After three consistent, unique albums, the duo only flag when they abandon their sense of humor and mischief -- which is what made them so smart in the first place.

The new developments in sound and style of Marling's fifth album--and the way her leading-lady status continues to evolve--leave it as her most captivating yet. Just watch the movie and don't worry too much about the run time.

His new self-titled record slips out of the leather jacket in favor of body-oiled synth-pop that balances between swagger-happy and tooth-rottingly sweet.

“Late to the Flight” is also indicative of Marling’s range on this album: She hits contralto notes on “Shake Your Shelter” and enters soprano territory for multi-tracked harmonies on “Hand Hold Hero.” The instrumentation, almost entirely performed by Mike Lindsay, is more varied than any Marling record to date.

The added vocalists flesh out the simple bed of guitar and handclaps on the crestfallen "Mama Don't Like My Man," and play her pragmatic foils on "Money," barking, "Whatcha gonna do?" while she pleads in a Tina Turner rasp for the green stuff to stick around.

Mutant, even as it threatens to filibuster itself at over an hour long, feels like the album that Xen was meant to grow into, with every lesson that Vulnicura taught integrated at a molecular level.

Godspeed is all about wide-open spaces here. And it's easier to find transcendence in the desolation, to get hypnotized by a single note, or get lost in rearranging the four vinyl sides into your own personal manifesto.

Beaty and bouncy but less meaty, Palo Santo is for now an unsatisfying follow-up to a terrific debut.

The record is not a disappointment, it's a progression.

Despite personnel changes, Here's the Tender Coming, the Unthanks' third LP, is still steeped in brutal Northumberland lore, and its doomed subjects (drowning sailors, child mine workers, a woman who dies on her wedding day) are well served by the band's dark, gentle strums and ghostly piano lines.

Hovvdy houses their most eclectic transitions and banger-certified pop songs.

Using lo-fi digital techniques to play up rough edges and raw emotion, Blake's rare talent is to make music so naked seem unshakable.

[A] taut, very good sophomore studio album.

The Ecstatic is easily his finest full-length since "Black on Both Sides," his 1999 solo debut.

The addition of female vocalist Mama “Mahassa” Walet Amoumine and periodic excursions into skanky Caribbean rhythms (wryly dubbed “Tuareggae” by Bombino) stamp Azel as yet another remarkable transition for the guitarist.

You in Reverse... rejects the pithy pop of their 1999 breakthrough, Keep It Like a Secret, for spacey, stretchy tracks that emphasize their unique, virtuosic musicianship.

The most-balanced Kevin Gates project to date, discovering an equilibrium between his pummelers and his caressers we didn’t previously know was possible.

Bless their Glaswegian hearts, they never sound bitter, 15-plus years after their brief alt-rock moment.

The closet thing to Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes hip-hop has ever produced: a collection of songs from, and largely about, the past that bode well for the future and sound damn good today. [Dec 2002, p.140]

Ridiculously entertaining. [Jul 2007, p.98]

Even as they add unimaginable depths to a deceptively simple form, Kannon reasserts their commitment to merely existing, unapologetically out of genre and out of time.

Is Dark Matter that different from immediate predecessors Backspacer, Lightning Bolt, and Gigaton? Not really. But is it somehow Pearl Jammier, in an ineffable sense? Yep—in fact, it’s something special.

One of [the year's] most heartfelt albums. [Jun 2006, p.80]

Flying Lotus' spaced-out visions are the album's trump card, a computerized mesh of hip-hop beats at dub-like tempos.

The Money Store fits into modern hip-hop like a square peg on fire, a 40-minute straitjacket tantrum of vein-popping, slow-flow barks closer to Helmet's Page Hamilton than Harlem's Charles Hamilton.

Elegant and nimble songs that are intricate in their beauty and restless in their heartbreak.

The quartet's fervent debut, produced by DJ Erol Alkan, offers a fabulous simulation of '80s new wave, with burping, sputtering synths and sleazy, Bowie-inspired crooning from frontman Sam Eastgate.

Delicate Casio-toned anthems. [Mar 2005, p.91]

Kurt Wagner's conversational croak is, charitably put, an acquired taste. [Sep 2006, p.106]

Fifty-year-old men rarely sound this enraged and energized. Neither do twentysomethings. [Jun 2006, p.82]

Mogis never allows the arrangements to pull focus from the Söderbergs' vocals.

