This album's exceptional, for as familiar and generic as it sounds, there is an autumnal sort of charm.

Perfect pop bliss.

Ultimately, Tanglewood Numbers is a pretty good record for the Silver Jews and a very good record if you like chimey, talky, uncool indie rock.

Russell has talked about how he enjoys the constraints of old equipment and recording in humble environments, but on Armed Courage, the effect couldn’t appear further from restriction, as it forges the very motifs that set their sound free.

The LP straps us into its cramped, jilted rhythms and harsh materiality, keeping us in its grips. And it’s successful in keeping us there precisely because we enjoy its confinement, we enjoy its power over us, and we enjoy the illusion that we aren’t confined and powerless. That’s ultimately what makes it a wonderland.

Stetson very literally breathes life into his instrument, and in turn, like the statue transformed from stone to flesh, his music softens our hardened selves--it reminds us that we were once made, too.

On Glacial Glow, flurries of compositional details accentuate a reassuring aesthetic, inviting us seamlessly into her world.

Bonfires is certainly a step up on its efficient, bloodless predecessor "God Save The Clientele" and stands up no matter what’s next for the band.

St. Elsewhere's triumphs are besmirched somewhat by its flubs.

It is still more accessible than previous Low records, as The Great Destroyer was, but doesn’t ever compromise the pure sincerity that the trio have conveyed throughout their career.

If we pretend that on some level this album doesn’t contain the cringe-worthy hetero-male angst of early-2000s rock, we’d be lying to ourselves, but the technical quality of the work renders it engrossing nonetheless, especially taken alongside its odd tenderness, its prescient cultural relevance, and its culmination of the fluidity of gendered tropes that ran throughout their career, where the concept of aggression becomes as much a floating signifier among a sea of textural dynamics as a reification of rage.

The Plot Against Common Sense finds FotL in fine form. It's Falkous' most eclectic crop of songs to date and stands out as a great guitar-rock album in a year that's seen its fair share of them already.

Each song has a distinctive quality that stands on its own. However, when you back away from the album as a whole, you begin to see that all these individual elements unify to make a greater holistic product.

Less Than Human is the sound of James Murphy transforming the songs of a guy who has spent a nauseating amount of time fiddling about with Kraftwerk-y synths into an album as enjoyable at home as it is on the dancefloor.

None of these songs is an inferior version of other songs on the album; each dangles from its own distinct nostalgic thread.

For CFCF and Jean-Michel Blais, it’s essentially a self-improvement exercise, one with every reason to exist but no particular cause for release. For the listener, it’s something too rare these days: an exceedingly pleasant listen, unburdened by the weight of being anything more.

What The Flaming Lips have accomplished with Embryonic is impossible to ignore: an ambitious double album in an age where the single is making a comeback, a collection of music that makes a 25-year-old band sound vital and new.

For a record seeking personal elevation via uncontainable energy, The Glowing Man doesn’t always glow often or energetically enough to help its listeners realize that it’s trying to attain such elevation.

No question, This Is How You Smile is a love album, a happy album in spite of everything and anything else. It’s there in the title. Instructions for sanity and joy can be simple to follow. Roberto Carlos Lange seems to have it figured out.

The songs here are mindless, repetitive, and perfect for the dance floor.

Darnielle [is] a songwriter still worth paying attention to.

It's clear there's a lot of, well, love on Infinite Love. And it's exciting to share in it.

It may end angrily, but when it’s all said and done, Microcastle is a blissful retreat from the known.

Engravings, his first full-length, evokes a grayness of place so completely that it is utter, that there is no there there because there is only there there.

Unlike the first three Wilco albums and even more than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, A Ghost is Born requires careful listening.

It’s a masterclass in formal brilliance meeting dogged idiosyncrasy on equal footing.

Both claustrophobic and breathtakingly expansive, The War on Drugs’ latest effort is their best.

For the most part, the pop songs work better than the mid-tempo numbers. They’re more spirited, but less moving. “Praying,” for example, is better as catharsis than as an earworm, but it’s no less powerful for that.

Rather than going full-on honeymoon or dead-end breakup, New View treads a middle ground that would border on the mundane were it not for Friedberger’s own headstrong presence, a matter-of-fact reading that gives the potentially uncomfortable tension of the lyrics a healthy dollop of confidence.

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.

What is absolutely impressive about MF Doom is his ability to craft unique, memorable characters with each consecutive album release while still imbuing a sense of unity and dynamic interplay.

While everyone else tries to steal from the greats, The Icarus Line have done an impressive job at continuing the great traditions in rock music.

