This LP is as sterilized and recycled as the pop gunk that the band profess to loathe.

Discarding the albums actually awesome opener, “No Room in Frame”,--which briefly had me hoping for some tangible musical progress from the band--Kintsugi is more or less 45 minutes of boy-next-door, paint-by-number indie pop

The title may be a little hyperbolic, but what it lacks in realism it makes up for in groovy new-wave guitar licks, other-worldly instrumentation and production par excellence.

By Death Grips’ standards, the first disc is significantly less dynamic than the second.... Jenny Death represents another step forward for Death Grips, a group that seems to have walked over the horizon and out of sight albums ago.

Haunting anecdotes make Carrie & Lowell consistently compelling and elevate the storytelling from murky religious contemplation to relatable human struggle.

All in all, Parton and his collaborators cumulate a muscular and even touching evocation of simply being rattled by the rush--happily.

Dark Sky Paradise lacks cohesion as an album, but on a track-by-track basis, it positions Big Sean as a wonderfully versatile rapper whose personality and style hold together even as he adapts to a range of contexts.

Self-aware in all of the right ways and delightfully crass in all of the wrong ones, Mr. Wonderful is ultimately a bit of a lark, but it is also far more enjoyable, far more self-aware, and far wittier than it needed to be.

Frustratingly, a few of the songs on Eclipse really do hit that arena-pop bullseye, but stacked alongside so many other songs mining the same territory, they become irritating by association.

This is Diamandis’ break-up album in more ways than the romantic sense. She also severs ties with popular expectation, and the end result is regressive rather than revolutionary.

Sometimes I Sit and Think is in conversation with the likes of Marvin the Album and “Supernova,” Brighten the Corners and “Malibu,” Mellow Gold and “About a Girl.” The dream of the 90s is alive in Courtney Barnett. And with Sometimes I Sit and Think, it’s just been fully realized.

Short Movie is an introspective journey crafted into a communal experience. It’s the product of a genuine artist losing faith in herself, hitting the reset button, and returning with an intensely personal work that manages to say something about us all.

To Pimp A Butterfly is a veritable feast for thought--and there are simply too many loaded couplets and unrelenting sonic fakeouts to be unpacked within the confines of a single review.

Jesso doesn’t have a perfect voice, but his flaws are less derailments and more idiosyncrasies. These pockmarks, along with strong and engaging composition, are what give personality to a record that could been another bland adult contemporary release destined for the sale bin.

Strangers isn’t bottled lightning like The Moon & Antarctica or The Lonesome Crowded West, nor does it contain a magnitude 9 single like Good News or Ship, but its unwieldy stature and combative stance compliments Modest Mouse’s storied discography.

A hodgepodge of bland, rehashed, vanilla indie-rock, scarred by woefully inept lyrics, and completely lacking any of the infectious melodies and choruses that bolstered their debut.

If you never liked APTBS, odds are you’re not about to start here.

It’s an album that gives as much as it gains, both in trap-flow intensity and emotional catharsis.

Blade Of The Ronin is a well-crafted, entertaining, and moderately inspired follow-up that doesn’t do justice to the fourteen-year wait, but it reimagines Can Ox as competent storytellers rather than progressive geniuses.

A harmless, infectious rock record that channels the sounds and concerns of a more innocent, less technologically complicated time.

The album is good, which is a component never worth underscoring. But it could be much more than that.

Despite its numerous shortcomings though, it’s a difficult album to completely dislike--largely because of its wistful, nostalgia-inducing melodies. But it’s impossible not to expect better from the former Oasis mastermind.

At its best, Rebel Heart has an ease, and a long absent softness, qualities sorely missed since her last masterwork Music. For every godawful moment, which come and go with a sad frequency on Rebel Heart, there are glimmers of virtuosity buried within the overworked mess.

Gliss Riffer offers just enough hooky material to entice you and make you dance, but you still need to work hard to gain even an inkling of understanding into Deacon’s vision.

The issue is in direction, and the real issue is that there doesn’t seem to be any.

Luckily, even without all of the context and lofty exposition, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late is an altogether great and always thrilling listen.

This might be their best album, in the sense that it feels more complete and narrative than anything preceding it.

Trainor recycles the themes from every forgettable Billboard alumnus from the past decade, with a bit more color here and there, but not enough to distinguish herself from the pack.

The density of Tetsuo & Youth just could have benefitted from even the slightest dose of levity to throw its rhetoric and messages into sharper relief.

