The album holds to the unambitious qualities deemed upon indie pop and twee pop, exploring no new territory while doing just enough to make it sound like themselves.

It's thrilling to feel all the hooks in this thing; one gets to feeling all Hellraisery, exploding with joy everywhichway.

All of Us, Together doesn't feel right as the first full-length statement being made by an artist of this caliber, but it definitely serves as an appealingly breezy 45 minutes of summer dance music.

An exquisitely polished, well-refined album that takes the best of what Liars have achieved in the past and fastens it in a crisp electronic casing.

One of the most refreshing rock albums of the year, a collection of songs that advocate a form of moshpit populism that, even if you don't quite get it immediately, will eventually win you over with big, sweaty hug after big, sweaty hug.

This is easily Saint Etienne's best album since 1998's Good Humor.

Nadler's shortest and sparsest full-length yet. The decision to limit it to little more than a handful of tracks ensures it's succinct and absent of any songs I could comfortably call 'bad' or even 'not good,' but it also means there's no room for any of the risks that made her older work so fresh and adventurous.

Internal Logic is a well-constructed album, more punk than post-, stronger in its ideas, and a welcome departure from so-called "love" songs prevalent in modern bands inspired by the early 60s. It's a strong statement from the band and a treat for those who revel in such influences.

It is a delicate alchemy of tight metronomic grooves and carefully parsed instrumental interplay, to the point where nothing steals the show.

For all its restrictions, Jazz Mind is a tasty little album.

There is a natural grace to these compositions that's difficult to deny.

It's conflicted, ambivalent, complex.

What makes Eternal Turn of the Wheel so captivating is not so much the band's furious blend of rural sampling combined with their consistent prowess as black metal musicians, but the enchanting manor in which they craft the tracks.

Cancer 4 Cure is as hard and vital as anything El-P has ever released, and that's no light praise.

On his masterful third album, Actress perfects a thrilling sonic aletheia that simultaneously reveals and conceals, opens and closes, remembers and experiences anew, giving some insight into the truth of post-rave electronic music as it has developed over the past 20 years, into both frame and artwork, stage and actress.

Where once this cut deep, extended, it discloses itself merely as pleasant and pleasantly familiar.

The album as a whole falls short of offering us anything new or of exceeding quality in relation to either Porras' other projects or the work of similarly-minded artists. Still, Black Mesa is an unmistakably effective, quality genre piece by an artist highly invested in the form.

It's the clingiest and most needy record I've heard in a while.

Krzysztof Penderecki and Jonny Greenwood are cultivating a dialogue of past, present, and future ideas, presented as potential energy for creation--and also for acquiring new ways of understanding music.

Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death, perhaps Blackshaw's most lucid and rawest effort to date, explores the effects and possibilities of repetition, plunging deep into a humility that suggests the movements of this process of refinement.

Gallery is an effort by a young artist who stylistically manages to be consistent yet not sophisticated, involving yet not affecting.

There's nothing here that so sheerly encompasses the tragi-gorgeous indie nexus as earlier tunes "Already Over" or "Spectator and Pupil," though "When To Let Go" comes close.

[Unpatterns] contains some of the most mature, atmospheric music we've heard from sirs Ford and Shaw - and, periodically, some monstrous grooves pierce through the ambient haze.

It is familiar, but it is Peter's familiarity.

The lyrics here are trite and the melodies saccharine.

Transistor Rhythm is an album with a thin atmosphere. There is little reverberation, just repetition, vocal samples repeating without degrading.

Despite its shortcomings, Always Want is a debut that shows considerable promise and a willingness to test the boundaries of the singer-songwriter framework.

What Batoh offers us here is a snapshot of a despondent, acousmatic psychogeography - a grief-stricken poetics wherein the blank nirvana-impulse of the Shinto rite of chinkonsai jars against the bleeding-edge caterwaul of his BPM machine.

Downright seductive.

As it stands, the album (along with the essential corresponding film, Icon Eye) stands as a rather moving document of the profundity of the cross-cultural and cross-generational conversation that goes on throughout all popular culture, and given the niche audiences for both Sun Araw and The Congos, this project offers a view on a very rarely explored conversation at that.

