Many of the other songs on this album feel rather static and enclosed.

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.

The rich, roomy tonal fidelity on display is a big part of what makes Angel click.

The Drop Beneath takes their sound in a direction both more eclectic and more shoegazy than 2011’s excellent Correct Behavior, even occasionally straying into jangle-Cure territory.

Their meh generation, “shouting lager lager” take on four-on-the-floor energy is starting to wear a bit thin.

The songs here are each separate, lonely or transcendent, self-absorbed and distinct, without the background, café-soundtrack quality of so many modern jazz singers: fleeting, melancholy, and dangerous creatures from Borges’ imaginary bestiary.

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.

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

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

Say Yes to Love is a potently wrought 22 minutes of febrile noise-punk that contains enough in the way of hook and subtle invention amidst its familiar battery to stand up on its own feet.

The band’s persistence is what makes this music “challenging,” as opposed to the compositional structures that shape them, but on Piano Nights, those idiosyncrasies are pressed through a grotto of layered instrumentation that reveals an essential addition to the Bohren canon.

It’s a record that vibes on mixture of psychedelic forgery and improvisational wholesomeness.

St. Vincent dances with themes (family, success and the absence thereof, the isolation of the digital) but only ever seems to fringe against them in a way that doesn’t let the record add up to more than the sum of its parts.

In the absence, though, of the gritty murk of TRST and the intimations of a world of malformed sonic objects outside the techno-primitive beat, there’s a quality of the streamlined on Joyland that calls out for irritation.

On Tomorrow’s Hits, we place our hands against the walls, we feel the familiar texture of recording studio foam, we lift ourselves up gently only to drop back down to the ground, actions of a bored child.

While it offers just enough in the way of individuality to stave off a disappearance within the impersonal grid of the received and the conventional, it still can’t quite fuse this into a coherent personality that transcends its inhibiting foundations.

All works of art, like all minds, have the potential to overcome mere sentiment. And that potential is glimpsed here in 10 restless hatchlings that make up Carla Bozulich’s new and perhaps most essential record.

Theirs is an 18-year experiment in empathy, in putting themselves in the place of Others, in trawling through the muck of human experience to find sparks of connection and compassion. English Oceans isn’t the Truckers’ best record, it’s their only record.

All of this is borderline insulting to its target audience, myself included. For a moment in “Brand New,” Williams lets us see his hand, and it subtly reveals how incredibly marketed and capital-centric this album is.

Perhaps direction is lacking on moments in ESTOILE NAIANT, but for the most part, patten has harnessed the objects of previous releases and refined them.

As Damaged Bug, John Dwyer exposes new horror, though perhaps that’s not quite it. Perhaps horror is hyperbolic. Perhaps as Damaged Bug, Dwyer exposes anxiety as ambience. Inescapable static.

Schoolboy Q is neither a great lyricist nor a technically dazzling rapper.... Happily then, the production on Oxymoron is uniformly solid.

The fact that it’s alienating, strange, impossible to get through and occasionally radically boring isn’t a slight, because that’s not the point. It’s too much and too real and too close and too far away.

So, largely unimaginative arrangements, flat delivery, a surfeit of vague ecological metaphors that wash like spray on the rocks (you can have that one for free, Mr. Hansen), and a lack of any sense of connection, of need, of reality.

Benji, Mark Kozelek’s sixth album as Sun Kil Moon, is as abrasive as Pharmakon, as hauntingly emotive as Dean Blunt, and as disorienting as Oneohtrix Point Never.

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.

There isn’t a misstep to be found here. There are a couple moments that veer close to an overly-maudlin tone (namely when the piano shows up on the sixth and final tracks), but this tone is just part of the strange alchemy of traditional singer-songwriterisms and fumbling tremulousness that make these 45 minutes so curious.

It’s “Lost Boys and Girls Club,” “Cult of Love,” and “Trouble Is My Name” (“Trouble is my name/ Is it your name too?”), endless clichés in songwriting, narrative, subject, and sound.

Perhaps the most that can be said for Have Fun With God is that it is reverent of its exceptional source material.

The LP isn’t internally coherent, isn’t particularly successful on its own terms, which is probably more of a sin than any imputed association with this or that philosophy could ever be.

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

As each track unfurls, its glacial pace arrests the listener’s search for novelty, forcing attention to the profundities of the mix and the texture that the interlaced sounds create; and yet it also deepens the desire for what each step forward promises, the crisis that the procession patiently unveils.

As good as Hastings’ production is, however, it is Young Fathers’ vocals that make Dead great.

