Through it all, Green’s show tune-y vocals are at center stage, and though the compositions are often too busy and can detract from his rolling lyrical intricacies, Sixes and Sevens is a very good record, if still a step short of great.

Glider is a fitting album for an overcast early winter day--cold and brooding, but not oppressively so.

Obstinate, prickly, and elusive as ever, Crystal Castles seem poised for more of the reckless aggression they've become known for.

This is, after all, a rock album, so don’t expect anything too innovative, but do expect moments of beauty and lots of writerly oversharing.

Bone-dry sessionman rock that’s either fun or stultifying depending on your mood is a tricky proposition, but fans of the TEASGJ sensibility should enjoy it either way.

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

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

While albums like Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and To Bring You My Love found her looking inward--Let England Shake sees her peeking beyond her inner observations into the complicated web of English politics.

End It All doesn't reveal some new profundity to Beans' formula; it just happens to be the album that came out when I was finally smart enough to get exactly how weird he always was.

Envy certainly do their fair share of the legwork in making the split a success, but it’s the surprise of Thursday’s evolution that provides the richest reward.

On their latest effort, no track is longer than 5:45, and they kick the whole thing off with arena riffage and a song about bears.

It's still better than most of the records that have come out this year; it's just that the Sparks family has set such a high precedent that even slight missteps are bound to disappoint.

It’s not Sonic Youth, but Ranaldo, haunted with memory and philosophizing all this time stuff, sounds like he’s indeed having the best time of his life.

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.

Despite its conceptualist sonics and firmly placid surface, Nothing still winds up as Kode9’s most unsettling and miserablist release to date, as well as his most emotionally resonant and straightforward.

Youth Novels serves as an entertaining, but ultimately inadequate introduction to Lykke Li.

Through his exuberant, alien compositions, Deacon seeks to manifest for us the wild places of his country, the barren plains and arid deserts, and in the process, reminds us that they are things worth preserving.

Goblin is simultaneously a patchwork project and a genealogy of Segall’s influences, operating on a confidence that’s as emphatic as it is earned.

Pemberton’s lyrics can be long-winded, but on the whole, they display a postmodern reflexivity that is profoundly mind-boggling.

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

For the duration of their career, Trans Am have described landscapes as if from a balloon, as if the universe is readily recognizable, and yet they've continued to do so with an oddly hued and surreal perspective. Thing welcomingly continues this delicate balance between the strange and the familiar.

Equally informed by universal human crises as it is by contemporary imbroglios, the album aims to disorient, alienate, and dismay the listener. The band is usually able to do all three in a single song. Often in one line.

Hold It In recalls the excellent Stag in its effortless eclecticism, and if there’s one criticism of the album, it’s that, even with its variety, its sounds and styles can’t help but echo its sibling from 1996 and also most of the other albums at the more diverse end of the Melvins spectrum.

Each track is unique and memorable in its own way, but they all follow the same basic pattern and structure.

Instrumental Tourist is an attempt to cleanse the listener of "urban discontinuity" and experience the world as a passenger (something that's lost on a generation so used to being in control).

Their flutters of effects, long, frosted periods of sonic dormancy, pefectly balanced twin vocals, and general sense of space set them apart from the herd with a surety you only see in the elite.

The Western Lands works well as a whole and will surely please longtime fans, but I get the sense that Gravenhurst are holding back.

They try their best to make a staggering number of genres their own, but ultimately prove themselves to be jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none.

The Flower and the Vessel is etymological in the magical realist sense. It traces language as a memory.

EPHEM:ERA cheats our trained cognition and creates a space for itself, playing with our restless thirst for difference, working itself into the gaps in our memory.

Though the experience of these songs are much easier to digest than their previous releases, Nick and Paul are still creatively pushing themselves with this album.

As a propulsive work, fueled by immediacy and intensity, Devour rejects the attempt to escape the body through the gear-consumed noise fetishist.

Despite the absence of a unifying theme or motif, these primarily acoustic songs breathe with a plethora of everyday detail that obscures their often nonexistent innards.

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.

Time & Space explodes with positive energy, emphasizing the rebuilding of oneself while the band itself builds together as a unit.

It's a mix that works just as well on the dance floor as the bedroom.

