Even at 45 minutes, Education, Education, Education & War feels too long, because the Chiefs are 100% committed to impose their sarcastic views till the last second.

She sounds like she truly cares and poured her heart into her songs (and most of them are indeed co-written by her), with the overall result feeling satisfyingly emotional and incredibly fulfilling... something that couldn't be said as strongly about an album like She Wolf.

It takes several spins to fully comprehend the ambitious scope on display here as this is the kind of record that unravels the longer one ventures into its gorgeous textures, subtle progressive leanings and consistently clever lyricism.

Forcefield stands proudly on its own, a meat-and-potatoes rock record that swings for the FM fences and gets by on Monks’ considerable personality and the band’s seemingly limitless energy.

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.

There are almost no redeeming qualities to be found here, and the whole thing is shamelessly derivative, thoroughly lacking in any sort of creativity, and (worst of all) a logical point in Skrillex’s career arc, one which has been pointing downhill ever since 2010. Listen at your own risk.

Wildlife was a great leap forward, and Rooms Of The House further evolves their sound.

It is an incredibly unique performance that builds upon the collective legacy of its members not by pushing them to their extremes, but by uniting them back to a rooted sonic aesthetic that all too often gets buried when they are apart.

The Pretty Reckless don’t do a great deal to prove the cynics wrong here. More frustratingly, they are undoubtedly capable of much better.

There’s all the verve and naked empathy of the best of his classic rock forebears, with none of the bombast or contrivances. Lost in the Dream is a long record, to be sure, yet it never overstays its welcome.

Happiness Is is warming shot of feel good guitar pop and bright choruses that is easily on par with the best of the latter half of Taking Back Sunday's career.

More than ever before, these songs spin on their own axes: and that fact alone makes this record as positive a step forward for Tycho as anything.

Burn Your Fire for No Witness’ eleven songs benefit greatly from the heightened sense of clarity afforded by the more spacious arrangements.

The Drop Beneath is the first record of their career that truly feels like the start of something special.

It makes for a surprisingly fun and varied record. Yet, that's not to say that the record is without its foibles. The biggest problem is Die Knowing never comes into its own.

The album captures the artist in scintillating form with its potent mesh-up of gutsy inventiveness and great maturity.

The benefit for The Men playing this sort of music is that where they’re nicking from grows less important--so long as they keep pulling it off. Pull it off they do in spades for the third straight record, save for the fact The Men have yet to figure out how to make their ballads as compelling as their high-octane songs.

The new outing from the Nordic rockers may not be as essential as Sister Faith in the long run, but it certainly makes for a highly pleasurable listen.

What it lacks in punch it makes up for in being a more focused effort than its occasionally mixtape-esque brother, and thus, Oxymoron isn’t so much a backpedal for Q and TDE as it is a solid side-step.

Estoile Naiant is an invigorating, perplexing journey through the post-modern contextual climate of the information age that has synthesized an almost completely new narrative for the future generation of music, one that is both progressive and retrospective all at once.

St. Vincent is a challenging art pop album that convincingly balances the beautiful with the ugly, and ultimately stays human despite its futuristic leanings.

This isn't a slight dip in quality, it's an avalanche.

Sarah and Josh have created a very well-written balance between depth and melody that sets them apart from many pop acts that are around today.

At the end of things, Morning Phase remains exceedingly lovely but disappointedly insubstantial; not a sea change at all, but just another passing phase in a career that’s made a specialty of them.

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.

If you liked the Com Truise of old, you will almost certainly enjoy this, and if you've ever been skeptical about the quality of music that chillwave would be able to produce, Wave 1 should dispel all doubts. Highly recommended.

The Brink is less immediate than all of the band's prior releases and is indeed a grower when given time to settle.

Like the album it constitutes, ["Emptiness Will Eat the Witches"] rarely illuminated, yet beautifully moving and unquestionably engrossing.