As the album unfolds, there is a genericness of atmosphere that, while not unpleasant, fails to blossom into anything more

Seasoned fans will be hard-pressed to dismiss I’m Up as a release chock-full of throwaways, but it’s truly a testament to Young Thug’s radical talents as a rapper for keeping an audience thoroughly engaged, even when the studio experiments aren’t always entirely convincing.

On the whole, Manners mostly evens out into a consistently listenable experience, the joy of one absurdly successful track spread out in variations and reformulations across the entirety of an album with inevitable dilution in the process.

Dylan shirks responsibility; he puts the onus on us. Fortunately, the impetus the album provides is all we need in order to define its brilliance.

The Men have simply absorbed another musical language and are trying to speak through it and the other languages they’ve spoken through on previous albums, trading Spacemen 3 or The Buzzcocks for Dusty Springfield (“Freaky”). Some don’t work (“Saw Her Face,” parts of “Half Angel Half Light”), some do really well (“The Brass,” “Electric”).

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.

The minimalist arrangements are still here. The bored baritone voice hasn't changed any. The personal-yet-guarded lyrics can be found throughout.

For those who have followed his recording career for any length of time, this change might seem jarring, a small revolution, but when his hushed baritone arrives on the scene in the lead track "Leaves Eclipse the Light," the development sounds completely natural.

Those who like Mercury Rev like them a lot; so while The Secret Migration doesn't happen to migrate into new territory, they are the type of band that could go on making the same album forever and we wouldn't care.

A perfect album.

Despite its sub-30 minute run-time, Remain Calm packs a punch.

There are some obvious pitfalls to this newfound worldliness, and the second half of Girls in Peacetime is a bit of a mess.

If Plowing Into the Field of Love is meant to convey anything, it’s the otherworldly passion of a world without control and without truth.

On the whole, these tracks feel partially-realized, like demos that didn’t get wholly fleshed out.

What separates Boss from any cynical cashing-in critiques is that the Markers went above and beyond to actually create an album that nearly contradicts their constructed identity.

Songs Cycled--cheeky, geeky, and critical as ever--is his most approachable take on the whole sprawling mass yet.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have retained most of what we loved about them while also finding new ways to dazzle us, to make us swoon.

If anything, this album is best compared to the aesthetic of hip-hop, where allusions to universality and transcendence are simply non-existent, and what we are left with is content that will be dated within months.

Given time, these transmissions work on a person like a vast overgrowth, subsuming one’s fastidious human preoccupations. When it hits you right, it’s like that first big beam of sunlight after weeks of cloudy sky.

Religious Knives’ latest recording doesn’t implore repeat listens the way "Resin" did and still does.

Wilco (The Album) isn’t a failure--not by any means--but when a band has become so attached to the notion of change and then stagnates, it casts a heavy shadow that’s hard to escape.

Unfortunately, Let Us Never Speak Of It Again barely registers any of the emotion or punch of the debut and, worst of all, goes ahead and adds positively dreadful lyrics to nearly all the songs.

Her words read and speak like a haunting.

Even with the complete lack of song-oriented material, Instrumentals 2015 serves as an interesting career overview and a welcome return of someone who I had begun to believe had slipped entirely into the light of time.

This, of course, can be a drag, but when said influences are as carefully picked, pristinely melded, and precisely replicated as they are in the case of Crystal Stilts, it can be a real blast.

The concept understood, no longer intriguing, no longer as unique as it's presented, runs out of interpretations on the final induction of every theory and concept highlighted.

An interesting and extremely well-crafted moment of critical self-reflection early-ish in a talented producer's career rather than a worrying about-turn.

As progressive and interesting as Wilderness the band is, Vessel States is not a great leap forward for them, and those who appreciated [their debut] will probably be underwhelmed with the band's latest offering.

Matmos have successfully transformed their washing machine into an instrument of righteousness as well as introspection, and while I am not surprised at their continued high level of craft, this one feels especially deep.

Whereas The Fiery Furnaces used to suffer from a lack of restraint, they suffer here from having too much.

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

It’s a good album. ... It’s a lusher, synthy, melodramatically gothy version of Tamaryn’s sound. More Soft Cell, less Chapterhouse.

Hello Sadness hits harder than any indie rock record in recent memory because it doesn't really sound like the gentrified indie rock I've grown so frustratingly familiar with.

This is nothing short of a monumental piece of work.

[Bring Me The Head...] is the perfect accomplice to the contorted bliss of a seductive daydream.