Brings a welcome grandeur to Ward's honeyed rasp and nimble guitar picking. [Sep 2006, p.114]

Though Dilla's rapping is never more than competent, Ruff Draft is still a platform for the versatility of his eccentric genius. [Apr 2007, p.88]

Within the milieu of creative, atmospheric, tradition-defying music termed alternative jazz by default, this is important work.

Why Make Sense? smooths out Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard’s longstanding, ever-evolving musical partnership and collective existential quandaries into an album as polished as Larry Levan’s disco ball, and their most cohesive as well.

Kinetic and thrilling as the uptempo blasts are, where Your Queen shines is on the slower pieces, revealing that Hutchings can purr, murmur and wax lyrical as well.

Yet even minus narrative detail or plot points, one surrenders to the logic of Richard's world, thanks to the modernist sheen holding the entire suite-like venture together, a voracious and melodic urban contemporary sound referencing 1980s pop as much as house or electro.

Mangy Love, his eighth album, now finds him on the Anti- label and like the title suggests, it shows divergent aspects of Cass, at his most subtle, resonant, and resplendent, and at others, his most maddeningly repetitive and scabby.

As big and slick a rock record as you're likely to hear all year. [Apr 2003, p.101]

With peaks and valleys, Stay Paid is patchwork, but Dilla's brilliance remains stunningly apparent.

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

Though Will Yip has already spawned a modern alt-rock empire from the modest Philly suburb of Conshohocken, Time & Space is the album that’s been waiting for him all his life.

Whether he’s teasing out the darkest parts of America’s history with an acoustic guitar, or allowing a genteel tremolo to ring as a meditation on modernization, it’s easy to get caught up in the disorienting, psychedelic drift of past becoming present. It’s even easier to just relax and float downstream.

More danceable (and vulgar) than previous releases.

Thanks to its polyrhythms and rich instrumental textures, The Animal Spirits is as likely to appeal to fans of experimental rock music (especially electro-tribal searchers like Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance, Fuck Buttons, or Dan Deacon) as it is to those who regularly spend evenings at the club.

Hyde and Smith prove they still have the Midas touch.

With Cash gone and Willie spent, hopes hang on Hag to deliver classic country, musically and poetically. And he doesn't disappoint.

The albums ten tracks flow into each other as if conjured by the most sublime after-hours DJ. Atmospheric beatless expanses cascade unpredictably into crashing hi-hats just a track later, and it’s the most laid-back direct challenge to the banal 4/4 thump dominating dance floors since Japanese transplant DJ Sprinkles’ 2009 landmark intellectual deep house revival, Midtown 120 Blues.

She's always juxtaposed the cruel and the kind, and here, the baroque arrangements are even more complex and her voice even prettier, with both only underlining the dark currents running through her songs.

The songs often end up miles away from where they started, but the characters and melodies persist.

Doesn't sound as raw as they probably wanted it to. [Oct 2004, p.120]

Nas' heart is in the right place but his mind is somewhere else entirely. [March 2003, p.119]

Even with its sonic detours -- the slightly nutty percussion, a lot of general yelling -- the record feels a bit monochromatic, like a just-fun-enough surrey ride whose background keeps repeating.

Slow burners like "Dying Slowly" and "Sweet Release" smolder like Chesterfields in the rain. [Sep 2001, p.164]

It's a Wonderful Life comes off like a Magical Soft Mystery Bulletin. Yet, those iridescent orchestrations seem to be covering for the underdeveloped dirges that dominate the album. [Oct 2001, p.127]

For all its grim honesty, Whitmore's fifth album also boasts a survivor's tenacity.

Krug clearly takes Sunset Rubdown every bit as seriously as his day job.

On WIXIW, everything is in its right place.

This transcendent debut is the real stoner rock. [Aug 2005, p.103]

Tanglewood roars back to life with a massive band, a detailed sound, and a voice that sounds ravaged but right. [Oct 2005, p.142]

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

Though Bonfires' pacing is erratic, the band keeps winsome romance close.

