An effective collaboration tempers the rougher edges around both artists and allows them to combine their own artistic strengths synthetically.

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

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.

Tracks such as The Fragile’s “Ripe (With Decay)” are these kinds of delightful journeys. “World” and “Over and Out” only display longer extensions of single ideas, which make them still a few points shy of the band’s best.

In spite of its shortcomings, this is a strong first record.

Not only, then, is Spoils a splendid introduction to Alasdair Roberts’ repertoire, it is also a fine way to get your feet wet in the British Folk kingdom.

They continue with their dark, shambling, lo-fi, black-magic psychedelia, but whereas much of their previous work had either sounded like direct covers or noisy filler, they've gained a great deal of control over their sound for this one.

Sonic Nurse neither disappoints nor surpasses expectations.

After listening for a third or fourth time, I started thinking of these songs as snapshots, not stories. Just flashes of narrative. All feeling. I started to hear the heart of Kevin Morby’s New York, and it sounded familiar.

Explosions In The Sky continue to tap into this special vector of imagination, emotion, and possibility, making everything that much more vivid.

Volta is Björk’s best album yet.

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

Deerhoof are spazzy, but not sloppy, and their execution is as serious as the atomic bomb on the album cover.

By rising to the high standards of recording and tonal detail set by “kraut” rock pioneers the first time around, and contextualizing the movement’s obsession with repetition within novel structures and rhythms, CAVE’s music sits on a decades-long continuum with the forebears that continue to inspire its members to pick up their instruments and write new music.

This record is solid and merits a listening, particularly for fans of similar straight-ahead rockers like the Constantines.

Under the Pale Moon carries an enormous amount of emotional and existential weight, yet it doesn't sound like the process of acting on impulses. If anything, it exhibits the fine essence of song craft, containing each song's individual mood against different echoes of similar themes in songs both before and after.

Gamel is OOIOO remembering themselves and what they do best, which sounds like something they’ve never done before.

Held is as sputtering as it is spartan, and as such the perfect tome to the eternal wretchedness that surrounds human need.

Easily the blissful equal of jj or Memory Tapes, A Sunny Day In Glasgow are diffuse enough to avoid easy classification, and Ashes Grammar is easier to enjoy than it is to write about.

The Voyager is a collection of catchy songs intended for those who have lost confidence in catchy songs.

Largely, Repave demonstrates that the collaboration between these Wisconsinites remains quite fruitful, yielding several songs that rival the finest moments in their respective catalogues.

Living With War is instantly the most incisive and penetrating album that Young has released in years, and it is arguably the most vital of his career.

Nothing is excitingly radical nor is anything unpolished or poorly composed.

For those smitten with the notion of the dark, mysterious West and its expanding, crushing, absorbing, destructive, albeit beautiful tendencies, there's much to enjoy on Ancestral Star.

Lamp Lit Prose is a quiet retreat into the confines of basic rock and pop trappings--perhaps not an unpredictable stepping stone in the group’s career, but certainly not unwelcome either.

Although Watching Dead Empires In Decay lacks content other than song titles, it evokes spaces that need no explanation.

Less of an experiment in product-curation, Quazarz scans more as an effort in process-orientation, one that, whether consciously or not, divulges some of Shabazz Palaces’s obscure mysteries.

No, at best, The King Is Dead is a patchwork of genre exercises, giving listeners little more than a chance to play "spot the influence." But even then it fails, for it taps only a very shallow stream of tradition, focusing on a series of folk facsimiles from the 70s and 80s that never quite add up to the real thing.

This is the sound of a thin stench of burning bone coming from a kebab shop’s dumpster.

The Old Believer feels like a creative plateau, all the more disappointing for the fact that the band’s last album left them standing on the cusp of what seemed like an even greater breakthrough.

In many ways, All Eternals Deck, his greatest work since 2005's The Sunset Tree, is the perfect final album, fixated on death, legacy, survival, and an uncertain future.

This music is uncharted, revelatory, blossoming, and all the more so, because somehow it feels like it might be to Foster as well.

Its (mostly) gimmick-free, clear-eyed dreamer propulsion will buoy you. But if, like me, you're looking for something a little deeper in an instrumental rock record and you don't unrestrainedly sanctify this band, you may want to hold out till the next Do Make Say Think album.

Although Mudhoney aren’t shaking things up too much with their established formula, The Lucky Ones shows no signs of the band mellowing out, and their bloozy, fuzzy rock action still sounds pretty damn great after a couple High Lifes.

The results of this experiment are not blasphemous by any means, but they have clearly lifted their collective leg to the fire hydrant of their former selves, in favor of cleaner and hipper pop.

Ghil is an album that’s shaped by ideas, but driven by a sound that’s often disengaged.

