The beats are good. The hooks are memorable, if often corny.... [But] Gone is the sense of humor, fearlessness, and willingness to subvert clichés that he flexed on his generally impressive mixtapes.

Dynamics or structure are not a major concern; these songs sound happy to just get the ignition working.

If you are over 25 and have been in a romantic relationship, Damage will not confront you with the unfamiliar, or make you suddenly realize you've never understood yourself like you do now. Still, some of it will comfort you when you've been depressed or confused by your life.

It's initially unnerving to witness indie's most celebrated airy faeries butch it up, but the result ultimately satisfies their what-the-hell-do-we-do-next dilemma better than any record since Ágætis byrjun.

Cole should be fired up to make his own Illmatic, his own Reasonable Doubt, or his own College Dropout. But here he seems stuck somewhere between starstruck and envious, fawning over his idols instead of trying to take their crowns.

Talk a Good Game is her realness in full flower, an album that balances world-weariness about relationships with infectious dollops of sexual agency, tackling the vagaries of love almost exclusively and offering anthems for experiences that every woman has had (or will have) at some point.

Aside from its sheer heft, though, it's hard to imagine it converting anyone who doesn't already care.

Just about every song here has a couplet Elvis Costello would be proud to call his own, and the money shot "Elephant" has several.

Yeezus ranks as more than a glorified placeholder in West's catalogue, but one can't help feeling that parenthood will compel his muse to even more Olympian levels of bombast and grandiosity.

One possible surprise is how little of Super Collider actually thrashes.

Desire Lines sits with remarkable ease next to Camera Obscura albums released a decade ago.

It is a bit Sabbath-by-numbers, but given the weight of history (it's their first studio album together in 35 years), you can see why they would kind of back into the thing.

We are offered 20 more, a handful of these tracks bordering on genius, a few offering genuine yuks, and the rest sounding so half-baked they could be an ice-cream flavor.

Between Pitts' unrelieved misery and the tepid music, Pythons makes a bitter, unsatisfying brew. Imbibe at your own risk.

If you want a "black metal album" that serves dually as make-out music and a loneliness weapon, this is as emo and earnest as it gets.

With Tomorrow's Harvest, the Sandisons' return feels natural. Rather than resort to hiring disco session musicians or citing Judith Butler to add a new kink to their sound, they've done something even rarer in the modern era: They’ve aged with grace.

His new mixtape's best moments gain their power from such good-idea/bad-idea indulgences and batty risk-taking.

The album's first half is suffused with a longing that flits between hopeful and resigned, unsure which is the worse fate. At other times, she sounds a little exasperated--mournful even--but throughout, her elegant arrangements remain taut and full of energy.

Nothing sounds new, and yet it has no parallel in the old Alice catalog, because they were just so much weirder than we remember.

Poised, cool, and impermeable, Trouble Will Find Me apotheosizes urban romance and its discontents, where conversations are monologues, parties are confessionals, and education and analysis are interchangeable.

Friedberger has always been a storyteller, but these tracks are rife with the kinds of details that breathe life into fiction, like white socks on a girl roller-skating down Market Street ("When I Knew"), and characters with names like Reggie and Peter ("I'll Never Be Happy Again").

It should be noted that this all sounds fantastic.

Despite gestating for years, IV Play is an album that feels unattended to.

Fortunately, Settle doesn't settle; each new track finds them testing their own formulas.

While their newfound alt-rock dalliances tend to blur together in the middle for some urgent-sounding tracks marked by temper-tantrum vocals ("What goes around, comes back around," promises "We're Taking This"), they finish strong, never quite denying their metal instincts

It's a warm, lightly psychedelic sound reminiscent of British strum god Bert Jansch and the quieter moments on Led Zeppelin III, less a soundtrack for Sunday brunch and more a place to get lost in, though our host herself isn't interested in hiding.

Nightmare Ending may not be Cooper's most cohesive record, but it's a perfect representation of the indie-rock generation's most diverse ambient musician.

On Excuse My French, he's outshone and undervalued.

It's an album of scorching, scene-defining hits.

Though Kool Herc is just eight songs and 27 minutes long, it's plenty challenging and weighty.

Lip Lock may not be the best rap album of 2013, but it's interesting, and it's honest. After 11 years, that's a respectable way to ride out.

They're not robots, they're "robots." They "rock" and want you to "dance." In that sense, this is absolutely in keeping with the band's legacy. It is theater: absolutely sincere and totally fake.

Thanks to its introspective depth, it's equally well suited to solitary listening, the rare mix that connects dance music's public sphere--joyous, communal, kinetic, chaotic--with a more private kind of rapture.

Functioning adults that they are, Dillinger Escape Plan have realized that tightly wound precision left to its own devices is about as much fun as orgasm denial. Welcoming the pleasures of melody's slow release, they've retained their desire to rage and contort.

