IGOR is not by any means Tyler's best work, and at times deliberately plays against his strengths in order to keep the listener off-guard--this pays dividends in the stunning "I THINK" and "A BOY IS A GUN", less so on the repetitive and cloying "RUNNING OUT OF TIME" and "ARE WE STILL FRIENDS？". What it is, though, is a form of ragged beat-tape minimalist that Tyler wears extremely well.

This album isn't about questioning convention, but rather embracing it. The music radiates melodicism, with each song inviting the listener into an environment of splendorous euphony rather than alienating with irregularity.

Goon surpasses any suggestion of mediocrity by a significant margin.

Expands on the sound she has been sculpting from her debut to the point of creating something that is unmistakably hers. You’ll read comparisons with Grouper here and there, but I can assure you this operates on another level.

It’s not as seamless a blend as last year’s Ashenspire, but both idea and execution are exquisitely fresh among the extreme scene. Portrayal of Guilt always had the potential to craft a definitive album, and if Devil Music is not it, then they sure are on the right track.

Without a doubt, it’s ‘heavier’ than past PoGs on a moment-to-moment basis, but its constituent pieces of songvomit are frequently disjointed and undeveloped to the point that you straight-up question why the band were so unwilling to dig any deeper into them.

99.9% is an assertion of identity and a rejection of identity and a whole lot of other things all at once, and provides some of the most incredible music of the year all the same. If this is the sound of hip-hop today, we’re in a good place.

One of the most interesting releases of 2021 so far. ... Two tracks in, some details start to surface: the production, which leaves a lot of air for the singers to breathe and shine, and the very subtle but delightful instrumentation of every track of this recording. ... In Quiet Moments recalls an album that marked a generation of artists during the second half of the 80s, a project known as This Mortal Coil introduced by an album titled It'll End In Tears.

Super Champon’s genius lies in the way it brings this relatively complex subject matter down to a set of laser-sharp bangers, all supported with just enough English to resonate either side of the Anglosphere frontier.

Norah Jones may be the same artist who sang “Don’t Know Why” on the beach 22 years ago, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t taken steps to advance or update her core sound. Visions is solid proof of this.

Sycamore Meadows is an album that was born from heartache, and it’s on its saddest and most visceral numbers that the album truly shines, and perhaps gives some validity to that old lie about art.

You’re Not As ___ As You Think feels like the conclusion to something that was never started in the first place, it hasn’t earned any of the things it takes without asking, it’s a shallow pretender desperately fumbling in the deep end, and it’s an unfortunate development for a band that used to write dumb, fun songs about girls.

[Moms is] about lamenting family trees and the things that created us worse for wear. Together, Harris and Seim have created a rock album punching the stomach the way their lyrics do.

Sunrise On Slaughter Beach is far from a perfect effort, but it’s good to have the merry band from Maryland back again regardless.

Hayley Williams gives the first of several poor singing performances on the record [on lead single, "Low"]; the verses are toneless and she tries to cram too many words into them without really saying anything.

Monomania demands an undivided attention and continuous play to truly see the beauty within its surrealism.

If Norman Fucking Rockwell! was the record her non-partisan sympathisers dreamed she might make, this is the one they feared. It’s hushed but impersonal, pared-back without having anything to reveal, and verbose without saying anything of substance.

Vaxis II: A Window of The Waking Mind takes everything questionable about Vaxis I’s overall charming forays into stadium rock, castrates it of any semblance of grit, urgency or personality, and subjugates its once formidable trove of catchiness to an almost impressively bland slew of commercialised hard rock templates that, in conjunction with the record’s militantly pop production, render it a gormless caricature of everything once endearing about the band.

We’re totally invested in Lump’s plight, watching it fight off numbness with two dead and flailing arms. But mainly because the tones here are wonderful.

'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! is a truly unforgettable experience.

It’s post-punk theatre through and through, full of bright colours and left turns, with enough returning cast members to keep the old heads in their seats (“bring back the old Ought!”).

There's a fair bit of tension in his rhymes and it works for him. Earl upholds a dangerous, unpredictable presence--when he slurs “step into the shadows, we can talk addiction” in “Grief” there aren't many who would take up the offer--but at times he holds himself wide open.

FM! might have personality, but it's of the more obnoxious and self-obsessed "Get the Fuck Off My Dick" variety, and there's simply not enough quality on display to justify its own brief and largely annoying existence. Next.