If there's one thing to complain about, it's a lack of focus to each individual track, in deference to sheer joy at the combinations of sounds they're making.

Ultimately, despite Gainsborough’s troubling of dance, of the physical, of expectations, the most successful (and most fascinating) tracks are those that engage with the dancefloor, or at least with rhythm, rather than do away with it completely.

It sounds dismissive to say that Farm is, undeniably, nothing more than another Dinosaur Jr. record. Yet it is, and if that assertion carries with any ideas of complacency or stock “rock action,” it should also denote the superb craftsmenship inherent in Mascis, Barlow, and Murph’s work.

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

Their strangeness marks them out from more typical death metal bands, while still retaining their brutality and extremity, a distinction that results from the ideas that animate Portal’s work and their commitment to forming their music into a vehicle for the monsters to which they bow.

The grand message that The Underachievers seek to spread musically can get a little boring, though, especially when they pretty much rap about it on every song.... AK and Issa Gold are getting better at rapping, and rapping together.

The band returns to The Power Out’s playground equipped with the chops their latest personnel lineup displayed on Axes. The album only benefits from it, becoming a more-than-worthy successor to both previous releases.

Alopecia, their third full-length release and second as a full band, is a darkly tinged juggernaut.

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

Bowerbirds continue to show great potential, with some truly beautiful music along the way, but Upper Air’s most interesting tracks ('Bright Future' and 'Crooked Lust') are the ones that deviate from their core sound.

On City Wrecker, in the swirling synths and bottled righteousness, you can hear Krug stirring the embers.

It’s a beautiful pop record, in its succinctness, its self-consciousness, and its sheer will to live.

At heart, Watch the Throne is a Kanye West production. It's more of a holding pattern than the seismic leap of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but WTT covers a ton of territory with aplomb; Kanye's hallmark versatility and tasteful maximalism as a producer are again in full view.

Many tracks sound like they're simply missing a piece.

The tunes sometimes lack a punch or vigor — not to say they aren’t catchy; I’m just not shocked when they’re misinterpreted as stale.

As far as collaborations go, Thao & Mirah does a good job of showcasing its contributors' strong points while still allowing them to mesh together as an organic unit.

2011 has yielded precisely one TyM release worth your time, and this is it.

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.

Despite references to hard drugs and depression, Boeckner’s songwriting betrays an unconventional joyfulness, marked more by the relief between emotional peaks and valleys than by its strict verse-chorus-verse structures. In fact, in my opinion, this is the first project of his that measures favorably against the solo work of his more cultishly-beloved bandmate and rival.

It's an agreeable listening experience with moments of catchiness and beauty throughout, and hints of an evolutionary path that leave future expectations open-ended.

The Air Force may signal that Xiu Xiu isn't as jarring and bewildering as they once were, but there's more than enough fortitude and craft present to ensure that Stewart will always be a good handful of steps ahead of everyone else making "experimental" pop.

Tommy is a kind of maximalist musical confetti, a mostly instrumental amalgamation of jazz, hip-hop, folk, and laid-back electronica. Disparate ideas flit in and out of these songs, often before the listener really has a chance to get acquainted with them.

Crafting a "singular" sound is as idealistic as the next musical virtue, but this album--the band’s debut--is glaringly commonplace.

Although warmer, almost folk-rock, Pickpocket’s Locket is as visceral an experience as any Mercer project, albeit in a new way.

Foster is a surprisingly competent and natural songwriter; freed from the constraints of tonal faithfulness owed to giants of poetry like Dickinson, Foster is able to draw from disparate genres to play with whatever form she's interested in from song to song.

At its best, ISAM enters the realm of pure abstraction without losing its sense of purpose.

For the most part, BSP is successful in their attempt to infuse a britpop sensibility into the otherwise insipid post-punk genre.

Easy Tiger’s not his best, but it’s got focus and a lot of heart.

This album is not going to win the band many new fans, but it is certainly a treat for the converted.

Even though Days To Bed is littered with the sort of tunes that indie pop fans obsessively search for, it suffers the same fate as the group’s previous releases. By the time you reach the final 25% of the album, you’re more than ready to go to bed — and not in a good way.

Wyatt processes his music through epic terms, even in its mildest moments, and if Union and Return isn’t a final destination, it is still undeniably a stepping stone, a vista for us to gaze upon with Wyatt as he campaigns on towards total, purified elevation of the mind and body.