By focusing on his aesthetic and retaining an interest in the possibilities that exist within slow music while setting himself time limitations, Porter has created a record that is as bold and as breathtaking as we might have ever hoped for, regardless of the projection it is set to generate.

The music is personal--an interior look--softly sung with more than a smidgen of sass and blitheness

God is Good shows a clear effort to steer their boat past the Nile, past Yemen, and into new territory.

Maybe that's the key to the whole album, how it can seem to be a blog-fisher one moment and slap you upside the head another: it dissolves before you actually know what hit you. But for a lot of us, that's all the more reason to dive right back in.

It’s an album of stitched-together aspects that feel incongruous, though interesting.

Strange Weather, Isn't It? is undoubtedly the band's most streamlined effort to date.

Singles leaves the listener in much the same state as their other records: loving what exists, warts and all, yet still gazing expectantly toward what remains to be seen.

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

Happiness In Magazines is one of the best garage rock hybrids to have been released since The Strokes hit it big.

It's Dirty Three as they've always been, testing their limits, but still producing some of the prettiest and most artful music around.

While Nothing Was The Same won’t do anything to win over Drake’s detractors, doing pretty much nothing new for the rapper except bringing in more drill-style hi-hats and scaling back the obsession with 808s.

Ultimately, what we’re left with is an EP built around a great pop song, two good ones, and a throwaway.

Wildflower isn’t going to shift any paradigms, and it’s not going to leave the same impression on the world that Since I Left You did all those years ago, but none of that makes it any less of a delight to listen to.

Serenity and temperance are peculiar words to use in praise of popular music, yet these are In Another Life’s most appealing features. Its greatest achievement entails the mindset it creates and invites the listener into, as the LP humbly ventures into well-tread musical territories.

e Kranky audience is likely to find the work here to be a charming retrospective. Newcomers should approach Reinhardt’s stuff as a pretty gateway to an era whose ideas continue to fertilize today’s pop.

Normally seen driving his hardware into the ground, here Ekoplekz is streamlining expanding.

Musically, Somewhere Else treads the ground between organic performance and arrangement, as well as the efficiently expansive possibilities of minimalism and pop in electronic music.

On Punk Authority, Pete Swanson distills punk as a generic signifer and punk as an ideation even further.

Konnichiwa confidently struts and showcases the emcee’s vibrant, exciting personality traits perhaps more than pretty much anyone else in Britain, grime or otherwise. Skepta’s music inhabits the good, evil, and the delightful grey areas in between.

The strength of Creature rests in its ability to reconcile the energy of her debut album, albeit and perhaps unfortunately without the youthful spirit, and the growth of her second album, without sounding in the least bit labored.

@#%&*! Smilers walks its own path as a uniquely beautiful addition to Mann’s already impressive catalogue.

Waiting in Vain captures the modest landscape of America’s backroads and countrysides.

The Genius’ latest full-length Pro Tools is no different; while its power as a long-player doesn’t hold up very well, random dissection brings out tracks destined for analog and digital freaks alike (in case that title--and the sparse cover--had you worrying).

Born In the Echoes maintains a pop-sensitive groove for all but two of its songs.... But the real winners on this record as usual are the curios.

Another solid release.

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.

Come To Life is a continuation of the captivating style he brought to the fore with Digital Lows; it’s motivational, sure, but it’s also thought-provoking and catchy as hell.

Four albums in, Polar Bear are clearly trying new things, ensuring that their brand of jazz-punk remains at the forefront of forward-thinking jazz music with an incessant desire to rebel against current trends.

While I would put this work near the bottom among Patton's opus, there are still some definitely enjoyable songs.

Grinderman 2 goes a long way towards solidifying this four-man Bad Seeds mash-up as a distinctive musical act, even as it brings them closer to their parent band's wheelhouse.

The one knock on this record is that it just isn’t very dynamic, as too many of the tracks fail to strike with the impact of truly great efforts. There are exceptions, of course, and the drumming on the fantastic 'Skeleton Man' propels the track with a driving momentum that’s too often missing on The Evening Descends.

At nine songs in length, Go is short enough that its purposefully naive milieu never becomes rote or oppressive.

Even if The Long Sleep is (deep down or hiding in plain sight) a resigned, muted, end-of-the-line Kool-Aid party, the bug juice is delectable enough to call one back from the great unknown for seconds and so on.

