Thoughtful, quiet moments like that ["What Can We Do," "Me & You & Jackie Mittoo," and "Your Theme"] work but, this being Superchunk, the uptempo tracks still hit hardest.

The dynamic between the wobbly production and the sturdy songwriting defines Moon Tides, though I wouldn’t say it causes any tension. Conflict is clearly something avoided within the tenets of Pure Bathing Culture. But it does result in a listening experience that causes more ambivalence than it probably should.

This is a charity album, released to aid the Isle of Wight Youth Trust, and as such it's a commendable venture. Still, its placing in the New Order discography is hardly likely to be significant, especially as the Live at the London Troxy album from 2011 already documented this incarnation of the group in a live setting.

When you start to pay attention to its manifold subtleties, you’ll likely only lean in closer, noticing even more details within an album that suggests they never end.

Unlike the other reunited groups of their generation, Medicine doesn’t sound nostalgic at all, and in fact they sound more contemporary than the majority of young guitar bands playing right now.

Move Way, dBridge's new EP and his first for the evergreen R&S label, puts a strong focus on his efforts to maintain the structural integrity and rhythmic impact of drum and bass while pushing its forms outward from the template-driven repetition he's spent his post-Bad Company career trying to counterbalance.

The songs don’t really go anywhere, but they don’t need to--it’s the psychic tone that matters, not any sort of hooks, and the blissful state they produce comes from simply enjoying them in the moment.

If you're looking for evidence of any major stylistic shift in Martin's approach on Filthy, it's better to settle for a solid reiteration of a lot of the stuff he was doing on his last album.

It's another excellent chapter in CFCF's story, a strong case for how much unexpected magic can be found in the ordinary and, more importantly, in CFCF's ever-mutating discography.

Rudimental are casting a wider musical net than their peers, which has the unintended effect of magnifying their flaws by comparison, making for a decent but ultimately second-tier effort in a crowded year for big-ticket dance-pop.

The range of Paracosm helps Greene present himself as more of a singer/songwriter than a producer, though the former part of that dynamic still lags.

Free Reign II is precisely the sort of risky, rejuvenating album Clinic needed at this point in their career, one that audaciously upends the perception that this band just releases the same album over and over.

It's not the music that sinks Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, it's those lyrics: well-intentioned, certainly, but as deep as the bowl on a one-hitter.

By default, Nextwave is less scattered and more consistent: It’s only five songs. But “Ratchet” indicates that Bloc Party could’ve gone way further off the grid if they gave themselves enough time.

Whichever end of her spectrum Lee swings toward--the harshly noisy or the hypnotically meditative--her sound always commands attention, making Ghil the biggest surprise in a career already full of them.

Practically nothing on the album feels strained, and even less seems compromised.

Given all the blood, jism, and other bodily secretions the dot Bug’s lyric sheet here, Pop. 1280 are still very much the sort of band that demand a post-listen shower--this time, though, you just won't need as much soap.

Hobo Rocket draws out the indulgence, more than happy to engage in dumb fun without bringing much to the party.

Mostly it's like coming across a public-access channel late at night, where it never feels like the people on screen are fully in control. It works because Copeland isn't too rigidly stuck to his aesthetic, instead setting up his stall and letting the chaos pour in.

Now that the veil has been lifted, there’s not much on Tides End worth the price of progress.

It's still questionable how this pretty, solemn music will work in the quirky context of Green's film, but it makes for a nice little album on its own.

Follow-up Swisher doesn’t abandon the beauty of the duo’s earlier work (“Andrew” and “Rei” could easily be lifted from last year’s album) but it uses it more judiciously. This shift makes Swisher less immediately captivating but somehow more involving than its predecessor, establishing the ultimate core of the duo’s aesthetic somewhere deeper and altogether more mysterious.

Aspiring guitarists might need the alternate tuning suggestions, but listeners won’t really need the anecdotes. Rather, Jones puts it all right there in the pieces, speaking volume about the challenges and triumphs of growing up and older without singing a word of the blues.

In the end, Lenses comes off like a proggy, synth pop album that wants to get treated like sound sculpture, but Soft Metals don't fully commit to either endeavor in spite of the record's handful of successes.

II is just about perfectly synchronized with the zeitgeist, and if it’s not a flawlessly executed record, it still seems capable of making the most out of its moment.

It's an uneven but captivating album that sounds like an artist still looking for his stride and trying to balance between two extremes.

While Chance is fond of joking, this album is no joke. As In Search plays out, it becomes increasingly clear that the record’s scatterbrained eclecticism and frantic energy is less a product of eccentricity-for-eccentricity’s sake than a manifestation of the very real anxieties fuelling this endeavor.

There's a weight here that could drag you down if you let it, but mostly this is a band searching for hope amid shattered dreams.