The Ecstatic is solid from front to back, but it's not always entirely cohesive. The production is uniquely executed, with the beats often focusing more on sample placement than drums and bass, but it's this lack of a low-end that sometimes makes your head nod in backwards directions.

The outfit’s edge has found a whetstone that is able to sharpen the previously-established chaos, whilst also adding a gut-punch severity to the overall effect, even if it remains just as playful in its lyricism and garage-band simplicity. Audacious in sound, digestible in focus and a big-bollocked, rollicking good time.

If you felt Be More Kind and No Man’s Land missed the mark, FTHC will remind you of why you fell for Frank in the first place.

His music more than stands on its own in its brilliancy and, again, the fact that it is supplemented by clearly thought out performance aspects should not mean that it is viewed as anything less than genuine.

There are those moments, here and there, when patience isn’t quite rewarded. .... The package as a whole however, those moments when the Pit of Language returns intoned into the drone and choir of Tar & Feathers, those moments where all of the haunted brilliance of Neubauten are on full display again, that same soul that made the subterranean abscesses of the bloated, dying West its echo chamber and forced it to confront itself.

Lie Down In The Light is still slightly marred by this uneven pace.

Although she is a great poet and lyricist, a little restraint would help in these situations. Seeds is still a great record nonetheless, and shows Muldrow hasn't yet lost focus since Umsindo.

While Empty Days and Sleepless Nights offered songs that were entertaining enough without lyric booklet in hand, Letters Home is much more dependent on its story for emotional impact.

Overall, Dark Matter ended up as the most interesting and energized record since Backspacer. It seems pushing the band to work fast in the studio yields better results. Of course, most of the material here sounds familiar, but the members feel once more invested in it.

Flying Lotus has once again proved that he is an artist that can consistently reinvent himself and make his new sound just as effective as it was before

The real problem with The Money Store is MC Ride's consistently incoherent mumbling and meme-of-the-day approach to making hooks.

The attention to detail is impressive and the resulting soundtrack is quite cohesive. Nevertheless, the brief runtime of most tunes here make Tron: Ares more of a Ghosts I-IV type record with an attached EP of what you would expect from a conventional Nine Inch Nails release.

So Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust is just another Sigur Ros album, but if I can be the first to say it, our "first vital band of the 21st century" is starting to feel old hat.

Back To Black is by far the best popular soul album I’ve heard this year.

Zeit is imperfect, but there’s so much to be savoured here, and aspects you won’t get from any other Rammstein album.

Good music that works, effortlessly, and is even easier to love.

Similar to UGK's "4 Life" earlier this year Dilla's friends, family, and admirers have created a(nother) great tribute to one of hip-hop's great.

They’re some decisive stuff, yet tend to leave the listener strangely alleviated, especially the title track: it’s the perfectly weird, yet high-energy song to get anyone out of their bedroom. That is, when they return to listen to this album again, of course.

They have managed to produce their most easily accessible album while still clearly sounding like Fear Factory.

There’s nothing about Ode to Joy that is meant to set the airwaves afire. It’s raw elegance; a surplus of creativity delivered with equal portions of restraint.

Blue Raspberry sees some extremely slight but thoughtful experimentation from Kirby. A playfulness that, on the one hand, gives greater depth to Kirby's music—or otherwise make that depth more obvious to the shallow listener—but also, on the other, reemphasises to you—to me—just how good, how delicate, how thoughtful a songwriter Kirby really is at her core.

It may be unfriendly and demanding beyond a level I've ever experienced from the Necks, but it is so meticulously, disarmingly constructed as such that it might just stand among their most intriguing works to date; leave any expectations of an easy ride at the door, and you'll shocked at how expertly it drains you.

There are several elements from their entire career fused with new ones, as well as a newfound accessibility that also signals a creativity boost. It's great to see Underworld this vital once again, indeed facing a shining future.

Loma doesn’t offer us the moment where the lines converge (i was never good at geometry) but it reaches for something more substantive: catharsis. Funnily enough, it sneaks up behind them as they’re looking elsewhere.

Fake It Flowers won’t blaze any new trails and beabadoobee is a far cry from a pioneer, but for a brief moment in the sun, her debut is both gratifying and immediate. There’s no reason not to bask in it.

["The Magician" is] an astounding piece of music that has to be heard to be believed, and cements The New Sound as a triumphant success for Greep’s burgeoning solo career.

Between the organic and artificial sounds found in Actor, St. Vincent’s voice melts the two clashing styles into a divinely pleasurable experience.

