Lyrics referencing both Greek astronomy and the Old Testament, as well as guitar textures indebted more to Glenn Branca than Black Flag, reveal an art-rock ace up the band's tattered sleeve.

Despite the Dap Kings versatility--they were more hushed and drowsier backing Charles Bradley on last year's Victim of Love--and Jones' indefatigability, there aren't many new ideas here. That's not the point, though. The point is that music from another time can still thrill us in this one because of its practically tyrannical insistence on bliss.

Vanderslice's arrangements glide between loping acoustic strums, delicate picking, and stately piano chords, though for such a quiet affair, Kid Face has a surprisingly sturdy bottom end.

Both chilly and warm, soulful and soft, Post Tropical is an intricate ice sculpture of an album, and a fantasy come true for anyone who's ever misted up over Maxwell's version of "This Woman's Work."

It's well within the Boss' right to try and freshen up old material, especially 18 albums in, but this one lacks a through-line beyond the distracting (and occasionally straight-up embarrassing) Morello.

Instead of reaching that precipice and seeming to over-stretch for some sort of tipping point into the mainstream, he's forged his own world, on his own terms, and invited like-minded artists to flourish there as well.

Haze's attempt to appear undefinable and resist categorization (as Dirty Gold's conversational interludes attest) is a laudable pursuit, but it leaves the record unfocused.

The contentment Malkmus expresses here is so cozy you might feel a little corny calling it wisdom. But you wouldn't embarrass yourself too much if you called it perspective.

As a work of scholarly revisionism, Purple Snow is peerless. How and why the Twin Cities helped transform Prince Nelson into the Artist remains a mystery. But this is a charming addition to the Paisley Park family.

What makes Re-Engineering worthwhile is that the odd blooms Warwick coaxes from that soil are so pleasing to behold on their own terms. It's critical theory as easy listening that you can actually cut a rug to, if you're so inclined.

The result is artistic click bait, and its genius and connective power is that it doesn’t treat music fans as factions. This one is for everyone, all at once.

If anything, 7 Days acts as the inverse of The Chronic, wherein a famous hip-hop producer introduced the world to an up-and-coming MC weaned on P-Funk and George Duke; now, it's a pop-cultural hip-hop icon giving a bit of shine to an adept indie producer who can elicit all strains of funk in this 21st-century Zone of Zero Funkativity. It's not the dank, but breathe deep anyway.

Maybe the entire album is a meme itself, a grand existential joke critiquing the all-conquering rise of Internet culture by parodying its overwhelming randomness. Whatever it is, though, it's a bad rap record.

Blunt and crass, 2013’s Black Panties is all about selling nostalgia for a bygone age of hard-body sexist black machismo that Barack Obama is, in his own quiet way, helping to deflate.

Britney Jean may chart respectably because it leads the most musically uneventful December in years, but it will soon fade like "Perfume," because there's zilch in the way of humanity here.

The best mood music transfixes; merely excellent, Jetlag is sometimes too easily relegated to the background.

As long as Midnight Memories offers chorus after chorus of Gary Glitter-style fodderstompf, it sounds like the best boy-band album since No Strings Attached.

What's interesting about Saint Heron is that it trips giddily over the line between relatively conventional approaches (Aiko, Solange, Shawn) and more heavily processed, speculative stuff (Sampha, Iman Omari, BC Kingdom), but takes no pains to make an overarching statement.

These parts slide and slip through and around one another, creating a shifting matrix that consumes your attention for as long as the band wants to play.

It isn't just a celebration of the warm-up DJ; it's a self-portrait of an artist who wouldn't be who he is today without once having had all those empty rooms to fill.

Packed with these canny connections between music and lyrics, Cupid highlights Hynes' tremendous recent advancement as an arranger.

While there are mistakes and bum notes — and the group's enthusiasm about recording for the BBC had pretty clearly waned by the later sessions--the gorgeous harmonies from those legendary young larynxes sound as glorious as ever.

She remains singularly compelling and lovable as a celebrity, even if her records don't always match up to her outsized persona. Even at their worst, they only prove that the art is sometimes unworthy of the artist.

Ferreira is finally fully reveling in the swirling cacophony that is her sound and her life.

"Indie rock" has long since ceased to be either "indie" or "rock," of course, but Surfing Strange signifies on both counts, just when we desperately needed a refresher on the fundamentals.

The record is so one-note it makes its predecessor sound like an entire season at the London Philharmonic.

Like its creator, Matangi is flawed, frustrating, and occasionally confusing, but it's also intermittently brilliant and completely unique.

This album will never top MM1 or even 1999's Slim Shady LP for the visceral thrill of watching a celebrity twist and distort his own identity like a comic strip transferred onto Silly Putty. But we get rhymes. So many rhymes. More rhymes than some rappers manage in a whole career.

Reflektor is long and weird and indulgent and deeply committed. It has three to five genuinely great songs; it also wanders off into the filler hinterlands for 20 minutes or so (out of 70).

