Death Dreams might be equally strong [as predecessor, Muster Station], but its inability to step things up can come off like a retreat in light of how much tuneful, wooly garage rock has come out since.

[With Memory] they've developed the approach of making high-energy tracks with subdued and subtle components-- beats that move with grace instead of brute force.

If not always up to their previous heights, Mohn highlights why these guys are still the masters, while so many of Kompakt's new-school driftologists are still students at best.

The Dr Dee soundtrack is a deeply felt but difficult to love entry into Albarn's entirely singular discography.

If guitar-based music is still your source of shameless pop, you'll probably enjoy In the Belly more than most records that actually aspire for art.

What makes this, if not the most fully realized, then the most rewarding entry in RVNG's already ambitious FRKWYS series is that it doesn't sound like noise dudes just trying to make the simulacra of a dub reggae album.

Whilst there's no getting past some of the duller and more unbearable material on this record ... if she'd made a record full of songs as unaffected as these four ["Lies," "Starring Role," "Power & Control," "Living Dead"], Electra Heart could be one of the year's most acclaimed pop albums.

A cautionary tale of what happens when a "hit record" forgets to actually include hits.

[The songs] are peculiarly absorbing, and they only grow more so with repeated listening.

Modern Jester is Dilloway's War and Peace. It covers practically all of his sonic obsessions, stretching them to lengths at which he can explore every detail and tangent. The result-- seven pieces encompassing four sides of vinyl-- feels like a major statement, even if it's made of wordless, sometimes harsh noise.

The record feels wholly substantial and satisfying in its own right, and even those with no prior knowledge of YT//ST's history and elaborate intentions can just enjoy it for what it is: volcanic prog-rock colored with equal parts post-punk urgency, stoner-metal heft, and psychedelic pop whimsy.

Newcombe is a master at turning the minimal into maximal, layering myriad swirling textures into a dizzying head-rush of a tune (see: "Seven Kinds of Wonderful"), but crafty production only takes him so far.

World, You Need a Change of Mind certainly isn't a bad album, and the technical execution is first-rate. Its failure is ultimately one of ambition. This is music to be enjoyed while doing something else, not something you fall in love with.

Exercises is chilly, spacious, and oddly out of time.

Part of what makes listening to Light Asylum so frustrating is a nagging want to see her talent mobilized to the fullest, to roll up your sleeves and try to make a Light Asylum in your own image.

What Schaff's everyloner routine lacks in subtlety, it makes up in a certain fraught, occasionally uncomfortable relatability.

A polished assortment of tidily global-sounding, mid-tempo pop tunes that seem to end before they ever kick off, strung together by a checklist of semi-impassioned capital-K Keywords: Youth, Machine, Riot, Fame, Freak, Pirate, Keepers.

There's a natural path forged between all the shifts, a sense that the abstraction feeds off the structure and vice versa. As such, Black Is Beautiful nears something that could readily be branded as Blunt and Copeland's aesthetic.

As a once-in-a-half-decade demonstration of Talbot's vital signs, The Ghost isn't necessarily compelling enough to make you want to hang around for a follow-up, but the vitriol of a line like, "If you let them burn books, you'll let them burn bodies," is a strong sign of life at least.

This is one of those albums that creates its own little sound world, and a lot of its appeal has to do with qualities like texture and atmosphere.

Pluto is Future's album and no one else's, and though it will sound instantly recognizable, his personality, voice, and skewed take on pop-rap make it instantly different. No Stargate beats necessary.

By presenting a more rounded portrait of Guthrie in which politics is only one subject among so many, The Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions shows just what Guthrie was fighting for and provides a persuasive rebuke to anyone who might whittle the man down to just one dimension.

It might not be perfect, but "chamber techno" probably shouldn't work as well as it does on the best moments here.

Horse Feathers are quick to set a mood and diligent in sustaining it, but it's pretty much the same mood they've struck on all their albums.

The production on The Block Brochure series roams a little wider and farther than the Revenue Retrievin series did, which helps when approaching such a seemingly undigestible block of music.

The production on The Block Brochure series roams a little wider and farther than the Revenue Retrievin series did, which helps when approaching such a seemingly undigestible block of music.

The production on The Block Brochure series roams a little wider and farther than the Revenue Retrievin series did, which helps when approaching such a seemingly undigestible block of music.

The innovation on R.I.P. is to put as much effort into making things clean as making them dirty, and the result is a sense of contrast: Fog gives way to clarity; fat, puffy synthesizer sounds play off pinprick-sharp ones. Like all good contrasts, it's simple and eureka-like.