“Harpies” is emblematic of the issue that prevents Glynnaestra from being an unblemished success, since despite its enveloping airs, the instrumental does often reverberate as a little undercooked and sketched out, as if it were the anticipatory intro to a more expansive and consequential piece. A significant minority of the album’s tracks could be charged with this offense, because for all their sheen and arch-modernism, they often don’t build upon their ostensibly innovative foundations.

That is part of Lambchop’s charm--irony might be the hipster flavor for the time being, but you’d be hard-pressed to find less ironic and more modestly beautiful sentiment than on OH (Ohio).

The strongest feeling I get from At War With The Mystics is that it's a wank riddled parody amalgam of The Flaming Lips back catalogue, focusing on the earlier stuff.

The songwriting is capable, it’s just somewhat predictable, and the lyrics are cheeky.

For those familiar with the music of Clogs, Lantern won't sound like much of a departure, but a definite improvement. The nuance of piano, the swelling strings that exercise restraint, the welling and wheeze of a crescendo – it all delivers.

While Oracular Spectacular has its sophomoric moments (you’d be wise to avoid the nasal whine of 'Weekend Wars'), a listen to 'Climbing To New Lows'--a catchy demo set from their undergrad days--will make anyone see what attracted the bigwigs at Columbia in the first place.

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.

AMOK might be a weaker, meeker product than the output of Radiohead, but its compact nature, its genre codes, and its context are what’s important here. AMOK sums up Thom Yorke as he stands to today.

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

While this doesn’t exactly add up to any profound reinvention of genre, Before a Million Universes thrives best without thinking.

However, palpable in the sound of hej! is the plastic production that in most PC Music releases obscures what severs real from virtual, superficial from sincere, instead exposing that the uncanny excess of the latter grounds the former’s dominion in our minds.

There isn’t a moment when Charli XCX doesn’t display the kind of wild, brash confidence that other artists take years to arrive at.

His delivery is low, wounded, yearning; despite the rockist structures, the keyboards and drum machines rattle in a pale imitation of the grandeur he’s seeking, like the last scene of Aguirre.

This album is ridiculously rhythmic.

On Komba, their beats are deeper, darker, and more powerful than before, pointing the way towards a new direction for the band and, consequently, their audience.

Transit Transit works like a best-of compilation, assembling the group's better efforts over the last six years while forgoing the mismatched feeling of such collections, a feat only a group as talented as Autolux could handle.

An intriguing album that grows both more complex and more likeable with each listen.

[It] finds her in fine form.

The only complaint about Knoxville is its length, although it's not so much a complaint as it is a curiosity about whether there is more of this live performance out there somewhere that didn't make the final edit. As with almost all Fennesz projects and releases, the listener is left wanting more.

The Rural Alberta Advantage's capital-E Emotions are rarely comforting, but they serve as a reminder that life, stark - and wintry - as it is, is worth feeling hurt over, that our petty, mortal passions are justified.

For going on 20 years, when Xiu Xiu have put out an album, it’s one of that year’s best. It’s no small thrill to see this trend continue.

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

While Smile may be inarguably more accessible than their previous releases, it still has enough cloaked treasures to keep the diehards interested.

Centipede Hz feels celebratory.

Gradually revealing its strengths, Arctic Monkeys have pulled off a rare musical trick of their own; they’ve finally made an album that grows upon consideration, a record that feels accomplished and complete.

It tends to, er, drag, but the producer's deft touch with wonky textures remains thrilling.

In short, Lux is exactly what one might expect from Eno in ambient mode, here manifesting with a blip of chaos in an opaque sea, like a drop of ink muddling a solution of milk.

Pitiless Censors is a sparkling album, a lo-fi synth pop masterpiece that manages to give endless aural delights while still being intellectually engaging, and despite having been caught at the center of a whirlpool of current movements, all of which reflect some aspect of Maus' style, he has only cemented his identity as a singular, unimpeachable figure.

Formerly a more stolidly post-punk outfit, their bread and butter on Remember the Night Parties are the kind of R.E.M.-meets-Superchunk anti-anthems of “For the Khakis and Sweatshirts” and “Return /of Burno.”

In a time where it is possible for acts who made their careers in that early-90s cauldron of independent creativity to reform and remake themselves, it seems a cop-out to make such a risk-free album, especially since Hatfield had full creative control. Fan-funding could liberate, rather than stifle, even allowing experimentation; there's no boss to please, only fans to engage. But that doesn't happen at any point on There's Always Another Girl. Just more of the same.

It seems nothing can stop them from releasing a good-to-great album each ear, and Preteen Weaponry is another sensation that will likely be taken for granted.