Like art, Vampires is dense; like pop, it seems to float in effortlessly from some place you're sure you've been, but by some trick of déjà vu eludes your conscious brain.

Over ten songs detailing a young man's despair and self-doubt, he delivers a performance that's both deeply confident and convincingly vulnerable, replete with stark, piano-based meditations and fuzz-pedal-abetted fury.

Though it's not exactly Leave Home to its predecessor's Ramones, Annie Up is still a pretty tasty serving of grits and sass.

Ready to Die is a weirdly exhilarating gem, thanks to Iggy's fiery eloquence and the Stooges' still-raw power. Apparently rock'n'roll can be an old man's game after all.

More Than Just a Dream steps backwards--where its predecessor was shockingly felt, this settles for something more distant, theatrical, grandiose.

An impishly brilliant 12-song set of scruffy garage rock with moments of dreamy shimmer, Monomania leaves no confusion about what sort of band Deerhunter are: one that won't stoop to conquer.

The album is stunningly crafted; their influences (Joy Division's mystic menace, Siouxsie Sioux's gothic howls) are proudly worn on blackened sleeves, but rather than dance around such matters, they dance with them.

The resulting album blurs the lines between simple and sophisticated more effectively than Phoenix ever have before.

Like most free jazz, it's music of the moment, a work of granular epiphanies that accrete, finally, into a magnificent whole.

Snoop's sing-song flow might seem ideal for pop-reggae, but he disappears into the background of his own album.

Cudi's unrepentant attitude is partly why Indicud sounds so engaging, at least during the album's sparkling first half. (Sadly, he doesn't have enough good songs to fill out its hour-plus, 18-track length.)

The music on their third album, Mind Control, shows a broader vocabulary of anachronism.

Early exploits including a ridiculous rhyme about T-Rex amorousness ("Dinosaur Sex"), jabs at vapid art-school scenesters ("Art Bitch" and "!Franchesckaar!"), and some indecipherable indie-dance vocoding ("I Wanna Be Darth Vader"). True Romance is a strident departure from those frivolities so far as solid, true-to-aim songwriting is concerned, but the divergence and a touch of the silliness remains.

Recorded at Jamaica's Tuff Gong studios, the record's strongest asset is making things that shouldn't work together sound natural.

[It's] mostly a very good album, but the concept betrays the end listening experience, leaving the unshakable feeling that it could've been a six-track EP, not an over-padded full album.

Ultimately, what makes Excavation such an awesome and absorbing listen is precisely its indifference to the listener.

They've stepped up their ballad game, and the grooves, smartly percussive and Kanye-slick, are deeper than ever.

Despite all this defiantly cosmopolitan music, Wheelhouse finds Paisley in bittersweet reverie.

By facing down the exhausting nature of depression and loneliness (seriously, Coyne sounds so depleted that he can barely muster the dejection to sing, and yes, that's a compliment), the Lips have retroactively strengthened their entire artistic credo.

Hotel California is inexcusable. It may be the least creative major-label rap album in recent memory.

Revealing more to outsiders than, say, that entire Nirvana box set, it revels in the seemingly defunct L.A. pop greats' status as old-school virtuosos who turned the new school on.

This is their longest album and has the highest stakes, and succeeds.

Overgrown's biggest fault is lack of quality control; it's an uneven listen, with peaks like "Retrograde" segueing into the quotidian piano recital of "DLM," with an undistinguished back half that doesn't linger in the mind afterward.

What aren't here are coherently shaped songs, or hooks, or riffs, or melodies that stick.

They've never sounded more in tune with the materiality of sound or the sonorousness of the physical world.

The living, breathing aspect of Arnalds' music is more evident here than on his previous six years’ worth of albums and EPs, which makes Winter easily his most straightforwardly accessible and mainstream-leaning effort to date.

So much of Wolf is about distancing Tyler from the listener, whereas the vulnerability and melodic mirroring of "Answer," awash in sad organ glissando and two decades of unmet emotional need, is the album's truly shocking moment, in large part because it's so much better than everything else. From there it's another eight problematic songs until a pulse returns during Earl Sweatshirt's guest verse on "Rusty."

They're still wildly unpredictable--and still committed to not singing in English--but the dichotomy between the adrenaline rushes and chill-out moments seems a bit more purposeful.

The real act of provocation here comes in the streamlining of what had been cacophonous material into a solid bag of actual tunes.

A cleverly plotted head trip disguised as a ramshackle mess, the debut full-length from this psychedelic Oakland quartet turns brain-scrambling confusion into a fine art.

Amygdala is the most fearless and most accomplished thing he's ever made: a smorgasbord of sonic possibility, a new idea around every corner, each vibrantly alive in a wide sound field.