The Far Field is carried by light catharsis, diffused and mild-tempered fun, virtuosic vocal delivery, and steel-clean production.

Death Lust expands post-hardcore and its asphyxiating spatializations, giving the genre and the sweaty people in it room to breathe. Reinvigorated by this pneumatic procedure, respiration transpires: Chastity’s pulmonary labor sets the stifling structures of headphone listening alight, giving us light and letting us (mired in the heavy) feel light.

For now, Flood Network shows the growing pains of acclaim, responding with a thoughtful ebb, a skim across the sand before the flood.

It’s as if the music has already presented itself. But it hasn’t. Titles can’t describe timbres or structures: they can only point to them.

Indeed, Annie’s given us a few winning singles but also a lot of glitz that can probably be ignored after one listen or two.

This new one is no less heady and singular, and even if it doesn’t do much to advance Jenkins’s captivating line in brain-hop, it solidifies his reputation as one of the most intriguing Wise Guy critics of the “thug life” still branding far too many rappers today.

[A] near-masterpiece.

The remarkable change here comes from courtesy of the record's sonic qualities.

This is an awesome, magnificent, incandescent, trailblazing record.

RELATIONSHIP OF COMMAND IS THE GREATEST ROCK ALBUM I HAVE HEARD IN THE LAST TEN YEARS.

While Vanderslice's consummate production creates several indelible pieces of music, the stark repetition of John Darnielle's songs seems all the more apparent on his full-band numbers.

Because they sound so assured in this sound and its deviations, and because they carry ideas to exciting ends, I want to believe.

With this strangely juvenile rush of an album, Wire have simultaneously honored and eroded the legacy of Pink Flag.

Even at her poppiest here, this is still chunky, dissonant, and dense.

Take Fountain... does little to expand on the formulaic offerings their followers have released. Instead, the album risks running itself into a dead end it creates, all on its own.

If you're a sugar-pop junkie or a [Architecture In] Helsinki-lover, check this one out.

This is a bloated, overlong rock record that shouldn’t have even considered breaking the 40-minute mark.

Another quixotic, cerebral, and indispensable album from one of Canada’s great talents.

God Save the Clientele is more of the same for the group’s fans, who will find the record near-faultless.

North Start Deserter, however, is in a class of its own.

The Kadanes have released their third full-length, a self-titled release best appreciated as the culmination of the Kadane’s experience of playing together since children in Wichita Falls, TX.

While Pfeffer’s lyrics are engaging, they’re sometimes inaccessible in delivery. Despite this, So Embarrassing is an interesting personal take on prog rock’s roots, and therefore quite a step in the right direction.

So maybe Nothing Hurts won’t be a record at the vanguard of a movement. But it certainly moves.

While there is an abundance of elements that are “of the norm,” a joyous and haphazard mashing of non-standard pop ingredients drives home the album’s directive: a deranged, wonderful projection of polypop-delirium.

Are Euphoria dreams dreams that weld themselves to clusters of thought-clouds. A kind of hieroglyphic retracing, keen in this summer air, surfaces, lulled in by the world.

As social commentary, it feels ineffectual and dated, its tone resembling someone’s morally mediocre guy friend who is eager to reconcile his own shortcomings by engaging a willing interlocutor. As music, though, the album glistens. Unfortunately, these two registers can’t be unwound, and so the listener is left liking the music despite, not for, its paratextual inflations.

Unfortunately, instead of rebuilding a sound structure (double meaning intended) with those scattered shards that Deerhoof has violently shaved off over its career, with La Isla Bonita, they’ve traced a nominal new work from a picture that never existed in such an ostensibly neatly composed way. Without that compositional tension hanging in its margins though, La Isla Bonita’s expressions, however inciting, remain just out of grasping reach, like an island mirage.

This isn’t an album that I foresee myself returning to very often, but under the right set of circumstances--such as the live performance that I attended last December--these are songs that contain the potential to deliver an unforgettable, emotionally cathartic experience.

This is the sound you need to get for right now, and it’s built to last well past that.

Itâ??s the hyper-distinguishable leap from idiosyncratic-but-lovable to just-plain-lovable that makes Bromst--and Danny Boy himself--of increased import.

It’s a hazy journey, encompassing loss, disconnection, and disappointment, buoyed up by hard-hitting production and Mykki’s unrelenting desire for pleasure and connection.

There’s nothing wrong with Atomic. If you like this sort of thing, you’ll probably think it’s as good as Mogwai’s other work; if you’re aware of their career trajectory, it will mean something specific in that respect, too. The problems come down to communicating the weightlessness of the invisible imaginary figures that dance across your mind’s eye when you’re listening to it.