These tunes are an absolute joy to listen to. Misadventures Of Doomscroller probably isn’t the AOTY 2022, but if your criteria is “best album to listen to while cruising the Pacific Coast Highway, wind in your hair”, well, it’s a shoo-in.

It’s a bit front-loaded, and not every track will floor you, but it’s definitely the most summative album of Robert Plant’s career.

It absolutely rests on Big Red Machine and Fiona Apple's heavy lifting with the bookends; IDLES and Courtney Barnett deliver fine but uninspiring retreads of the originals, whereas more electronic indie-pop renderings of "Dsharpg" and "One Day" absolutely pale in comparison.

While Heritage is the strongest of this new trilogy, as well as laying the blueprint for this current era, Sorceress is able to push the adventurous qualities further to outstanding effect.

Metals, in its muted, gray imperfection, feels vital--even when it isn't.

The Golden Age Of Glitter then, is a subversive record. Things may not be as they appear at various points throughout, but that’s no reason not to give it a go.

On Connector, the accomplished quartet have recorded an immersive album that is not only satisfying in the moment, but also reveals further layers and textures upon subsequent listening.

Motorpsycho raised the expectations bar so high and continue to hold it up there. You can only criticize small details, but overall, this is another excellent journey in their catalog.

In spite of its more defined nature, Microtonic is an entirely immersive affair. There’s tiny sonic motifs littered across the record, connecting each moment to the next and making everything feel like one well-rounded experience.

Its moments of potential aren’t to be to be trifled with, but neither are they enough to elevate it from a stale sequence of overthought ideas, and this is a real tragedy given its stark contrast to the preview performance the band gave on KEXP back in April.

In two albums, the man shatters our conceptions of music--and in the finale of his trilogy, he glues the pieces back together and hands the end product back to us, thereby redefining the word ‘musician’ in a single gesture.

At times, it can be a difficult piece of work and its dark themes may require a few spins to grow on the listener. Irrespective, Drums and Guns is a fine piece of work, Low's best since Things We Lost in the Fire.

Lyrically, it’s inconsistent, and doesn’t serve its title or occasional flirtations with current events very well besides a few references smattered in every other song. Musically, though, it feels more disposable than before, and less beholden to locking into deeper, more resonant grooves.

The Ghost of Orion is My Dying Bride’s best sounding album from a production standpoint, featuring some of Aaron’s most accomplished vocals, and guitar melodies that harken back to the days of The Angel and the Dark River, and it is a welcome addition to the My Dying Bride discography.

The Gods We Can Touch feels like a very round pop record, a little bit of everything for everyone, and it's been smartly complemented by great visuals (the video for "Cure for Me" is mesmerizing) and an impeccable production job by Magnus Skylstad, who doubles down as a drummer in her live performances, and multi-instrumentalist and producer Matias Tellez. Definitely a strong contender for one of the most interesting pop albums of the year.

This is, simply and purely, a great, if blissfully weird, Blur record.

It's their most accessible record both musically and lyrically.

This album does not suck. It is disappointing, it is underwhelming, and it features some of the best pop cuts of the year. Yeule’s first hyper-playlistable album, I guess.

While her vocals absolutely rule 99% of the time, the instruments just do not measure up. It's hard to even point out specific parts because it all blends together and not in a good way.

Atlas Sound meanders where it ponders, a purely ethereal trip without the oomph.

Perfect Saviors probably could have been the quote best rock album ever. It should have been bigger. It should have been better. It could have been everything.

They're not really revolutionary because there's nothing that ambitious in them. Rather they're content being a light Dinosaur Jr., making pleasant, noisy indie rock with tambourines and static that's more an aural treat than a mental stimulant.

Agora is a lot of things, but one thing it is not is corny. But in the process he has sacrificed a whole lot of virtues. Where Fennesz once generated productive frisson in the mind-body continuum of his listeners, now his music stares blankly at them, as if hoping that their and not his affective dispositions will create the passion that sustains worthwhile musical practice.

Le Bon is doodling, but as she refines it, CYRK becomes a clear piece of work with a well-clarified core.

What you find in Transcendental Youth aren't answers to any big questions, but instead questions to a bunch of answers that never meant anything before but now seem exceedingly important.

Strange Timez doesn’t break a whole lot of new ground, but it’s Damon Albarn’s strongest release since Plastic Beach and an infectious celebration of the unique legacy of Gorillaz.

