On his debut album, he shoots for the stratosphere and lavishly scores.

She might be Hank’s granddaughter, but Holly Williams doesn’t let the lovesick blues get her down on this twangy-yet-smooth sophomore effort.

This is a record that sounds like it could be performed in living rooms, in department store foyers, on mall stages, at any moment, anywhere. The songwriting stands strong enough that the context of the music matters less and less, and the instrumentation becomes secondary to the tonal and lyrical moves--chamber music for the microdosing set.

Final statement Funeral Mariachi is a showcase of their lush, accessible side while remaining as peculiar as ever.

Goes for basic sun-dappled guitar pop. [Nov 2004, p.118]

Bun combines swagger with substance without losing a step. [June 2008, p.104]

Love letters, brief smiles, a touch on the arm, friends, and pets abound; throughout, Russell poignantly captures and echoes life's ephemeral delights.

Think of this impressive, 25-song double-CD compilation as Singles Going Screaming -- a testament to a Canadian punk institution.

Hot Thoughts sounds like Spoon and Dave Fridmann’s idea of a futuristic, guitarless record, which is to say it’s full immaculately constructed rock songs arranged on layers and layers of synthesizers and studio fireworks.

A soul-drenched, horn-inflected labor of lust. [Jul 2007, p.100]

For the first half of the album, this tested formula works as well as ever.... Moone runs out of flavor, however, when the Apples trade colorful and ebullient for derivative and listless.

This time around, the band square their artier tendencies with their sweet tooth for classic psych-rock. [Aug 2002, p.110]

Not many of the expansive, leisurely songs on Asleep In The Back stick in the memory once they've ended, but they swoon nicely. [Mar 2002, p.127]

Processed guitars and keyboards, wordless 
vocals, and muted beats blend into a pastel wash of sound, as shifting patterns hint at familiar styles without assuming a clear shape.

For listeners coming into the album without knowledge of its overarching concept, PROTO is also full of pop-forward compositions that are striking in their own right. ... For a record about the development of machine cognition, PROTO is remarkably human at every turn.

This Philly-born belter sounds like a direct reaction against the Auto-Tune era, with Sullivan turning her pain into a performance worthy of a vintage Apollo headlining gig.

As a whole, Elephant in the Room lands somewhere between concept piece and exhibition, balancing an array of new and familiar styles. ... Seven years after his breakthrough, he remains one of the best writers in the game—but rather than a big fish in a small pond, he’s only showing room for growth.

Ripped is about three- or four-minute songcraft--never the highlight of their resume. [Jul 2006, p.88]

His latest release (aided by fellow Texans Okkervil River) is wizened and epic, marked by squealing guitars and a deep wistfulness.

The result is the alternative pop album of the decade--one that imbues the Killers' "Hot Fuss" and MGMT's "Oracular Spectacular" with a remarkable emotional depth and finesse.

It's a major work, one that confirms that she's only marginal in the sense that she's vibrating on her own wavelength, way out at the edge of the spectrum.

Sweetly alienated knockouts like “Ice Cream (On My Own)” and “Sometimes Accidentally” lend a gravitas to twee as shruggily out of place in 2016 as Tallulah was in 1987--and every bit as necessary.

while he name-checks fiery saxophonist Albert Ayler on "Love Cry," the track's steady, nine-minute crest signals Hebden's return to meticulous melodicism.

On Being Funny in a Foreign Language, the lyrics remain flippant. The instrumentals are gone. On the following 10 tracks, you can feel Antonoff taking over to guide the band’s more straightforward pop songs. ... It’s the 2022 Antonoff playlist it was crafted to be. It’ll make a lot of people happy. It sounds like it made the band happy too.

The meat of the album is about relationships gone awry, but the edges of that are where PUP really flourish.

Happily, his killer solo debut offers more of the same. [Apr 2007, p.87]

Japandroids have a point of view (young, male, infatuated with the promise of the present) and an M.O. (excellently fuzzed-out garage rock played as if at the apocalypse), but more impressively, they've mastered another secret to swaying the public: confidence without smugness.

Exhilarating and at times exhausting, the competing rhythms atop call-and-response choruses deliver a jittery math-rock fix cut with humanism, warning against fundamentalists of all stripes even as they embody the multicultural promise of their homeland.

The Moon and Antarctica does show Modest Mouse willing to change. Too bad it wasn't for the better.... Mistaking subject for style, Modest Mouse has chosen to accentuate on a tendency to drift rather than an ability to write emotionally effective songs.

The result boasts an admirably moody menace, but lacks the debut's darkly comic drive.

