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.

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.

Those pop songs, [not the ones on Herein Wild,] confess everything and never apologize. Herein Wild just disappears.

While the concept is admirable and ultimately quite touching, its forays into disorientation, uncertainty and exoticism can make for a rather patchy album.

Transforming such intensity into a product so bewitching is an incredible effort, and the resulting works leave very little doubt that Colonial Patterns is more than some admirable interpretation--it’s a ruthless conquest.

Sandoval and her collaborators may never modify the melancholy torch that they bear, but they keep that fire masterfully for those of us who still have a yen for patient, no-frills sounds that happen to serve as a miracle balm.

As Hookworms gain more confidence and their heady rhythms are spread further afield, hopes remain that future material might be slightly less veiled.

Mediation succeeds not only as a stunning instrumental performance, but as an hour of personal storytelling.

It’s the change in an almost overall sound--when acts like The Human League, OMD, Ultravox, and Depeche Mode weren’t the only ones making ample use of keyboards--and Kilfoyle captures this incredibly well while retaining a still-in-formation yet already distinct MINKS sound, much in the way many formerly post-punk bands retained their own certain darkness throughout.

For a record preoccupied with usefulness, it’s unsurprising that that’s the case. There’s no room for artifice; he’s got to tell it like it is, because the telling is the moving, and the moving is the riding, and the riding is the living.

None of the other songs are as instantly arresting, aside from “Plenty of Girls in the Sea,” which proves to be just as fruitless and repetitive as the aforementioned single.

in the end, most of it turns out hypo-real, turns out less enticing and engaging than its eroding object, and this more than anything else is what makes On Oni Pond such a disappointment.

Janelle Monáe’s The Electric Lady is simply wonderful.

Even ignoring the tectonic shifts in music over the past decade, this is by no means a novel or inventive album.

Known for their micromanaged and micromanaging tracks, it’s fascinating to see that even their words about themselves are efficient, each phrase and constituent particular effervescent in their appearance and disappearance, yet wholeheartedly lunging themselves into place, forming a whole crystalline and formative structure.

For the moment, it’s surely a worthwhile project for players and listeners alike, an album of unusual synergy, exploration, and focus that expands both artists’ repertoires well beyond genre constructions to create something both unique and replayable.

The initial mystique of The Weeknd is gone, and we’re now confronted with the work of a young man who possesses an impressive voice, an incredible ear for production, and a complete lack of purpose in his confrontational, intensely graphic lyrical obsessions.

The Worse Things Get is a no-brainer Album of the Year.

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

Chelsea Wolfe’s songs don’t often sound like they’re supposed to, and therefore they always sound exactly like Chelsea Wolfe.

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.

Whether exploring a lost little town or his own lost soul, Will Sheff proves an excellent tour guide.

Stay Trippy distills the sonic extremes of contemporary hip-hop into a potent hybrid of radio-friendly sheen and hard-knocking street fatalism.

This is pure, unadulterated pop music, and while its individual musical elements sometimes don’t quite add up to the full potential inherent within Dent’s ever-stunning vocal melodies, there’s always something going on that’s guaranteed to endear this music to the listener.

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.

The execution may be on point, but the personality is absent, the ideas are fewer, and the experience is all-up flat, no matter how raw and flashy the playing.

It’s a fun ride, to be sure, but once the high wears off and all that’s left is the darkness, you can catch a faint glimpse of oblivion. Hopefully we get to peek deeper into the chasm the next time around.

Even though the evidence isn’t excessively rife on Aerotropolis, it’s clear that somewhere under the shiny, retrogressive hedonism and 4/4 decadence, there’s a voice trying to escape the easy confines it has found for itself.

With so much music released by White Hills, a lot of the tracks end up being mood-lighting (“InWords,” “OutWords,” “The Internal Monologue,” “Circulating”), but the album’s back-half, kicked off by “Forever in Space (Enlightened),” is what keeps me spinning.

Like a masterfully carved piece of woodwork, every facet of this record has been lovingly molded such that, when all’s said and done, the finished product looks completely natural.

An enjoyable yet essentially average release that plays it very safe, sticking close to preconceptions and relative “rules” of electro/synth pop without straying too far from the groundwork set down by the figures from another era it quotes and, to some degree, replicates.

Doris hits a couple more high points when Earl flirts with horrorcore.

