Guilty of Everything is loud, it’s distorted and it’s heavy, but it’s not aggressive. It’s actually quite comforting.

The moments where Mastermind gives us William Roberts the man instead of Rick Ross the gangster flick composite character with the borrowed name are scarce, and he remains committed to dialing in good life platitudes that increasingly ring hollow.

The Satanist is a terrific coil of most everything Behemoth have ever done well, a strangely hopeful vision of hell wrested away from its very grip.

Cooley’s superlative performance on English Oceans would be more worthy of celebration if it wasn’t negated by Hood’s most non-committal songwriting to date.

Death After Life gets a little cute here and there (cf. the extended roboseizure freakout outro to "III"), and it starts to lose a little steam near the end, when the downtempo digression of "VI" and the hopped-up yet unsurprising "VII" roll towards the official conclusion.

The net result of the half-thoughts that make up the patten mythos throw the music into a certain light, depending on how it's received.

Who knows if the Men would be energized or completely lost if they took more time next time out, but Tomorrow’s Hits for now mostly succeeds in toeing the line between being on a roll and being in a rut.

It’s disappointing that these songs don’t have the bones to stand on their own, especially since a precedent for truly great Major Lazer songs exists.

Ava Luna are an exhilarating live band, and Electric Balloon is the first thing they've done that comes close to bottling that energy.

This is passionate music, delivered with searing honesty by a man who didn’t mind disappearing from the conversation if that’s what it took to articulate what he was trying to say.

They’ve made the first record of their career that feels like it might teach you something over time. It is rare, and special, for a band to be this effortlessly and completely themselves.

The urgency and vigor he packs into the unplugged punk of Workbook--the frequent knuckle-scraping attack of his strumming, his refusal to whisper or withhold--are what make the album a testament to tension rather than hesitance.

By burrowing down into a few key sounds rather than stiffly approximating a dozen-plus, the intermittently funky, unshakably finicky Wave 1 is a mostly welcome return.

Interscope’s trust in TDE saves the album from the awkward test tube collaborations that bog down many of its peers, but Oxymoron’s doubling down on a reliable formula makes for a relatively risk-averse listen.

There’s a purism to Moody’s music, but it’s made of muddy waters (literally, on “Sunday Hotel”), dusty vinyl grooves and—if the Popeye's inner sleeve is to believed—greasy fingers.

Thankfully, it's not just dour missives and desolation--there's life in these songs.

Each of the 11 songs here are positioned at some point in an endless cycle of going out, scoping girls, getting drunk, making out, passing out, and “waking up in [your] clothes.” But for Skaters, such scenes are apparently so routine that they often sound disinterested in their own debauchery.

There was always a tendency to divert into different styles on their prior albums (at least from 12 onward), but always with a feel of continuity underpinning it all, as if each path they took was firmly routing off the same road. Here, their razor-sharp sense of direction feels strangely blunted.

Lucky for us, there’s no one else like them and on Present Tense, their success has allowed Wild Beasts to be even more like themselves.

Not only does it uphold the myths of baby boomer greats like the Byrds, Neil Young, and Simon and Garfunkel with a staid type of reverence, but it also piggybacks on the legacy of one of Beck's best records. It's the sound of a rule-breaker dutifully coloring inside the lines.

True to its title, Voices in a Rented Room is modestly scaled and simply structured; the tone and form established in a song’s first verse don’t change by the time we reach the third. But even within these confines, New Bums rarely retrace their steps.

St. Vincent continues Clark's run as one of the past decade's most distinct and innovative guitarists, though she's never one to showboat.

The album, and the woman steering it, are not only comfortable with their eccentricities but strengthened by them, and the effect is enthralling.

Helms Alee doesn’t slough any of its previous interests wholesale, and each aspect of their musical personality is too distinct to camouflage with the rest. But the seams now crisscross in brilliantly unsuspected patterns, giving each element its space and the benefit of contrast.

Digital Resistance might be older and wiser, a transmission from a lifer, but that not a quest out of which they’ve aged.

If you’re in this emotionally combustible state, you’ll relate to You’re Gonna Miss It All directly and deeply. If you at least recognize it in retrospect, you can just as easily appreciate its wealth of infectious songs that are both sharply observed and sharply written.

Lyrically, Lo-Fang songs range from almost embarrassingly inert to annoyingly overwrought to frustratingly tone deaf.

The slate of beats on Cilvia Demo unites into a consistently immersive, complete album package that's just as ruminative as the lyrics.