Scales are Middle Eastern, obviously; tempos range from up to mid-plus; the programmed drums generate rhythms that few American tub-thumpers could map, much less replicate. There's far more variety in what Sa'id plays than in what Souleyman sings--flute sounds, an orchestra once. But Souleyman's intensity nails it.

This is a pivot, this record, and a shrewd one, but "shrewd" and "boring" are not mutually exclusive.

Each song boasts a memorable harmonic shift or guitar filigree or hook, but successive listens reveal an overstuffed package whose melodic involutions aren't complex and/or simple enough to sustain more than an hour's worth of music.

Quickly working 11 tracks into 40 minutes, the album is visceral and unrefined, two qualities not often associated with Hebden.

Despite the full dismissal of punk roots here--the blended-in drumming, the lack of rollercoaster twists and turns in the tempos and time signatures--Uncanney Valley's only real stumbles are lyrical.

There's an exhilarating bleakness at the center of Virgins--the hollow at the heart of all things, nibbling inexorably away.

Get me out of here, take me back: That's breaking up in a nutshell, and Cults till this soil multiple ways.

It's far from an implosion, far from spectacular.

While 2010 debut Treats was an exotic, overdubbed roar (Big Black-meets-the-Waitresses for people who give a shit about those references), and 2012's Reign of Terror winked through a heavy heart at Mutt Lange's scorched-earth sound field, Bitter Rivals is sly and sleek.

Here is another deeply considered collection of top-shelf beats and uncompromising-though-still-pop-enough raps that justifies the fairly awful personalities driving it, which, depending on your tolerance for wounded narcissism and a complete lack of insight, is either fascinating or frustrating.

Bangerz is a precise album that flits between bombastic and turgid; it is not very fun.

With his first album for Warp, OPN proves his mettle amid labelmates like Aphex Twin and Flying Lotus.

It isn't traditionally enjoyable, and it isn't supposed to be.... It's the most daring record he could've made.

There's a hypnotic purity to Innocents.

If nothing else, the music is aggressively okay (there's coiled-spring potential in the crackling, anxious "White Teeth Teens"). But its overall unspecialness undercuts Pure Heroine's devotion to playing both sides of Lorde's "only 16" coin.

As it stands, with its insistence on aggressive polyrhythm and bumping bass, 2 of 2 is most certainly a funky record, but it's hardly a deeply soulful one. That's not a distinction without a difference.

The music is propulsive and upbeat, but executed with the almost blasé confidence of people who sound like they have nothing to prove.

Mazzy Star steadfastly stick to their dusty, psych-folk, dream-pop tableaux on Seasons of Your Day. Yet it feels nothing like a '90s hangover; in fact, the touches of organ and pedal steel that open the album hint at Beach House's hazy indie-pop.

CHVRCHES' debut is at its best on its revenge tunes.

The group embraces its status as a classic-rock band, and make no mistake, this is a classic-rock album--one that evokes the sort of denim-clad '70s-rock vibe that Guns N' Roses and Foo Fighters tapped into.

Even when they're shouting, they do so in a particularly musical and distinctive way, and although their smash is one of five This Is… songs the duo had no hand in writing, they nevertheless suggest a consistent sense of authorship through the intensity of their shared ecstasies and frustrations.

A steely affair that finds Drake and longtime producer Noah "40" Shebib pulling their sound and worldview further inward to increasingly murky results.

An amazing all-originals simulation, mostly of teeny-bop smashes by sundry Kasenetz-Katz-produced studio concoctions (plus the Archies) circa 1967-1970.

Dream River flows from one track to the next, with a similarity of tempo that makes it play like eight movements of one 40-minute song. But a few moments stand out.

While EDM grapples with growing pains, beset by adult problems like drugs and money, Avicii has made an album with the kind of pure pop heart that's as likely to appeal to eight-year-olds as it is to amped-up ravers.

Musical achievements that once came easily (if not accidentally) to Sebadoh must now be persistently willed; processes that once pointed toward self-discovery now only offer a familiar balm.

You’ve got to give it to perennial over-achievers: sometimes they even know how to make extra-credit assignments sound like A+ work.

The quality of the set rises and falls with the quality of the band, from the formative fusion of soul, rock, and pop on their first three albums to the sudden, exhilarating sound of it all snapping into focus with 1969's Stand! and the gradual turn into 1971's claustrophobic, paranoid There's a Riot Goin' On and the nimble funk of 1973's underrated Fresh. From there, however, it all fell off just as quickly as it had risen, as Sly's genius dissipated in a downward spiral of drugs and delusion.

A confused, confusing album, MGMT treats contemporaneity as if it were an insulin shot.

It's practically the entire history of the band crammed into a mock boombox. Designed by bassist Paul Simonon, the set incorporates retrospective essays, reprinted fanzines, a poster, dog tags, stickers, badges, and so forth; die-hard fans have probably sold off their existing Clash collections just to afford it.

2 Chainz forges deeper emotional connections, but that surface is as entrancing as ever. B.O.A.T.S II ups the production values like a true sequel should.