High-energy electro eccentricity. [Jun 2006, p.80]

A conduit for sound at its most expressive potential, No Home of the Mind squeezes all it can from the five-person form into something warm and full and unprecedented.

The production is as overwrought as the antiwar themes. [Apr 2007, p.88]

While Gore is far from impenetrable, it’s still evident that Deftones are the most interesting and esoteric thing the radio-festival circuit might dare touch.

Lotus and his fellow former collaborator Kamasi Washington turn up again here to add to the downcast din, but their inclusion only highlights Bruner’s dispositional shift.

In lesser hands, all this weight could feel leaden. But Miguel remains a craftsman, and leisure gets its due.

Magic Whip finds enough majesty and intrigue in the band’s more meditative days to remain worthy company to any of the band’s classic LPs.

Spirited and frenetic, Hold On adds up to more than just the sum of the band's five-star libraries. [Apr 2008, p.100]

The hopelessness that loomed over his prior work gives way to a sort of circumspect hope on The Horizon Just Laughed, a new sense of things working out or having the chance to, and that’s victory enough.

Is it essential? Absolutely. With only a guitar or piano, and a voice that is developing into one of the most expressive in rock, Marshall crafts deeply textured explorations of heartache, terror, longing, dismay, and emotions I'm pretty sure I've not found yet.... Rock will see few finer releases this year.

Dub dropouts and freestyle toasts monkey with the beat; the rap on 'Magnificent Seven' yields to 'Armagideon Time,' then returns for more. Many people probably danced. [Nov 2008, p.89]

In flashing back, Cox smears just the right amount of Vaseline on the lens. [Mar 2008, p.96]

Mainly they noodle through indeterminate world-music jams that’d feel equally ignorable at mud festivals and at ethnic restaurants.

It's a techno album, straight up. [Aug 2005, p.98]

Embryonic finds these wild-eyed Okies sounding even more adventurous and less eager to please than at any time since 1997's four-CD experimental sonic goof, "Zaireeka."

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.

Even though The Glowing Man offers a satisfying, substantial conclusion to the Swans discography, listeners shouldn’t expect a now-or-never, paradigm-shifting opus.

An eclectic vanguard sound. [Jul 2006, p.88]

The band's interplay has grown both more varied and intuitive.

Thee Oh Sees are always the same but different, drifting through genres before twisting them out of shape, from the bubblegum of Castlemania to the metal-tinged Floating Coffin. On A Weird Exists, they do this more successfully than ever before. [Sep 2016, p.80]

Where Cox's Atlas Sound output is scattered and eclectic, Microcastle, Deerhunter's third album, is focused and consistent.

Tweedy's influence shows primarily on the two songs he wrote, especially the stoic title-track ballad. Yet the album's best moment belongs solely to Staples--a spare version of Randy Newman's "Losing You" that might well stand as definitive.

There are flashes of Yankee's shimmer on Ghost, but the album is more elusive, more disjointed. [Jul 2004, p.103]

Though they may take several listens to reveal their beauty, the payoff for your patience and attention is substantial.

Vibrates like youth itself.

A Deeper Understanding feels like the ideal War on Drugs album--the one where the songs are the strongest and the instruments the most uniquely cathartic, and with a mist that gives it all an alluringly blinding sheen.

What first makes the record baffling is also what makes it fascinating, as the band toes the line between experimentation and self-sabotage. They wring maximum potential from bizarre ideas.

Rainbow is a document of Kesha coming into her own, blossoming into the artist she’s always truly wanted to become.

These eight tracks are big, bold, dynamic, and show a particular mastery of modular synthesis.

Though Villains is a perfectly solid, occasionally bloated QOTSA album, it’s the first to really feel like a missed opportunity.

With his unassuming voice--like a more agreeable Lou Reed--and spare folk-rock tunes, he's got a gift for importing cosmic subjects like mortality ('Demon Days') and transcendence ('If It Rains') into vivid everyday vignettes, minus any cheesy melodrama.

The Jane's Addiction album Jane's Addiction should have made last year. [Jun 2004, p.108]

Proof that simple pleasures always beat academic detachment. [March 2002, p.137]

Rich in minor-key melancholia, twangy reverb, and retro keyboards. [Apr 2003, p.108]

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.

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.