Its problems arise not out of any dearth of talent or skill, but out of its unfiltered sincerity and relentless positivity--qualities that are hardly problematic in themselves.

In the end, it’s the vague, shapeless, and undefined nature of the fancies her protagonists chase that partly undermines the album’s substance, since without any clear delimitation of their supposedly particular aspirations it’s a little hard to sympathize with her characters and see in them anything more than cowardly, flighty children who ought to grow up.

Despite the aforementioned darkwave influences, it’s not that his earworms get leechlike hooks into you--but that, while you’re caught listening and daydreaming, strands of ivy poke tentative tendrils into the eardrum, and deeper.

Moments of its 44 minutes are as hard to stomach as anything Xiu Xiu are ever likely to record.

Wonderland isn’t a very good album, but it more than succeeds at being a mess. Is this meant to be a Marxist critique of capitalism, or is it a maximalist celebration of the same? I’d argue that it’s both, but much like Berglund, I have too strong a sense of the fact that I do not understand what it all means.

From All Purity at once epitomizes Indian’s sound and represents a leap forward into new levels of intensity.

Amidst the palpitated urgings of bass and the rapid skimmings of guitar, Fox’s drumkit emerges as the key figure here, the volatility of his technique underscoring the fact that, as soon as you efface the certainties and the contrived precision of the external world, the once incontrovertible dimensions of the self go with it.

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.

Unfortunately, the bright spots are weighed down by fodder that would fill the troughs of many, but coming from Cohen feel perfunctory at best.

Silver Mt. Zion (now a quintet) extract so much harried beauty and grace out of the world’s sorry predicament that it seems unbelievable that they wouldn’t be dispossessing themselves of something if all their/our problems were magically solved one day.

They are pros, the best at what they do, but this is running on empty.

The River & The Thread transcends its geographical markers. It is an open-hearted piece of Americana, filled with music that is literate, narrative, and just a little bit strange.

On Pangaea Ultima, that world isn’t one with which the audience is typically familiar, but Moore does a spectacular job of making us feel at home there.

The selections run the predictable gamut of great to interesting to wholly disposable, but the breadth of material here nonetheless reaffirms Springsteen’s talents as a songwriter and interpreter of others’ work.

Give The People What They Want is an especially bright new feather in the cap. It’s towering, tempestuous, addictive, and available in a beautiful shade of marbled blue. Maybe we don’t deserve it, but it’s here to own us just the same.

While it’s clear that the album harbors a sign of affection, there’s just no room for the audience to revel in the appreciation that makes it so.

Dirty Gold feels like a statement, an arrival.

Despite its positives, the album falls far short of the impressive musical peaks of Kelly’s discography.

The alien, blank dead-eyedness of Britney Jean is frightening, because it feels like it’s all will.i.am trusts Britney with.

Its songs are well-constructed, well-paced, and all subtly different from each other.... [but] for the most part, it’s a little too “safe” and unadventurous.

Rival Dealer might be an intrepid leap for Burial, but the music is ultimately obscured by his intention to share a positive message through the most glaring of means.

Its framework and color scheme may possibly end up as just a passing diversion for Halo, but it will still remain a captious rendering of where her craft and human-craft could one day go.

While the (simulated) exploration of the innards of this destruction may not make for the most hospitable or easygoing electronic album of the year, it undoubtedly goes some way to achieving its stated aim, even if its ethics could conceivably be indicted from the above-mentioned angle.

Drawing from the rock pantheon as well as personal experience and fascination, Chris Forsyth presents a guitarist’s record that is decidedly group music, and Solar Motel should whet appetites and blow minds of shredders and weirdos alike.

Ed Askew will continue to write, observe, reflect, and create visions and words. This result is timeless enough to remain there if one wants it.

Completists will appreciate the ability to experience the Art Cologne installation in the convenience of their own home, but everyone else should have no trouble finding more compelling examples of this theme, from the most difficult noise music to the most pleasant synth-pop.

If there’s a problem, it’s that this batch of songs doesn’t quite show off Donovan’s gift for weirdness as much as previous Sic Alps outings.

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.

Magik Markers seemingly forget their own warnings and regain their former wily intransigence, ending the album with a threesome of songs that return them to sonically murky territory, as if suddenly realizing that in fact they’d been trying to uncover something in this murk rather than striving to bury themselves in it.

It’s precisely because of the transience and mutability of Open as a whole that its fleeting moments of splendor prove all the more affecting and beautiful, despite the possible contention that--because of the often contradictory accompaniment--these might not be moments of splendor at all.