Rather than give us a full album of "The Strokes Misremember the '80s," the band falls back repeatedly on self-imitation.

You're better off soaking in the good choices here and resigning yourself to enduring the bad ones.

Her voice and her lyrics are just a part of what makes Sleeper such a gripping listen. The record evinces a rumpled bohemian chic resembling a Purple Fashion editorial come to life, but behind that effortless cool is an impeccable sense of craft.

Hello, Mimi Sparhawk, who sings lead on five of these 11 songs instead of her usual one or two, and it is glorious to behold.

He seems plenty happy to hone coulda-been Nirvana licks to perfection on Afraid of Heights, which, despite being an album of all-new material, still feels like the Incesticide of his canon.

Although he's stretching traditional, time-tested folk templates culled from around the world and back again, Tyler's vision is both distinctly American and deeply modern.

Many of the tracks conclude with two- or three-minute outros, but that's where The 20/20 Experience is often at its best.

New Moon offers pleasures aplenty.

There's something exhilarating in listening to her think out loud--the sureness of her songwriting battling the part of her brain that knows the song will never be enough.

Tidy and concise, clocking in at 43 minutes, it favors the diminutive gesture to the cloying, hammy affectation that derailed so much of his prior discography.

There’s a good balance here: classicist in the Lee Ann Womack neo-countrypolitan sense, yet neither stodgy, frail, nor nostalgic, but rather as thoroughly in tune with modern millennial existence as Taylor Swift.

Real to Reel is otherwise lacking in the kind of tension that's required to produce an album that's more than the sum of its talented parts.

Regardless of the catalyst, Chelsea Light Moving is an entirely successful test of Moore’s post-breakup mettle.

The aspirations here are lofty, as always, if less reflective than your average NIN lament; the songs swell, bobble, and even leak from the seams under the pressure.

Mostly, it's the wilting pedal steel, warm analog tubes, and lush heartbreak flourishes of "When I'm Gone" that distinguish Rose from the merchants of new country's jingles.

The nakedness of Crutchfield’s music is the source of both its confidence and its vulnerability.

Like Animal Collective, Youth Lagoon craft modernist pop so perfectly of its time that we're hardly aware of how much time has passed.

Mostly there are ballads--exquisitely poised, expertly arranged ones so dialed into their feminine inspirations that Milosh and Hannibal virtually merge with the objects of their affection.

The collision of rhetoric and intentions result in both colorless abstractions like piano ballad and first single "Where Are We Now," and grand melodrama like "You Feel So Lonely You Could Die."

Despite subjecting himself to psychoanalysis and attempting to purge himself of ego, Ashin has created something emphatically empathetic out of his inner turmoil. He's going through it like everyone else, but the very personal Anxiety is remarkably messy, dramatic, poignant, and at times, beautiful.

For an album whose most apparent traits are simplicity and broadness, Miracle Temple's best moments are pretty idiosyncratic.

So, no, Marr isn't exactly reinventing rock here--he already did that. The Messenger feels more like a tribute to his youth, to his home, and to all the musicians he's worked with over the past three decades.

Pleasingly, A Love Surreal eschews the idea of calling in favors, instead laying bare Bilal's own songwriting and production prowess.

There's a grandeur and purity of intent to the whole doofy concept that prove hard to resist. For Kavinsky, B-grade electronic '80s gunk is rocket fuel, and it makes Outrun soar.

There are no prominent electronics on Island Universe, but it's a relatively ambitious, often distortion-less statement that feels more spacious than the band's (former) basement-rock peers.

Miraculously, this is instead the man's best since Multiply, and his first since Jim to recreate a specific sound in his own image.

Their hooks sink deep, but you'll be more likely to hum than sing along, simply because their words so often disappear into the ether like messages traced with your fingertips on a fogged mirror.

Vexovoid is possibly the most inscrutable, evil-sounding thing to emerge from Australia since Mel Gibson.

Even in a career filled with expansive balladry, there are moments on Push the Sky Away as lovely as anything in his repertoire, from the music-box piano chimes of "We No Who U R" to the "Dress Rehearsal Rag"-strings on "We Real Cool" and the dulcet choruses of "Finishing Jubilee Street" and "Wide Lovely Eyes."

You're Nothing turns everything up--it's smarter, faster, catchier and noisier than their debut, more a Funhouse than a Rock for Light.

How I Knew Her glides by in 40 minutes without making any kind of impression at all, other than giving you a vague desire to hit up Starbucks.

the monster of folk's slow-jamming, white-suited funk would seem fresher and riskier (at least in this godless era) if Matthew E. White, another Southerner with that old-time religion/romance on his mind, hadn't carved out similar turf on last year's equally ambitious and somewhat superior Big Inner.

Take their third album, Holy Fire: It shreds.