The Buffet is better than just another R. Kelly album, but not enough to be worth saying so outside of a review, much less on a year-end list; call it a good one-night stand.

The tunes on Saint Cecilia--the patron saint of music, as any Art Garfunkel fan will tell you--were largely assembled from past albums’ cutting floors. The title track crawls towards wholeness on the lovely vocal meld of Grohl and Kweller.... Meanwhile, “Iron Rooster” is a bone-tired dragger that’s probably of recent vintage but could date back to Down on the Upside.

Though we may never fully understand BUB’s highly advanced Space Speak comprised of rumbling mix of squeaks, chirps, and squrggles, listening to the ebullient Science & Magic would indicate BUB’s newfound ability to sneak out from under the proverbial bed and bask in a ray of sun.

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.

The deceptive lack of star power would be less of an issue if there was more here to break up the album’s mid-tempo monotony.

What’s most charming about But You Caint Use My Phone is how unpretentiously Badu comports herself, ever-mindful that one of her most special qualities as a vocalist remains her ability to entwine the resilient with the goofy.

There’s plenty of sublime to go with the ridiculous, as well.

To say that PRODUCT leaves you wanting more is an understatement, beginning and ending with EDM you can’t dance to, building and toppling all kinds of aural Legos in between.

When it works best, as on the now globally ubiquitous “Hello” or the show-stopping “All I Ask” (featuring a rending, diva-appropriate performance for the ages), 25 delivers the kind of timeless vibes people have come to expect from Adele, even though the first-person narratives in her songs often still feel oddly generic.

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.

With compressed mechanical wheedles circling each other like birds on “Ghosting” and the self-explanatory “Morning Vox,” the machines pumping through Howl are the most organic you’ll hear all year.

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.

The album is a dense, cinematic, always surprising and often moving album that sounds like it required the full three years that the L.A. crooner and producer spent chipping away at it to get right.

By giving us the best album of his career, and subsequently re-ascending to Top 40’s mountaintop, Bieber’s answered his own question: In pop music, it’s never too late to say you’re sorry.

1D’s swan song is hopelessly neither here nor there, appropriate to the drinking-age attention spans of an act whose solo careers beckon.

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

In making a record about growing up, Lopatin’s come out on the other side in one mutated piece.

The ten songs that make up the surprise new Mr. Misunderstood are a step back from the arena-scaled grandeur Church has been trading in for the past several years. Many of the songs feel like scaled-down counterparts to some of the best tracks on The Outsiders.

Rustie’s new album doesn’t signal a reclamation of maximalism as much as it’s a return to form, even if it’s likely that many of its themes were inspired by an acid trip more eye-opening for Whyte than necessarily for the rest of us. But what a trip.

The emotional arcs are just as fresh and just as gripping [as Barter 6], but here they’re confined to songs, and sometimes to single verses.

It’s no surprise that the romantic tunes are shunted to the second half of the record. As they go, they go well.

The record’s biggest flaw might be that it stacks the stunning “Sun” and “Lights” as its first two tracks, setting a challenge to which the nine remaining ones can’t quite rise.

In spite of the giddy playfulness, it never comes off as a lark. You’ll get no closer to ascertaining his actual identity, but as the balance between jokes and earnest emoting narrows, Sold Out presents something of an abstract portrait of the man behind the haze.

In her willingness to tread the line between the crushing flood of data and irrepressible pop hooks has created a record so undeniably of its time and place (that is, cyberspace) that it can’t be easily ignored.

Listening to the man find his voice is the only “thrill” here, as familiar (if hardly marquee-level) Nirvana staples like “Been a Son,” “Scoff,” “Sappy,” and “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” all appear sans finished lyrics, or sung in too-high or too-low range-testing cadences like a very bored kid performing for a live studio audience of stuffed animals.

Even by Hyperdub’s standards--a 20-year lineage of beats birthed and incubated in London’s most soot-smeared corners (grime, dubstep) and Chicago’s windwept streets (footwork)--this is not a light record.

Finally, she’s embracing the responsibility to provide stone-cold tunes without pretense.

That’s Storyteller as a whole: expertly arranged, dense without overwhelming the force of its captain.