I think Keveikur will, for awhile, make a lovely soundtrack as I walk along the shore.

What makes these songs so positively delicious, in the same way that going on a bender can be a welcome alternative to crying into a pillow, is that Barnes realizes how seductive misery can be.

The sound of loving is consistent, even as it appears in radically different instances. The mechanism of love song fits all bodies, all modes. It lands on ears, it laps and licks and it does no harm.

The Age of Adz is an outrageously fun and messy masterpiece.

It's unlike anything else in Lopatin's discography, not just a bold step sideways, but something like an epistemological break from an artist whose work increasingly bears the weight of something like hegemony.

Ay Ay Ay does veer closely to the edge of overextending itself by its completion and, by result, making a strong case for listener fatigue--but who said dancing was easy?

It's conflicted, ambivalent, complex.

It shouldn’t offend, but it might be slow to engage.

While no one could accuse Sylvian of playing it safe, the exercises that make up Manafon are neither experimental nor aesthetically pleasing enough for me to recommend this album.

It’s a slicker, more professional, and more abstract matrix-y record that might put off any fans of the singer’s lo-fi confessional work.

If you’re fond of the curious, Icky Thump is the choice White Stripes album.

If you let it work its magic, it will--no matter how unfashionable or cloying it may seem at a glance. It’s music to get absorbed by.

If the album feels too familiar sometimes, it shouldn’t really throw you off much.

Although these five tracks embody their own specific form, shape, and pattern, they work as appendages to the previous LP as opposed to a collection that builds upon new ideas, and if the debut album weren't such a marvelous success then that might be a problem.

The biggest pleasant surprise here, though, is the vocals.

Although I quite like some of the tracks here, overall there just isn't enough here to keep me interested. [combined review of both discs]

Ratchet is one of the most purely pleasurable records I’ve heard so far this year, and one of the strongest debuts in several years.

There are some redeeming qualities, but for every success there are one or two failures.

It's a subtle album about an unexpected range life, full of slow talk and afterglows, the work of a confident and comforting craftsman. If this is what it means to grow old with Stephen Malkmus, faults and all, then bring it on.

As evidenced by their name, The Body is seeking something more basic, using techniques that link us on a primal level to that most universal of human certainties: death itself. Together, they give us both the forest and the harpies, the tortured and the torturer.

Letting themselves go with greater frequency would turn what is a pretty record into one that actually breaks ground; it'd be sexier that way.

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

The music in this album slowly shapes the surrounding substance of the listening space, building a reticulated, synth-orchestrated architecture with countless perspectives.

While the Actress tracks were, by most accounts, club tracks exposed to organic erosion and presented in sequence as an endurance test, KOCH is more bizarre and less aggressive.

So, caveat auditor: this album is deep and often rich, but it definitely wants, even requires, you to pay attention.

Taking a step back and struggling with that always-expected "hot band" dilemma, Why? is coming to terms with his career as a musician. Judging from the quality of these eight songs, he appears to be handling it well.

But by continuing to relentlessly mine the same fundamentally limited descriptions of groupies and Schedule VI narcotics, The Weeknd risks coming off as bored as its debauched narrator.

Melt-Banana prove with Fetch that they can twist their peculiar universe into something more cordial, but one that forfeits a certain part of their penchant for risk.

Honest is transporting in ways that few records are, and no matter how strong the beat selection might be or how perfectly the guest list is curated, credit is due overwhelmingly to Future for being able to sustain and justify such a broad range of moods for the duration of the record.

With Tigers clocking in at a brisk 35 minutes, she definitely leaves you hungry for more.

This is a sexy album.

The pleasures that Pleasure describes are mundane to the point of tedium, trite beyond cliché. And the music itself is, despite the strength of Feist’s voice, mostly intolerable.

What makes Since We Last Spoke such an indisputably groundbreaking record is Rjd2's ability to create such an intricate pastiche of diverse musical styles that it seems like a wholly new genre in and of itself.

Beyond nodding more explicitly to the sounds of the early 70s than Ghost’s or Batoh’s work usually did, the real difference--the thing that marks The Silence out from these earlier projects--is a kind of poise and effortlessness, which is drawn out by the richness and immediacy of the production.

For the most part, it’s the moments that pivot between shadow and light that provide the most pleasure. “L’Inconnue” emerges from its chrysalis around the 1:40 mark, Legrand singing in French as a heavenly choral loop begins to surround her voice. Both musically and lyrically, the development feels closer to the sound of falling in love than anything they’ve made, an ecstatic payoff that ranks among their finest work.

