Hunn is an adept mixer, and he plays the long game in a way that rewards close listening.

Even as Motivational Jumpsuit faithfully approximates the grainy fidelity and 60-second dosages of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, it can’t maintain the same dizzying standards of pop euphoria throughout.

As generous as Guilt Mirrors might seem, it puts an oppressive onus on the listener to find it.

Nothing much happens in The Soul Is Quick--it's possible to wander in and out, picking up a thread you left dangling a few minutes before. That's where Willner excels, in creating these supple moments where you can get totally enveloped in what he's doing, or check out from the world for a while, or just leave him running in the background and marvel at how slowly he moves through time when your focus returns to him.

The hard-driving Blame Confusion, in too big a hurry to stop and take in the scenery, simply lets too much whoosh by in the periphery.

With Small Town Heroes, Segarra proves herself one of the most compelling stylists in a folk revival full of suspicious acts either too beholden to tradition or too uncritical to make much of it.

Cheatahs might not be a very ambitious record, but it is kinda ballsy.

Finn sounds best when Dizzy Heights is at its dizziest, when he has to completely rethink how his voice fits a song. On the other hand, he sounds slightly less engaged on the more straightforward tunes, which perhaps don’t offer the same heady challenges.

Halfway between French Romantic and Nashville outlaw, Loveless’ songwriting can come across sometimes as overly bleak and therefore sensationalistic, yet Somewhere Else makes such boldness a virtue, as thought decorum blunts creative expression.

Burn Your Fire for No Witness conjures the past without ever imitating it, swirling its influences into something intimate, impressionistic and new.

While its standout tracks are strong enough to ensure Phantogram maintains its current altitude, there are a lot of places to turn to for this sort of thing these days, and this album ultimately underwhelms next to the pure-pop punch of Haim, the cutting lyricism of Lorde, or the radiant grandeur of Chvrches.

Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place. Instead it moves, and moves others with it.

There's an organic, humanistic ethos operating behind her music: we are all people, and we're all moved by the same primal passions and stimuli.

Acoustic has all the ponderousness of a forgotten episode of MTV Unplugged, and that setting only highlights Band of Horses’ worst tendencies.

There’s pretty of sunlight on Galore, but no heat or friction, as everything from the production to Pepperell’s enunciation is so glassy that all of these somersaulting hooks might as well be gibberish.

Entire swaths of music are cut from Persson’s cloth; she is a known quantity. For better or worse, this lets Persson get away with an album like Animal Heart, one that isn’t much of a statement.

Real Hair keeps its runtimes tight and its choruses front-and-center, pulling in some of Major Arcana's looser ends without sacrificing its fall-apart charms.

When you're operating within a strict template, you have to find some distinctive way to fill it out--a felicitous phrasing here, an unexpected chord change there. Without those elements, there's little on Sun Structures to remind you that you are, in fact, listening to a new band called Temples.

While ††† may be on the same scale as Deftones, they’re not a replacement, and it stands to reason that Moreno can ascend to the heights of their previous work. But on †††, it’s like he never had wings.

Whether you find dance music far too repetitive or you live for old Traxx 12"s, you will remember Dance Mania's tracks, as they are among the catchiest and most brazen of their kind, alternately hypnotic and disruptive.

Tranquilzers does very little to reinvigorate or recontextualize chillwave or shoegaze and does even less to signify innovation on its own terms.

It's the mood of Hotel Valentine that stands out the most.

Remaining true to your identity while also evolving and keeping an audience that’s always a moving target interested in you is a tough gig. On Emmaar, Tinariwen are up to the task.

Little Red is not the best album it could have been--a few of the bonus tracks should have made the album proper--but Katy displays a vision for her career that suggests an exciting future.

Chorus, Herndon’s new two-song EP, essentially amplifies the extremes of her musical personality and pushes the tension almost to the breaking point.

The forward movement of July can be entrancing and propulsive.

Mitral Transmission is a fascinating album, then, a would-be footnote that reveals Fox’s willingness to mine most anything for sound. Sometimes, as on the first half of Spiritual Emergency, that process can lead to messy results. But elsewhere, it’s the power pushing Guardian Alien and Fox past their past associations and into a wonderfully strange and unpredictable future.

There’s no chest-puffing here, no braggadocio; this is only the very sincere statement of a person doing his best to work through the worries of living and share any delight he’s stumbled upon along the way.