It’s not quite as satisfying as Kaleidoscope Dream, but it expands that album’s palette, pushing Miguel into further depths without submerging him in the squalor.

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.

Recruiting Cursive’s Tim Kasher (on a single that outs the founding fathers as slave rapists) and Laura Jane Grace for 14 good songs in 40 minutes, Oberst’s made his best album since 2008’s addictive Conor Oberst, and ended up with the white male rage of the year.

What it does best is address the simple lament of not having anything to twist to in too long.

It’s hard to imagine a better record to stone and dethrone the three reigning M’s of ’90s indie: Malkmus, Mascis, and Martsch.

On her excellent second album, she brings us the whole block.

Her confidently unsteady voice has a refreshing energy, serving as a cohesive, quivering throughline for her intentionally nomadic debut, The Fool.

The results are hit-or-miss.

Ruess’ songs are a puzzle: They contain no memorable lines but the arrangements act as if they do.

The 14-track effort staggers in its breadth, especially since the album never loses its central through line: his knack for spinning pretty, heavy, and pretty heavy tracks.

This is a concept/protest record about Monsanto, and unless your blood boils as intensely about the issue as Young’s, the protest element of that is handled so clumsily that it sinks the album entirely.

Like all of High on Fire’s efforts, Luminiferous is an extravagance, no doubt, but it’s their most refined. And everyone can afford a few of those every now and again.

Hval continues to cleverly connect, and explicitly comment on, matters of sex and politics on her third album.

It’s a record full of fits and starts, baffling successes and giggly failures.

If you’re not feeling Surf right away, stick with it long enough and it just might bring you to its wavelength.

Things appear quieter for Kozelek this year, and the magic of Universal Themes is in the telling.

The results are brilliant, but the album too often focuses on the latter two-thirds of the album title at the expense of the first.

Diplo and Co. threw everything at the wall and turned around, pretending it stuck when all that’s really left is the splatter from undercooked leftovers.

Tucker and Tividad have discovered their indie-pop Neverland, and a fanciful, free-flowing sound to suit it.

It is exceedingly rare to find a producer who does so much, with so little, that he distilled from, again, so much.

Derulo’s latest, Everything Is 4, proves he’s a workhorse, with possibly even (gulp) a vision.

Clearly, it’s also a druggy album, and the highs are high--noticeably on “L$D,” whose stunning production turns from submerged to soaring, the jiggy “Excuse Me,” and the sexy, aforementioned “Westside Highway,” which has A.L.L.A.’s only hummable hook. Despite those peaks, the overall tone is more despondent.

While his latest album is obviously rooted in Nielson’s present, it still brims with the same introspective nostalgia that comes with dusting off those old memories, and old records.

Highlights finds the former remix project paring down to less imaginative drum/guitar basics, sounding like a 5 a.m., post-Tiki party K-hole, or sex with a Cabana boy you thought for sure would blow your mind--and then just laid there like a starfish.

On True Colors, each track tries to be a separate statement as Zedd tries to crash through his own, pre-existing glass ceiling--but the whole falls short of the sum of its parts.

Peanut Butter is far more self-aware, and that leads to music with greater resonance and variety.

We’re supposed to admire the fact that 30 years after their debut album, they haven’t moved an inch closer to definability.

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