At its best, Nobody reveals Beal as an old soul deploying the genre of old soul, not so much as an exercise in nostalgia as a surge protector to best contain his electroshock persona.

The album itself feels improvisational, but not loose; recorded live, it features very few edits or overdubs.

The arrangements simply aren't as sharp as before, even as the ensemble uses ingenious tricks, like shifting rhythm mid-number on "Q.U.E.E.N." and girding each song with string melodies that circle back to those suite overtures.

Kiss Land plays like a more considered, better-mastered continuation of Echoes of Silence, not anything dramatically different.

Turner's keen lyrical skills have outpaced the band's musical development, and the ultimate role of guitars (which aren't crucial here) has yet to be determined. But if you want expertly creeping unease, dive in.

Run Fast is certainly more benevolent and interesting than the myopic records most people make post-40 about their changing place in the world.

Her voice is a bear hug in the literal sense; succumbing to it is like being carjacked by Patsy Cline.

This is the most important artistic statement from NIN leader Trent Reznor since the late '90s.

All those disparate styles and references should logically clash, yet here they flow seamlessly. By Franz standards, it's relaxed. Believe it or not, it's also compact and concise.

6 Feet, like Me Moan before it, succeeds sometimes in spite of itself.

While Sean obviously lacks his mentor's star power or ambition, he shows more heart than he typically gets credit for.

This sort of alternate-universe intimacy with songs we've already come to love makes Versions a wild success, proving that something wemusic once coveted for its desolate nature can be just as warm and familiar when flipped into something else entirely.

The music might be prime kicking-back fare, but that doesn't mean Braids can't sneak some gentle urgency into the mix as well.

Pretty great for mindless pop-punk, in other words.

He's struggling to reconcile the unease of his past with the confusion of his present, but Doris proves that Earl's future is secure.

Overall, though, the absence of pretense does more good than harm here. By emphasizing his singing rather than the usual wailing walls of distortion, Segall expertly treads the fine line separating rockist classicism from lo-fi innovation.

There's nothing on Trap Lord to suggest Ferg will follow A$AP Rocky onto the pop charts, but it's a rewardingly dark and grounded listen.

Like Gigi herself, it is a work of perpetual self-invention, an extended state of becoming. Have pity on the inquisitory birds, because it's impossible to look away.

The Luca Brasi Story was more ambitious, but Stranger Than Fiction does moves Gates closer to a larger audience.

Most of the music is fiercely restrained, characterized by short songs, skeletal atmospheres, and performances that have a mechanistic, flatlined intensity. Bad? No, but stiff, and sapped of the dynamism the twosome seemed to come by so naturally in the past.

Superchunk clearly trust their music to hold up under all the heaviness of life's big questions, and trust us to hold up, too.

The album has a studied looseness that's never contrived, and it shows a poise and clarity of vision which her earlier efforts barely suggested

This is the album that Justin Timberlake is too famous to make in 2013, its musical scope and track lengths modest, its sexual appetite and commercial ambition immodest, its star willing to offer up whatever cheesy line, vocal acrobatic, pop hook or funk groove or electro flourish that it takes to keep you listening.

Each track bleeds into the next with seamless precision, borrowing each other's fantastical effects from both mid-century analog plug-ins and modern digital tricks.

This polite Americana mistakes solemnity for seriousness.

At its best, Home is a sumptuous, thrilling experience on a purely sonic level. There are absolutely zero boring moments here, and the details are often transcendent.

Humor and mirth best define this voracious multicultural outfit, no matter how many tunes are set in minor keys.

Body Music, the full-length debut from British duo AlunaGeorge, could have made an excellent EP.

Tennant and Lowe's rueful melodies and vocals dilute the euphoria. Classic Pet Shop Boys, in other words.

As clever as Fuck Buttons are at cobbling together unlikely juxtapositions, they're master builders when it comes to tension and release.

On record, though--and particularly this one, which presents churchy performances in mixes both realistic and surreal--these same Up With People tropes don't work as well, particularly with prolonged exposure, as inferior follow-ups to promising debuts by the Polyphonic Spree and I'm From Barcelona have proven.

Walk Through Exits Only might not be a comeback in the way we're used to hearing one, but damn if it doesn't feel like comeuppance.

This one is way, way, way better [than her last album], not least thanks to a quaint little ditty called "Body Party."

It's a lovely place that Soft Will fashions here, but it sounds hesitant about pulling you in, perhaps because its creators are secretly concerned that you'll realize you aren't really going anywhere.

The DJ's fleet-fingered precision and explosive, intimidating drum-machine attacks are a distinct form of performance art, and one that's hard to fully appreciate through headphones alone; Remixes is simply no substitute for his live act. But these tracks are still a crucial part of his identity.

The result has to feel like a studio adventure! Whereas Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories was lavishly rich, Smith’s treatment of his session players manages to flatten all human serendipity and rhythmic nuance.

Overall the young rapper's glorious flare of an introduction has not been brightening. His latest, Summer Knights continues this trend.

The melodies and rhythmic accents here hang together as decent hooks, if not poppy ones.