As they stand with Ice Cream Spiritual, Ponytail have captured an ample document of their instrumental majesty without losing a lick of their live energy.

It isn't life music, unless you live in a camp permutation of Gold's Gym. The Air-like, Gary Numan-lite instrumentals popping up between the songs with hit potential are way lighter than air. I don't mind 'em, but also don't love 'em.

I don’t think garage needs saving. Yet, when Ty Segall shares visions within the freaked-out space of garage, he cracks it open.

It's obviously the most upbeat album they've released yet, and despite the more rigidly defined dynamic, it's a far cry from the bog standard "rock" sound the mainstream has accepted as the norm.

For an artist who has released as prolifically as Moss, having a “defining solo album” is a hard choice. But this is an excellent primer for Jamal Moss’s singular ideology, and deserves our dual attention.

A bit more polished, a little more cohesive, and a bunch more bizarre, but all still an attempt at reinventing rock ‘n’ roll from the inside out.

The guitars are jangly and questionably tuned; the drums are doused in whiskey but always manage to keep the train moving; and the vocals are passionately out-of-key but always a perfect companion to the aesthetic and historical world they float within.

Pierce sinks his heart into his music, and while that may not manifest in impassioned yelping or big rock riffs, the exquisiteness of his playing and songcraft make it apparent.

Despite these compelling, fidgety positives, those who bugged out to last year's On Patrol (i.e., everyone) will be forgiven for experiencing a sense of deja entendu.

They are uniformly wise and lovely, and by turns elliptical, sad, even political, whatever.

It’s really the power of the synthesizer that allows his playing and compositions to breathe, to carry the music into the z axis. And while this new dimension may not present much in the way of a challenge for Frahm or for us as listeners, it’s chill indeed, and also beautiful.

Although the album bares many dark and barren moments, as well as the recycled voices of pristine, angelic choirs, few songs are ever overtly “positive” or “negative.” They probe atavistic fears, wistfully and with an endless curiosity.

While many of the album’s stronger tracks are also its most spacey and elusive, the sequencing emphasizes just how important the clicking, EDM drums are to the project’s core.

Emperor's Nightingale takes that smoky Stereo MCs sound to the stadium much more effectively than their previous attempts.

The recording captures the irrecoverable magic of a first meeting and encapsulates it.

Landing well above a genre bedeviled by the twin albatrosses of solipsistic whining and overwrought political grandstanding, lyrically Sollee's songs feel well-worn yet sturdy. But they stand out chiefly because the array of melodic and textural effects available to a cellist is much different than your run-of-the-mill fingerpickin' crooner.

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.

Oneida is traveling further down the path laid out in last year's The Wedding. It's equally pastoral, with luscious production and Bobby's surprisingly beautiful voice taking centerstage.

Though Sheff’s lyrics can be too earnest sometimes, there’s no doubt he’s one of the most exciting songwriters of recent years, and The Stand Ins is another fine entry in the band’s discography.

Brightblack Morning Light retain a signature, singular, salient sound and still refuse to nudge their songs forward at anything but a crawling pace.

There may be less surprises over its 45 minutes than over the course of earlier efforts, but Rutili’s hand for slanted folk songs that possess their own select personality is as strong as ever, and for this reason, we have at least one thing whose reality is equal to its unreal paradigm.

These four Kinks followers have incorporated all manner of brass and strings into turn of the millennium Top 40 rock sensibilities, with shades of early Flaming Lips indie psychedelia and classic rock songwriting.

Filching from the foundations of dub music to create a stridulous yet wholesome panache is something Vladislav Delay has been doing for many years, and despite purveying a rather ambivalent shrug with regards to its inception, he has fashioned on Kuopio an album that stands equally as tall as its predecessors.

Strip away voices, acoustic guitars, and the lullaby-ish balladry, and you have substantial grooves, declarative beats, and mesmerizing blends of fuzzed, meandering synthesizers clanging and cooing.

C-ORE offers its own representation, served by the idiosyncratic artists involved.

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).

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.

The acoustic slide guitar that opened "Fourteen Autumns" could have broken up some of this monotony. But it’s powerful monotony. It begs you to listen to it.

It’s impossible to predict which of today’s hit songs will become tomorrow’s classics, but at least Mandatory Fun, Weird Al’s 14th studio album, delivers on the laughs.