The organic lushness should please indie-pop fans reluctant to embrace synth music, while the emphasis on sound instead of structure holds appeal for fans of loop music who’ve grown bored of its now-familiar tropes.

There will be about 20 songs, and there will be about 30 minutes’ worth of myriad emotions that you’ll have to re-spin back four times or more to hear all that was sung-and-said.

Eight of the twelve tracks here surpass a four-minute run time and few would sound as good on a dancefloor as they do on a laptop. So to ask the audience to remain patient for the record’s 55 minutes proves a tall order, especially for music as subdued as this. Still, Weatherall demonstrates an indisputable talent for compiling and arranging a diverse array of sounds into one cohesive song on Family Portrait.

In the moment of listening itself, the lo-fi complexities, interactions, and repetitions create a revelation

This is mood music, flecked with beauty and riven with hurt, a compelling, complex work that extends itself outwards, generously inviting the listener to share in its triumphs and disappointments.

In 37 minutes, there isn't a single moment when the music really hits with conviction.

At eight songs in 34 minutes, it’s the band’s shortest, but it’s also perhaps the best distillation and presentation of their sound, coming off like a stranger, dreamier sister album to Shake My Head.

They may have traded in a certain sort of urgency and sprawl, but there's a certitude to the whole affair that makes the album go down easy.

While Castlemania lacks the punchy, propulsive crowd-pleasers ("I Was Denied," "Block of Ice") that have lately been the band's stock and trade, the record glows with the unhinged, live-in-studio quality that translates so well to an Oh Sees live show.

The best parts of Iron & Wine songs are almost always the bridges between chorus and verse or the outros, the spaces void of singing where Beam adds subtle riffs on top of the normal progression... They are the sharpest hooks, and, unfortunately, Calexico pretty much cuts out the effect of these bridges on In the Reins, replacing them with dull saxophones, harmonicas, trumpets, and ill-defined electric guitar parts.

Unfortunately, the focal point of the album is not on the music, but instead on Slug's lyrics, which have matured at a much slower pace than Ant's slick production.

It ensnares the listening consciousness, simultaneously revealing the trap and pacifying the listener.

Whole sections that might feel accomplished if taken as isolated pieces feel misplaced in the economy of these side-long tracks.

Live, Hunx are utter trashy goodness, a trip to Dreamland, but recorded here, there’s a fine line they wobble back and forth on, like the tyres of a dodgy fixie, where the humor can wear thin and wear out its welcome.

The overriding element of Natural is the band’s sense of experimentation, merging punk with semi-transcendentalist folk.

All heavy-handed metaphysics aside, RP Boo proves on Legacy that he is truly a deft master of the drum machine, inspired by the potential in pure sound.

Fantastic Planet is an achievement in advancing that voice to a clear-eyed place, where wonder and apprehension can peacefully coexist.

This new approach is graceful but weary, with mixed results throughout.

The morbid motivation behind it all looms like that skull, never far from the festivities, even if Gliss Riffer doesn’t always reproduce its glow.

This is a supergroup, and part of the fun lies in the interplay between musicians, especially Cartwright and Hames. In the classic tradition of the "answer song," the two singers take turns poking holes in each other's vows and proclamations, comically deflating their assigned roles in the pop tradition.

It’s an accomplished one, and Fernow sometimes impressively commands the stylistic cues of the electronic musics he’s discovering. But the cold, calculating position of producer feels alien to Prurient as a project, where once Fernow torched his soul.

There's a swagger about Dents and Shells unseen since Since.

The album has more than its share of bangers and certainly beats last December’s leftovers casserole More Fish on the killer-to-filler ratio, but Ghost veers too close for comfort to the feel of his worst albums

Object 47 is not a horrible record; it just isn’t all that good. It has none of the flare found on the band’s trilogy of classics and is never quite able to free itself from not-so-desirable labels like bland and unchallenging.

Food is another sad testament to how the squares have won and how we’re all likely to capitulate at one point or another to the dictates of the majority.

Pain has the audacity to come correct, while so many 90s miners are content to approximate. They place themselves in the pantheon and let the gatekeepers of dubious to imperious distinction do what they will.

Many of these songs begin promisingly before losing momentum and settling into turgid grooves. Rather than serving as a platform for D∆WN and Machinedrum to hybridize and expand the pop form, Redemption offers ornate, glittering garments, which constrict as they envelop.

Undercard tastes like diluted Darnielle. Nonetheless, there's enough gold buried here to recommend it, even if it's not strictly canonical by my personal reckoning.

The songwriting of its back-half just doesn’t stand up to its front-half or the rest of the band’s catalog.

There isn’t a single moment on EWBAITE when I wasn’t second guessing my feelings, and that makes it interesting to me, if not necessarily as interesting as some of their other post-reunion records.