While the second half of the album is a miscue -- eschewing the sunny innocence that makes his music so likeable -- I know what'll be in my CD player all spring.

The band isn't doing anything that hasn't been done before, but damn if that doesn't seem to matter a lick while listening to the record. It's just too youthful, effervescent, and charming.

Bill Orcutt is a mid-career eponymous release. This is a familiar signifier of artistic reinvention.

Sweeney brings an array of agile guitar playing and striking harmonies that create a more contained, musically astute Billyvironment.

Another Life, chameleonic as it is demonic, aggregates its influences and kaleidoscopes them into earworming shards of electronic puncta, a diabolical mimesis whose loathsome grin belies its functionality as dance music.

Chalk it up to Lanois, near-death experiences, or the wisdom of youth. No matter the cause, this is the Neil Young to embrace.

Deep meaning and well-crafted pop.

It is one of the better EDM records in recent years due to its well-mired quality, and it feels neither trendy nor throwbacky nor settled.

The more I listen to Tones of Town, the more I can’t get it out of my head.

Lucky Shiner feels at once painfully intimate and intercontinentally expansive

The Morning Star is both an Exaltation of the Guitar and a magician’s vanishing act: Bachman himself, noise-man under the role of hypnotist, embracing chance and slippages and sloppiness and draperies.

Though it shrouds itself in chaos, Bottomless Pit is ultimately Death Grips’ most straightforward, morbid, and brutal report from the deep end yet. Like watching a great beast eat itself, there is little in the way of elegance or grand design to this music, yet it remains throttling nonetheless, as relentlessly blunt as it is overwhelmingly meaningless.

Black Sun is spotty and rusted, and it is likely that it will be interesting to most for this or that track - a grimy slayer, a leftfield floorfiller - or for the fact that it has a fantastic musique concrète apocalyptic vignette featuring Flying Lotus for a coda.

Lekman perfectly funnels his signature sound of gentle string and horn melodies, audaciously appropriate sampling, and often corny balladry into a well-oiled, 12-song machine.

The result is a cache of songs that are somewhat transposable with one another, but they’re undeniably well-crafted pieces of music, let alone psych-pop.

Sure, Street Horrrsing doesn’t overtly delineate any new sonic set, but its execution and relative brevity reflect highly on these two venerable artists.

Fabulous Muscles contains some of the band's best songs since Knife Play.

Peppered with dissatisfying, mommy-daddy emotastic lyrics, Jeff Tweedy impressions, and Four Tet-inspired, stop-on-a-dime, into-something-totally-unrelated segues that don't really belong on a country-twinged "let's hang out, drink, and make a record, dudes" kind of affair.

Rainwater Cassette Exchange is another reason to head down to your local cassette exchange and a great nightcap to polish off one of last year’s strongest albums.

As ever, the music of Rob Mazurek has numerous layers to confront, peel away, and embrace.

There’s enough texture and variety to Drop to make it a consistently engaging listen, although on a song-by-song basis, it doesn’t quite stack up to the albums preceding it.

Primitive and Deadly will take you to the highest heights of doom, high enough to see the end in its coming. It’s all over now, there’s no need to come down.

Airs resists the cheap gratification of the indie genre’s tendency of plundering from rock & roll’s rich past with only a passing fancy. Rae’s commitment to serving the dignity and stateliness of those genres is the record’s greatest asset, and with it comes the authenticity of a younger artist who’s keenly aware of her modest place in Nashville’s wide musical tapestry, but nonetheless confident enough to prove her salt time and again.

When I listen to this, when it hits me when I’m living or trying to be with others, or trying to be with myself, or trying, it is all I need.

The Flying Club Cup is a good album. If you’re a fan of "Gulag Orkestar," it’s probably a great album. But aside from 'Cliquot,' it’s more of the same.

Pink is muddy as a bowl of bad split pea soup, and twice as hammy.

It's a careful mix, edging onto cream-puff territory but never surrendering its solidity.

Transference offers up several solid additions to the Spoon canon and setlist, but narrowly misses living up to its pedigree.

His arrangements stay wondrous as usual, carrying a gravitas that hasn’t been present in his recent creative (see: non-musical) work.

My Maudlin Career may not be the kind of album that breaks new ground or does anything particularly forward-looking musically, but what it lacks in that department it more than makes up for with intelligent pop hooks and some of the loveliest string arrangements of recent memory.

Drunk’s a chill listen, but it’s also a restless one.