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.