It is certainly a solid and promising debut from a richly talented MC with the potential to help others with his music in the same manner his forebears inspired him.

Hats off to this fantastic singer-songwriter for not only emerging from the fog so quickly, but also for crafting a dynamic album that is bigger than its size and very deserving of the praise it will undoubtedly receive.

It’s a little too steeped in irony, not without tenderness, flippant but consternated, self-satisfied yet hungry for more, eager to expose the world’s duplicities alongside its own and then do nothing about it.

The about-faces make for an engaging, challenging listen, but by the end it all seems a bit vague.

Shadows is no lark: it’s a gentle and undulating return to Dylan’s salad days.

For the most part, Space holds it together, but there are a few moments that feel a little... moronic.

With On Your Own Love Again, Jessica Pratt has crafted a record that is as accessible as it is complex, two traits that she proves are not mutually exclusive.

Uptown Special exhibits a long-playing cohesion missing from his prior output. The sense of free-wheeling fun, however, is largely absent with the exception of the record’s funky A-side trifecta.

Vulnicura is a harsh and demanding album, one to sink into with a good set of headphones. But it’s also Björk’s most--if not first-- personal record.

Their approach works because the songs are so excellently written than they’d be praiseworthy coming from a less capable, more pedestrian group

What a breathless--and breathtaking--comeback it is.

Beneath its well-produced cacophony, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance is an emotional and intelligently bruised work.

They’re not always entirely compelling, but it’s difficult to question Meloy & co’s sincerity in these Kumbaya moments, and that is the band’s true triumph here.

It’s frequently arrestingly beautiful (“Selfish Gene”) or driven nearly wild with joy (raucous party-starter “Mr Noah”), but always with a visceral, off-kilter kick where Panda Bear’s last pair of full-lengths opted for heavenly effervescence or communal transcendence.

This is the Second Coming of D’Angelo, not a close second, but a continuation of that lineage. We’ve waited fifteen years for his finest album to date.

Sucker’s greatest musical weapon is Aitchison’s voice--a posh, melodramatic caterwaul that will encourage either adoration or virulent hatred for all of its full-throated, Union Jack swagger.

Almost thirty producers were affiliated with the album, yet the music is shockingly simple.

What’s unfortunate is that songs the group co-wrote are the weakest ones here. The exception is the aforementioned lead single, a Journey-inspired ballad that’s catchy regardless of how much my instincts demand instant dismissal. The other slower, anthemic numbers on the album are not nearly as inspired.

There are no wasted notes, no wasted time, and nothing but the impulse to listen again.

Not dance music in any traditional sense of the world, Faith In Strangers has injected itself into a crowded conversation on originality alone.

Everything musical seems startlingly familiar, and not in the paying-homage-to-the-denizens-of-rock-past way the album’s conceit might have you imagine.

Her complete dominance over the sonic space of her debut reinforces Broke With Expensive Taste as a product singularly of her vision.

Like John Hughes crossed with David Lynch crossed with John Waters. Pom Pom recalls similar vibes in bursts, and at its best conjures even more striking colors and passages.

Seeds isn’t TV on the Radio’s strongest album, but it is a radiant reboot, a move forward and a reason to move.

The Inevitable End closes Röyksopp’s career with neither a bang nor a whimper.

Punk is alive, but it just needs a second to squeeze drops of Visine into its eyes before it can bust out ferocious riffs and sing about nothing, or stick it to the status quo but maintain Austin, Texas levels of weirdness.

Despite consisting of well-crafted, thoughtful songs, the emotional gutpunch that is to be expected from a Grouper album never quite arrives over multiple listens.

Bundick’s inspirations run rampant across the back half of Michael.

RTJ2 isn’t quite the game-changer The Money Store was, but it makes no attempt to hide its desire to knock its progenitors out cold and scamper off with the crown.

1989 isn’t a “crossover” success. It’s the album every subsequent blockbuster must now reckon with.

You’re Dead! is a near-flawless examination of death as narrated by a virtuosic musician who has been exposed to a little too much of it.

A misstep, to be sure, but even more troubling is that Foxygen have distended from tight, trim retro-pop to unkempt, unfocused conceptual goo in less than two years.

Taiga is better-produced and differently arranged than 2010’s “Poor Animal,” but it’s no more or less “pop.”

Plowing Into the Field of Love is a great record which only has one song on it that really sounds like the Gun Club, or like anything you would want to play over the trailer of The Hateful Eight.

In finding their way back to what works, it too often sounds rehashed to make it a true return to form the band has been yearning to find.

