Flying Lotus has the notion that death should be the only limiting factor, and when he's put out a work that wrings beauty out of that very thing, what's the point of fearing anything?

This album’s equilibrium-upsetting aural eclecticism comes into sharp focus: even if you’re not a working mom trying to function on four hours of sleep per night, the buzzing busyness and hallucinatory disorientation of Cosmic Logic are liable to make you feel like one.

Social Rust proves that real experimentation does not require impenetrability at every turn.

What [3rdEyeGirl] don’t have is much of a personality. Recorded live in the studio using analog equipment, the album is nevertheless too proficient, too slick, and too professional to come across as much more than anonymous.

Art Official Age is not a return to form by any means, but a modestly exciting Prince album.

Everything could be accepted for what it is and be held to a more manageable standard: how good does a Weezer album have to be before it can be considered actually good? As it turns out, about this good.

Certain elements of Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, if given the right amount of attention, can be enjoyable to luxuriate in.

It’s rare to see a band as established as Electric Wizard come back from a slump with renewed vigor and a fresh shot of hellfire coursing through their veins, but with Time to Die, they’ve both surpassed expectations and proved that they’re still as vital as they ever were.

The second half of Cool Choices can’t match the first in quality or intrigue, but what makes the album as a whole worth listening to is Ghetto’s ability to burrow into a quarry of sentimental abandon and talk about what it feels like to be vulnerable.

The Drums are at least halfway to amassing a pretty great singles comp--they just can’t really call it a Greatest Hits.

The “Dimension Dive” tracks sometimes sound like they belong on a different record altogether, although taken in the grab-bag context of Savage Imagination it just about works. It’s just that elsewhere there’s a more coherent flow from one change to the next.

On Singer’s Grave, Oldham tweaks the lyrics and song titles here and there to fit these new, peppier arrangements, but he doesn’t appear to be making any grand artistic statement in these re-dos other than making it clear, again, that he can reinvent himself and his songs in any way he so chooses.

This generation-crossing collaboration feels like a record lodged in a sort of chronological rut, one where a young artist fronts an old-sounding record that sounds like it could've been released at any point in his lifetime--and helmed by any number of MCs that could've sounded like him.

Feel Something is a so-so listen that never rises above the band’s influences.

The New Testament feels mostly like one just-OK thing, easy to enjoy on a pass but much harder to love.

At times, KOCH is so microscopic it feels like there’s barely any place left for this music to go. But Gamble keeps finding new ways to take it apart and reassemble it, to the point where something so closed off, so concerned with the smallest of gestures, feels thrillingly open.

Ontario Gothic is certainly part of a great story; but as a perfectly satisfying half hour of modest and common dream-pop, it's not much of a story on its own.

On Tyranny, that guy has simply worked too hard, and that sense of needless toil bleeds through in every bum lick, brick-walled sound, and garbled burst of noise shoved onto the record.

Throughout, Mr Twin Sister is every kind of luxury--it’s more pillowy and firm than the spindly, spiky dance-pop of their past, crystalline on the outside and glittery on the inside, a snowglobe of a Times Square celebration.

PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO succeeds, much like its predecessor, largely thanks to Brathwaite's aptitude for mood.

The tracks on Remembrance don’t sound like they’d be improved with people spitting over them, but they do connect to the emotional world of a certain kind of rap production, with chords and patterns that suggest tension, danger, and, ultimately, melancholy.

As ardent and inviting as Something Shines and We Are Divine both are, Sadier seems content at this point to coo to the converted.

Like all of Cohen's albums, Popular Problems sounds slick but slightly off-kilter, like someone trying to imitate music they've read about but never actually heard.

Some of Commune is pretty splendid.

Mallet percussion, multilingual lyrics, chesty vocal huffs, fumbled acoustics, roundabout vocal harmonies, tentative EDM dipping, Asian monasticism, "Rule Britannia", American gothic: they all get sucked into the vacuum of This Is All Yours without leaving an impression.

These songs feel less like songs and more like treasures, ones that fill you with power and wisdom, and as a result, Too Bright seems capable of resonating with, comforting, and moving anyone who's ever felt alienated, discriminated against, or "other-ized," regardless of sexual orientation.

If the stories are slightly different, for better or worse, the song remains the same.

In its winning attempt to paralyze you, Sway may have paralyzed itself.