Though energetic, their danceable chassis and sprawling melodies nevertheless feel weary, as if constantly grinding against some looming, countervailing force. It’s true that wearied, furtive anthems have always been Wolf Parade’s thing, but they feel especially right for these enervating times.

By the end, when Johnson stakes a place vocally, geographically, and alphabetically "somewhere between [Waylon] Jennings and [George] Jones," you're relieved he still has his wits about him.

The result is Help Us Stranger, the group’s richest batch of songs to date.

The details change, but the heaviness remains.

Deerhunter’s inspiring and surprisingly triumphant seventh album.

Written in Chalk sounds like a breakup record, with the Millers (and guests Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris, and Robert Plant) picking through an emotional boneyard of broken promises, shattered hearts, and spiritual uncertainty.

This debut is a different kind of soul music, as meditative as it is evocative.

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."

Halloween’s Slime Season 2 serves as a companion piece that’s smoother, more skeletal, and, by most measures, superior.

Given Holy Ghost’s two-pronged creation (unlike Lukens, Ewald wrote his contributions before Modern Baseball hit the studio), it’s impressive that the finished product sounds as cohesive as it does. That certainly speaks to the guys’ artistic connection and overall friendship. The union might be even cleaner, though, if the songwriting had been more of a collaboration rather than two separate auteurs’ A-side/B-side project.

It’s a cohesive meditation on the legacy of avant-garde greats like Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt and peers such as Tim Hecker--and, of course, an essential part of Stetson and Neufeld’s own impressive canons.

Deeply felt, gorgeously rendered folk-pop songs.

Fans who pass this latest test of commitment will find another studied and resolute replica of one of Swift’s most compelling and formative albums.

It’s not easy to homogenize the opposing forces at play, but everything here feels like a genuine rumble through a mind scarred and inebriated by the reality of gang life and chasing the American dream while the room spins.

R.I.P. rewards background play just as much as concentrated listening, if not more so.

Ivy Tripp cements that Crutchfield is better able to hone in on her fears and articulate emotional realities.

Valedictorian frequently collides with bracing beauty, sometimes of the of the conventional sort, but more often like nothing else before it. [May 2007, p.85]

Lay It Down (with tasty guest spots from John Legend, Anthony Hamilton, and Corinne Bailey Rae) makes it clear that Green's devotion to the primacy of his music's groove has only deepened with age.

Tortoise are still on a creative roll, even if it’s a very slow, drawn-out one.

Recall[s] his greatest '90s-electronica work. [May 2006, p.91]

There are odd nods on Somewhere Else.... But her full-throated attack and guitarist Todd May's twang-snarled guitar, which splits the diff between Tom Petty's Heartbreakers and Johnny Thunders', also recall a less-remembered version of that decade.

Freer of their influences, Hop Along have produced a stunning batch of songs--each of them like a small world of its own, continuously unfolding.

His most accessible [album] yet, crammed with melodic Brit punk played at maximum speed. [Nov 2006, p.97]

For fans expecting Dirty Three to pick up safely where they left off in 2012, Love Changes Everything will likely shock. Rather than slide back into comfortable routine, the trio have distilled their past 12 years of sonic travels into something exciting and new.

Her solo debut slightly tones down the Knife's electro innovation but turns up the creepy affect, making lyrically tender tracks like 'Concrete Walls' and hallucinatory sketches like 'When I Grow Up' into reverse Rorschachs.

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.

Contra is more fully formed, a '70s-style record-type record. It's their version of the Talking Heads' "More Songs About Buildings and Food," the disc on which they see how well their gold-star ideas move.

Like an art film that ignores narrative, there are moments on Get Behind Me Satan when the motion seems stationary. [Jun 2005, p.101]

[Vocalist Beth Ditto's] temper-tantrum vocals turn tired indie-rock poses into two-minute biblical epics. [Jun 2003, p.105]

Doom's playing it safe. [Oct 2005, p.133]

This dense, complex document is an impressive display of vitality by the Athens, Georgia–based Elephant 6 collective, as Will Cullen Hart of the late Olivia Tremor Control weds that band’s bizarre breakdowns with Apples in Stereo’s earnest tunefulness.

Somehow the group manages, with masterfully restrained piano and strings, to wring joy from bygone heartache.

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

Brandi Carlile works too hard on By The Way I Forgive You, and though sometimes this results in songs haunted by mourning, it also leads to songs that collapse into bathos.

No matter how enthusiastically some claim Beck as a zeitgeist-embracing pop chameleon of the Jean-Luc Godard variety, he's far more a craftsman of the Louis Malle school: sophisticated, assured, self-aware, and incessantly torn between competing genres.