[Modern Jester] is, admittedly, a comprehensive representation of his course thus far, but the amalgamation of Dilloway's diverse temperament presents something untried and, for want of a better way to put it, pretty ****ing violent.

The real genius of this record, and of Ghost Box's output more generally, is that it works even if you don't 'get' the references in anything like a conscious sense, even if they don't make you feel 'nostalgic' per se.

Perhaps his greatest record.

Cynics might call it selling out or betrayal, but the convenience of bringing Death Grips' innovative and destructive sound to a potentially wider audience is, at the very least, a positive thing.

Harmonicraft is a short, sweet collection of pop-metal confectionery, irresistible if not unforgettable.

This is a sexy album.

There are plenty of sticky hooks and hummable melodies to be found, and their existence inside the delicate, shifting tapestries are what makes Dreams Say so endearing.

Something in the air of the hoary label worked obscurely on his imagination.

Orcas at first seems nondescript (and as such works well as background music, if your foreground is, let's say, a wintry gazebo), but it's an album one 'finds' after repeated close listens.

On Iradelphic, Clark makes a sizable sonic departure from this tried-and-true brand, accelerating his recent investigations into vocal song structures and exploring rudimentary acoustic guitar textures, with mixed results.

Truly, Sweet Heart, Sweet Light is one of those gorgeous things and, if nothing else, the most profound late statement Spaceman has given us in a decade.

The "black" of the title is not racial blackness, but the blackness of the void, the "abyss" of occultism. And that void, evoked by the dark, inchoate pop of Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, is indeed beautiful.

This is intensely human music.

Despite the gratuitous, overripe details of these songs--potent, lurid confessions; broken plates and bloody lips--Heartbreaking Bravery is a peaceful, centered work.

The Next Logical Progression, is evidence of a serious identity crisis.

The Clearing is nothing if not the sound of a band discovering a new home, musically, emotionally, and physically. The sound is far bigger than either of the previous fingerpicking-heavy records.

While that combination [hip-hop beat, industrial trudge, start-stop synth] yields some moments of blissful jitteriness and pop rejiggering, Mr. Impossible never gets too far past being big, dumb, and unquantifiably creepy.

The new songs display a newfound sophistication in composition, arrangement, and production, with richly layered, textured guitars, and Pundt having come ever closer to finding his own voice.

In Between still contains its predecessor's youthful spirit, if not exactly matching its energy. It's evident that replacing those muddling walls of noise with a cleaner, distinct, and more organized approach to songwriting hasn't affected the band's knack for capturing the melody and feel of early shoegaze.

Much like the surrounding semblance, densely concealed behind a name with clear sci-fi connotations, the music on The Host can be difficult to really get into.

Overall: Fair.

Foreign Body has moments of generous lucidity. Yet it struggles to find a foothold amid a flood of ideas, as if each performer were vaguely unsure about her role.

What Lapalux manages to do here is capture something of the mood of his time in the sonic language of his time. It's a real achievement.

It might be "teenage" in its orientation, but it is an adult album in its serious and mature rumination--and affirmation.

Ekstasis is a lovely record. Bedroom pop that floats and swoons, it has a lightness to it at the same time as a real sense of seriousness and ambition.

The balance of gold to dross still makes this album a keeper.

With them, hip-hop's fun again.

Next to "Knots," the rest of the record feels like a sort of necessary supplement. The quiet before and after the storm, it prepares and relieves us.

Oddly utilitarian, geared towards dancing rather than listening. This is the type of music that reminds you that iTunes has made 'party' a utility.

A hymn to improvisational specificity... a melancholy erotics of noise.

The cuts on Kindred aren't simply longer than before; they introduce a completely different sense of space and continuity... this is why Kindred is so strong.

Overall, the album is something of a grower.

Something about the gummy aesthetic of the viscera at work here keeps I Love You from sounding too awry when its elements seem to suffer from slight exhaustion, elasticity, endocrine peaks, biological decay.

I hate to say it, but Love at the Bottom of the Sea is such a drag: a damp and dreary album, drowning in bad faith and bad jokes.

