what’s most disappointing about What Happens Next is not that it will in any way tarnish Gang of Four’s legacy--if their vanguard reputation could withstand Hard and Mall, it can withstand this. Rather, it’s the unshakeable feeling that, if Gill had released this as some newly branded collaborative project, no one would question why it wasn’t a Gang of Four album.

Future Brown feels overwhelmingly like a bunch of intriguing ideas left to drift off inconclusively.

While the composition of Bad News Boys adheres to a tried ‘n’ true formula, the songs here consistently yield charming little details.

Seasonal Hire sounds more like a Black Twig Pickers album than a Steve Gunn album.

It's good for what it is--better than it needs to be, in fact--yet what it is is only a fraction of what it could be, if only Earle would stop trying to tidy up his inspirations.

EarthEE makes one think more than feel.

Dark Sky Paradise is a big leap in the direction of the ideal Big Sean full-length.

The songs on here are surprisingly strong, such that any of them could have appeared on a proper album at any point in Beam’s decade-plus career. But the collection never sounds like the sum of its parts.

Physical Graffiti is Zeppelin's best album ultimately because it felt like a culmination.

Her blasé delivery might seem impenetrable at first, but there is warmth and wit to her work that rewards those who are patient enough to hear its message.

Some of the rougher edges and raw(er) emotion that got the twins noticed in the first place get ironed out a bit. And one side effect is that a few of the album's final tracks sound somewhat similar in tonality, tempo, and their vibe. But Ibeyi still find subtle ways to create shape.

Rose Mountain might be Screaming Females' most deliberate music yet, but it lacks much of their former wildness.

At his finest, most expansive moments, Deacon renders this dilemma beside the point, but on Gliss Riffer, it's hard to avoid it; the battle between song and arrangement is staged in too small of an arena.

On Restarter, that precept again takes the lead, and Torche have made their most compelling record since Meanderthal.

It sounds less like a young producer enjoying the fruits of quick success than a restless experimenter figuring out what to do next. Lucky for us, the woodshed is destination enough.

Rapture is ultimately an honest effort devoid of staying power.

As it is, the album feels slightly cluttered by a surfeit of dry minutiae that calls for a cutting room floor of its own.

On a whole, Whatever is milder and gentler than the darker Become What You Are; that comes with age, I guess. But, all said, it does feel like a return.

The six-piece around Houck is more competent than combustible, a quality that’s long made Phosphorescent a good band to see for a 90-minute show but not one that makes you need to take them home.

Pierson hasn’t lost any of the force or heat that’s characterized her vocal work for 40 years; if anything, she’s acquired the ability to enrich otherwise pedestrian line readings with a resonance that feels born of a life well lived.

The most successful [alternative versions] are the ones that drastically reinvent their material, recasting, for instance, rock songs as synth-pop songs, synth-pop songs as rock songs, or busy twee-punk as slightly less busy acoustic twee-punk. But Supermoon never takes those kinds of leaps.