So, every sha la la-la and wo-o-wo-o still shines, as the brothers McDonald once crooned in Carpenters cover "Yesterday Once More" (which reached No. 45 hit on the charts in England!), or at least sort of shines: Cleaner production might've buried the vocals less.

Though [Meloy] rarely cracks a smile, he finds creativity in defeat. [Apr 2005, p.101]

The "neon" in the name is both a hint and a misnomer: This Austin, Texas duo's debut emanates bright colors even while the glow is muted by lo-fi haze.

Soul deftly blends caprice with the ensemble’s usual care. Anything featuring Daniel’s scrunched-up, uncommonly expressive yelp and high-strung guitar can’t help but be Spoon-y.

The fidelity hasn't improved much from the Calgary foursome's basement-recorded debut, but Public Strain consolidates the clanging drones and subtly hooky flourishes that previously existed only as separate pieces.

AZD quickly and wonderfully makes clear that neither retirement nor creative exhaustion is in the cards quite yet for Actress.

Ritter's wordplay can be dense, but his warm, inviting voice makes it a pleasure to unravel.

Though made by only two people, Civilian never feels less than fully realized.

On Amelia, Anderson resurrects this courageous woman and gives her breath, heart, and soul. It is impossible to hear this aerial ballet and walk away unaffected.

They continue to blur the lines between art, psychedelia, alt metal, and prog rock with undiminished curiosity and skill. ... As with previous work, on Fear Inoculum, the band’s songwriting can at times seem like a riddle, daring listeners to lean in and figure out exactly what is going on.

Like any (sorta) self-titled mid-career album, this one functions best as a thrilling overview of what OPN is capable of, from the sample-driven soundscapes of his earlier releases (“Answering Machine”) to the ominous, cinematic thrall of the Uncut Gems soundtrack (“Shifting”). Oneohtrix Point Never’s music has never sounded like it’s angling to get played on radio stations. With Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, he creates his own instead.

The Antlers still summon widescreen, dramatic moments when their moody tangents cohere, but too many songs sacrifice substance for prettiness, gliding by forgettably.

Infinite, often chaotic, near-instrumental psych-prog-punk-metal grooves rich with fine-ground detail. [Sep 2006, p.100]

It’s structurally confounding, simultaneously weirder and more welcoming than any of the other material she’s released to date.

If the ranting occasionally suggests generic provocation for its own sake, Smith's fury, amplified by the pounding grooves, is oddly uplifting--in moderate doses.

The majority of cuts on Goon still feel like demos: languidly spaced chords, carefully measured arpeggiation, and hardly anything so gauche as a groove. The twinkle, such as it is, comes from the vocal.

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

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."

Like floating from level to placid level in Monument, listening to this record prompts your imagination and encourages discourse and reflection. Not the academic kind, but the kind of communal discovery people have been doing for ages.

That’s the beauty of Universalists: there’s no use trying to pin it down. What’s more, doing so discredits its core thesis: music is music, plain and simple. Gat manages to capture the ecstasy of his live performance, while expanding his production and experimental practice to a global, and—dare I say—universal palette.

The LP’s sunset pastels and recurring elastic bass lines at times threaten to rob the tracks of their singularities. But 99.9% is a success because Kaytranada fosters an environment where every guest shines.

You won’t hear much new on Vertigo, but what’s there is lovingly, potently rendered.

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

Her stormy folk songs (which, on occasion, recall PJ Harvey's) are primal and dark, crammed with ancient mythology and portentous warnings.

Even when he's bumming, though, Walker still finds comfort in a good groove or a tart horn chart.

With a tangle of voices and viewpoints, both songs [“First Letter from St. Sean” and “A Better Sun”] write beyond Boucher’s near-exhaustive projections-of-self to see things from with a larger, more insightful point-of-view.

That sense of newfound freedom and exaltation surges through Potential, a rich matrix of the Range’s knack for digging up strangers’ stories and assimilating breakbeat, grime, U.K. garage, and late ’90s R&B.

A blatant 180 degree shift from the confines of his wretched comfort zone, Redemption is full of creative risks that pay off in spades.

The live guitars and drums--and vocals more emo than robo--give off an irresistible warmth. [Aug 2004, p.108]

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

The initial 1996 sessions emphasize the droll felicity of essential early songs 'The State I Am In' and 'The Stars of Track and Field,' tightening the comedic timing and ramping up the tension, making their adolescent trauma both funnier and scarier.

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.

This stream-of-consciousness head trip blends tricky, delicious melodies and slippery lyrics, yet never lapses into annoyingly smug artiness. [Mar 2007, p.88]