But for all the praise it should receive for being the record Deerhunter were destined to make, what will make Microcastle a classic (and this has every right to become a classic) is what the album means to the person listening.

In the midst of the endless formula tweaking and inventive twists, there is nary an ill-advised departure or split-second of suggestive identity crisis. It’s all fresh, and it’s all Fleet Foxes.

The riffs are meatier, the leads are catchier and the breakdowns, while still present, are reserved for only optimal moments, making The Powerless Rise an instantly memorable modern metal album.

While Die Without Hope is a mixed bag, I enjoyed it enough to at least recommend it to Carnifex fans, fans of deathcore, or even fans of blackened death metal who are looking at a band with some potential in the genre.

When the songs are this satisfying, when each guitar solo tears through cynicism like a wet paper bag, sometimes good old fashioned honesty is more than fine. It’s downright beautiful.

here’s nothing wrong with hearing these well-written songs, packed with sashaying grooves and wobbly synths, but by the mid-section of the record there is a definite sagging point, and the album doesn’t feel as effortless to listen to as Loner did. Even so, this is as enjoyable to listen to as its former, it’s just a shame that it doesn’t progress Caroline all that much as an artist.

The centre of gravity around which they've always spun, the human heart of Berninger's lyrics that was always caked under middle-class anxiety and "quote-unquote upscale tropical funeral" surrealism, has never been easier to find. This tension between open-heartedness and discursive, tangential songwriting--let's call it the distance between simplicity and complexity, for closure's sake--is the paradox on which this album is built, and to that brilliant balancing act you can always return when it feels like it's losing the thread.

It doesn't all work, of course, and that kind of wacky humour nestled alongside self-empowerment anthems can be jarring, but it's all in service of Kesha re-discovering the fun, the joy, the rainbow.

You almost wish Friedberger would unleash more of that nervous energy that sometimes overwhelmed Personal Record, but with a record as lovingly crafted as New View, it would be wrong to ignore what remains: a songwriter with as distinct a voice as anyone in indie.

It's both primal and audacious, raw and approachable, unnerving and at times comforting. Most of all, though, it tackles the relationship turmoil in a brilliantly inventive and thrilling fashion.

If Guster can grow old and still sound so damn cheerful, maybe everything won't be so drab after all.

It crafts an atmosphere of quiet terror that also just happens to be a flawless sonic extraction of this very moment in history.

Grande is adding herself to several distinct sonic palates, putting her own indelible stamp on fundamentally disparate productions while letting them exist in different spaces. It doesn’t sound as free and natural as much of her previous work, but maybe that awkward hollowness is the point.

Their pre-NWOBHM influences continue to reign supreme in the best of ways, but this auditory backlash to all of the technology that we surround ourselves with on a day to day basis takes itself a bit too seriously for what most of us would come to expect from a Slough Feg record.

It’s a much more jagged experience; a patchwork as opposed to an exercise in consistency. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Nightmare Ending manages to be Eluvium’s most evocative and interesting work to date.

Small blemishes aside, CAPRISONGS is cool, calm, composed, and immediately apparent.

Pure Music is transparently imperfect but remarkably enjoyable, while showcasing a lot of creativity, delivered in a spirit of wild abandon. True to form, Strange Ranger aren’t resting on their laurels. Who knows where they’ll go next.

If the point of music is for us to take something from it - whether it be an emotional response or a change in mindset or any sort of inspiration - then The Age Of Adz is the most selfless album ever recorded, and Sufjan is the most giving composer.

Carly Rae captures the glitz and glamour and grime and sex and directionless sadness and anxiety of her listeners so, so well, and the way it’s wrapped up in an endlessly compelling composition of synth jams, funk accessories, and modern electro-pop makes it even better.

The often minimalistic approach requires time to settle in, still the duo clearly had in mind the bigger picture. It definitely has a charm of its own, despite being hard to digest and most importantly, enjoy. In a way, it shouldn’t become a pleasant listen due to the nature of the stories it depicts. Even so, it’s a really moody one, the way every other Xiu Xiu album turns out to be these days. Taking risks is appreciated though.

Pastel is exchanged for matt, or maybe gloss, via 27(!) instruments, all played/recorded/produced/mixed by our BOI, not that you could tell he’s been that busy. “Memory Palace” is simplicity itself, Melotron and Mustel celeste sneaking betwixt bashful oaken strumming.

Though it's a lengthy record, at just over an hour, it's a rewarding one.