Remember Your Black Day has some great moments--the eight-minute title track, with its hyper-pulse percussion and somber synth strains, is a solid incarnation of what made Vatican Shadow so compelling in the first place--but it’s surrounded by a mixed bag of tunes that either attempts some agoraphobic tightrope walk before falling flat or wrestles with contrasting ideas that weaken the project’s potency as opposed to crystallizing it.

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

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.

It doesn’t require the patience or emotional/intellectual involvement that albums I typically listen to require. The cool thing, though, is that it does have quite a bit of redeeming value.

ARTPOP wants to hide that it doesn’t have much to say.

Poppy but pugnacious, familiar and yet dizzyingly foreign, Matangi is a contrarian work from an artist who lavishes us with liminality, with contradictions.

Double Cup sounds like an album Rashad has been gearing up to make, but instead of abandoning the footwork style he has championed throughout his career, he’s scoping its potential on nonconformist terms. And from the perspective of the listener, it’s an absolute treat.

Autechre present a uniquely realistic vision of our present-future: always problematic, limited by human nature and other complications, yet driven forward by incredible optimism, perpetually fixing itself and, adapting to new contexts, engaged in a constant state of becoming.

Listen to NYC, HELL 3:00 AM close enough and you’ll hear them drumming at the windows of your mind’s storefront.

An astonishingly challenging album in every sense of the word; and for this, it is one of the most fascinating and beautiful things I have heard in years.

While the first disc winds its way sporadically through the humid alleys and hazy bars of a multi-dimensional shantytown, the second half explodes outward upon the magnificent vista of symphonic discotheque.

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.

Stars Are Our Home is a passable enough album. It’s just a bit naggingly stale, even for a fan of this sort of thing.

Rapor doesn’t push any boundaries or break the speed of light, but it constructs its fragile, fervid, and elegant confections with laserlike precision.

This album has all the presence that you should expect it to have.

The referents on CUT 4 ME are as well-studied as they are obvious.

On Weird Sister, Joanna Gruesome exotic blooms--forget the Ys and wherefores, and cue some!

A double album of prickly rock-outs, pugilistic odes, and utterly eerie ambient entr’actes bridging an anthology of lyricism that shunts your earbud-plugged head toward the mirror to take a good long look (and listen).

McCombs doesn’t want to be known any better than he already is, but here, for once, he shows that he understands everyone else a far lot better than he has to date.

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.

These songs are history, and have now become it again, renewed.

With Christs, Redeemers, they ignite a range of complex reactions designed to inspire and to petrify, the consequences of which reveal a wholly unsettling listen.

Admittedly, Beautiful Rewind isn’t Kieran Hebden’s magnum opus, but it’s an album that succeeds at both moving the listener emotionally and, like much of the producer’s impressive body of work, inspiring him or her to literally and physically move.

Not only is it exciting to hear Youngs challenge himself with genre conventions, but it’s also comforting to know that no matter which mode Youngs adopts, it always sounds like him.

All these various elements are arranged like a sleek showroom with smooth glass surfaces, a few international flourishes, maybe a pair of funky modernist chairs in the corner; it all sounds like a seamless, impersonal, cosmopolitan package.

The Bones of What You Believe is one of the most unabashedly sincere works of indie pop.

Sometimes, like on the outstanding "Wrecking Ball," the emotion calcifies into catchy, mature hooks, propelled forth by Cyrus' oft-underestimated vocal heft. Then again, the breakup also produced "FU," a dismally adolescent electro-soul duet with French Montana.

Psychic simply doesn’t leave a lasting memory when one considers the work as a whole.

It continues to be true that instrumental synth of this caliber is a perfect backdrop, but today it gives the impression of digital trompe-l’œil, a backdrop devoid of foreground, a Real Hero as crash test dummy.

While there’s certainly something thrilling about the wild, back-and-forth rollercoaster ride of listening to a Danny Brown album, in the end the grandest triumphs of Danny’s work are the myriad revelations gained from how the seemingly contradictory elements of these dualities interact with one another.

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.

It’s not a terrible album. It’s not a spectacular train wreck. It is, in fact, so remarkably unremarkable that neither a glowing nor incinerating score feel deserved.

Pared down and stripped to its primal rudiments, the latest Timberlake saga could have been something truly epic; instead, it just feels unnecessarily immense.

Admittedly, it may not furnish any musical diagrams of how to move from A to B, but in its own illogical way, it succeeds in submerging us deeper into A.

This is frivolous, immaculate music.