It’s one of Snaith’s least cohesive and affecting full-lengths, even as it provides us with some of his strongest individual tracks to date.

Though at times a little errant and borderline-satirical, A New Testament succeeds because it showcases backward-facing storytelling and incontrovertibly catchy vintage American music.

It takes him--and the listener--way out of the comfort zone, a shift that suits his tendencies wonderfully.

Given a dearth of hooks, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes demands a decent set of headphones to appreciate its foremost asset, technical construction.... Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes disappoints most when it approximates ordinary song structures.

Favorite records tend to draw us back in again and again because they offer a specific, familiar feeling, yet it remains difficult to rate, categorize or even define an album as restlessly mutable as ­Mr Twin Sister.

Alt-J remain impossible to put a pin in, which makes This Is All Yours almost as frustrating as it is absorbing.

Richard D. James has successfully crafted one of the most stunning records of his career, and he did so by exercising a deft amount of self-control.

An unexpectedly weird, inventive and invigorating album that sounds absolutely nothing like The Strokes, and for that reason alone you should be really excited, and maybe even a little hopeful, to give this record a spin.

Here, Sampha sounds comfortable and confident, showcasing his vocal prowess rather than merely living with it.

When every song is short and recorded in the same minimalistic style, it often feels like just when you’re starting to get into a song, you’re immediately whisked away to another idea, to another moment that should have been spent finishing that first thought that now will never be finished.

This is no disaster, nor is it a masterpiece. Songs of Innocence is a competent U2 album, always a good thing.

This album succeeds in ways You’re A Woman never could have, and for that, it requires commendation.

Ultimately El Pintor feels a like a blast of icy fresh air after a sticky, sweltering summer’s day.

Banks’ debut, sometimes promising and even wonderful, could have been revelatory.

The best offerings here are “Blind Faze” and “2 Shy”, Fleetwood-fashioned tracks that sway playfully, celebratory in their own modest way. The rest doesn’t hit hard enough, and doesn’t even really seem like it wants to.

While Merchandise hasn’t exactly figured out how to inflate their songwriting to match the scale of the giants who’ve preceded them, After the End still glows too vividly to be obscured by anyone else’s shadow.

There’s an unforeseen clarity in his compositions and vocals.

Atmospherically, Barragán falls to a part of the spectrum Blonde Redhead have never found themselves on before, but half of the songs here feel like placeholders for ideas that haven’t been fully excavated.

Short of their obvious opposition, there is little here in the way of meaningful tension between the Angels & Devils.

It’s not so much a new sound as it is a more robust, balanced sound--a beautiful chair perfectly placed in an already beautiful room.

On Green Language, we witness risks. We listen anxiously as Rustie bets a Brinks truck on his emotional wherewithal, and that bet pays out exponentially.

The band may love the sounds of Built to Spill and Superchunk a little too much, but they’re also far too adventurous to settle for apery, least of all on LOSE. It’s their best work yet.

Despite its shortcomings, My Everything succeeds in its primary objective. This is a pop record, clear and simple.

It’s all bolder, fuller, and, well, better.

It starts off brilliantly, but by the end of twelve tracks, it tapers off into an incessant and increasingly underwhelming performance.

In The Wild won’t ruffle feathers, but it’s rarely less than enjoyable.

Twigs’ superb vocal melodies anchor LP1’s flights of experimentation. Were they to be stripped from the album’s bizarre flourishes and dropped into a commercial R&B context, they would stun nonetheless.

While Time isn’t a massive overhaul, Bear in Heaven tweaked where they needed to, and picked up a pretty neat trick along the way. The more you listen to these songs, the more they linger.

They Want My Soul is the sort of mid-career album promising young bands should aspire to, and long-established acts will come to resent.

Shabazz Palaces are often as mystifying as they are mind-bending, but they’re in a class all their own.

hese Days… isn’t the kind of sharp-to-the-touch effort that one associates with excellent rappers who eschew the mainstream.... It’s the start of a conversation; and one can only hope that he plans on finishing it.

Is Trouble In Paradise a groundbreaking work of unparalleled foresight and talent? No. But is it a spectacular assessment of La Roux’s painfully progressive growth over the past half-decade? Maybe.

The album’s 12 bloated, mostly mid-tempo tracks drone on and on, and even when they aren’t technically long they sometimes feel like they might never end because most of them fail to find a hook.

Though her new material is of mixed quality, Sia’s instrument remains uniformly magnificent. She executes vocal cartwheels throughout these twelve songs, delivering great pain with even greater triumph.