Its funereal funk can be hard to shake off; its catchiest hooks stain and discolor.

Ghostory is well on par with the strident ephemera to which followers of this project have become accustomed.

Whimsical waltzing and barefoot stomping, warm 'n' fuzzy resurrections of soothing old-tyme indie-baroque-pop shimmies for sunset revelry, splashed upon buoyant, Northern African-influenced rhythms and shining with the silky gloss of a keyed-up, Eastern-Euro-tinged lounge sashay.

Xiu Xiu is so earnestly committed to its project that its music inevitably bursts through its own irony to the other side.

The shift in styles more readily exposes the band's strengths and weaknesses.

On Elemental, Demdike Stare give us glimmers of melody - looped chimes or listless piano figures - shivering out from the cloud of reverb, but for the most part what we get are dub shadows of songs, low on contrast and grainy with dust particles, uncanny echoes and malevolent drones.

With Echo Ono, despite their disposition to meaty and minimalist hard rock, Pontiak have shown that there is music beyond what they know.

With no pretense and few frills, Rhyton have created an excellent document of tripped-out modern instrumental rock, drawn from open minds and extraordinary musicianship.

The Men have decided to gift us with yet another 10 glorious songs.

Ingenious in its conception as a soundtrack, weak and tedious as a standalone musical venture, an interminable experience despite its brevity.

Gonzalez' voice is beautiful, but it doesn't have the emphatic uniqueness to carry the album on its own, while the songwriting, though producing gems like the EBTG-esque, understated "Mind & Eyes" is just uneven enough to fade occasionally into the background.

Although it lacks the conceptual cohesion and embroidered orchestration of their last three albums and has a few weak tracks, Animal Joy adds sentiment to intellect, an undefined rebellion to Shearwater's heady songwriting and thereby challenges that duality.

Traceable by touch, cogent in dreams, the fibers of its text bear the weight of a psychedelic meisterwerk.

We Will Always Be rewards your attention, but only so far.

It is still mostly sickly sweet sounds from Tennis, but the band must be commended for talking a bolder step the second time around.

Music this agreeable and well-produced may not leave the most potent aftertaste, but it still makes for a sweet listen without veering into the saccharine.

Neither the downfall nor demystification of the group, the truly awful Ten$ion only further tangles the mess of questions surrounding Die Antwoord.

Flumina does exactly what it's meant to. Which is not very much.

Blouse may have inadvertently produced one of the most notable, truly unencumbered reflexive turns on the genre (and almost necessarily by extension, its subculture) in recent memory.

Maraqopa is a shooting star, an album bursting with presence of mind, a testimony to emotional rebirth buoyed by recurring themes of freedom and transcendence.

The problem is that all of the moves feel like they're pointed in the wrong direction.

Consistently unique and fascinating.

Imperial Teen sound here like they're trying to squeeze some new flavor out of a chewed-up piece of gum.

While the lyrics at times retain the smarts and wicked humor that we've come to both revel in and expect, the romantic ballads more than flirt with cliché.

As with other Bats albums, Free All the Monsters' charming modesty is a hair's breadth away from monotonous.

He has always played it warm and safe, but in this album, he is playing it warmer and safer than ever....Lukewarm this album is, indeed.

The album pursues a house sound consistent with 2011's Ital's Theme.

Living Room Songs succeeds specifically because Arnalds does not try to build it into a masterwork.

Dessner, as studio ringleader, misperceives Van Etten's power as simply a matter of mounting force and so tries to buttress her performance (her personality) with all the layering clichés and atmospheric tricks in his indie rock playbook.

"Eighth Avenue" starts us off with a case study in mid-aughts indie pop: nylon thrumming, snare-led rhythm, spare buoyant bass.... Feels orchestrated but spontaneous, massive but twee.

At the end of the day, Kevin Barnes is really trying to make good pop. Paralytic Stalks is just that, bombast and all.

I have done my best to place the album, as a series of utterances, in its agony and vacuity.

All the things that give an album its personality--the sound of a band finding its feet, the little tempo fluctuations, the requisite "are we rolling, Bob?" fits and starts--are here in spades.