This sits up quietly but pointedly as a quiet rebuke to records that won’t try to render the depth of the world in a layered and crafted way, those that prefer to just wink, shrug, or laze.

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

This is a profound and giving music.

Despite her best efforts, the non-instrumental tracks still suffer from a kind of sameness that causes them to run together.

Although everything here is at drum-and-bass tempo, White approaches each track from wildly different directions.

Although it’s a dark, drifting ride, Perfect View makes other recent minimal synth albums (Chromatics’ Kill For Love was so flat I haven’t heard it since last September, and I still feel bored) look positively one-dimensional in comparison, and does it in a third of the time.

Paracosm is, at the very least, beautifully rendered wallpaper, and it’s hard to blame Greene for living in this fantasy for as long as he possibly can.

Imps of Perversion is every bit as stark and nasty as the band’s previous outings. Only this time, the boogeymen and the futuristic hellscapes seem a little less remote, not quite as far-removed from reality as before.

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

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.

II is, on the whole, worthy of the names and histories that have coalesced and been commingled in its making.

Even though A Constant Sea is arguably somewhat conservative in its regurgitation of established tropes and forms, the execution of its inherited framework predominantly unfurls with confidence and clout.

The Big Dream is but a pretty stone that withers the moment it is touched, lifted for further inspection.

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.

AlunaGeorge have built a happy marriage out of the slick and the smart, and with Body Music, they just might manage the trick of making everyone else--from old fans to new ones; from critics to their record labels--happy too.

The Word As Power might only have one trick, but it’s one that resonates deeply.

Harry Fraud’s production ensures that the EP is still enjoyable in a purely instrumental, non-lyrical dimension; I just wish that Action had stepped up and delivered rhymes on a level that these beats deserve.

Fuck Buttons have created an aural ibuprofen, an auditory Novocaine.

“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.

Ciara is the singer’s most realized full-length to date and one of this year’s most thrilling pop moments.

Aesthetically, funk, soul, and gospel are part of the same tradition that runs from African polyrhythms, through house and classical minimalism, to minimal techno, and Hood’s faith enables him to embrace these influences as more than just empty signifiers. The result enriches all of these traditions, making for a thrilling and enlightening listen that forces a fresh look at Hood’s peers and back catalogue.

The songwriting is pretty much entirely solid, and there are brief flashes of idiosyncrasy, but this album boils down to being a product of the excitement of influence and just being young playing and writing music, without ever remotely threatening to stand up as something worthy of all the critical saliva that’s already dripped onto bedroom carpets worldwide.

It’s utterly consistent, simply arranged, and scrolls through the bad ideas fast enough to make them forgivable.

Gold Panda shows himself to be a more mature, more skilled architect of sound, creating vast textures that expertly render the materiality of his samples.

Where its siblings thrash and writhe and scream, No One Dances flows, undulates, sighs. The result is nothing short of pastoral.

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.

Bitchitronics may not be bold or experimental, but that’s irrelevant to Bitchin Bajas’ concerns--that being the craft of pure sound, as Eno put it, “ignorable as it is interesting.”

While it’s certain that catastrophe is written all over Locrian’s high-concept Return to Annihilation, the experience is a step removed from the anxiety of early post-rock: here the listener trudges through the burnt-out husk of a world, its structures transfigured, estranged from their original forms.

Unfortunately, Me Moan doesn’t really deepen Gibson’s exploration of this novel niche. Instead, it feels mostly like a country record that still has one foot in the sample-based electronic aesthetic that previously defined Gibson’s work.

Ostentatious as it is, there’s no denying that Magna Carta… Holy Grail is filled to the brim with satisfying, big-budget production.... It’s just a shame that Jay-Z doesn’t rap ‘em for all they’re worth.

They obliterate any subtle expression or connection to the listener beyond low-order thinking--the band just bludgeons the listener with generic narcissistic drivel.

For Years is at its best when Airhead is working in the first of these modes, the more melodic one.

What’s particularly exciting about this disc is the possibility that lies in Gunn’s interleaving of timeless songs and allover “time”--few of his influences and even fewer of his peers have searched in this direction.

This is an unfettered, deservedly ecstatic victory lap that’s riddled with in-jokes.

There are some solid points buried deep down in the wreckage of Cole’s seven-bar pileup, but you’ll have to sift through a great, big, ambivalent pile of solecisms in order to get to them. As it turns out, that holds true for the vast majority of Born Sinner.

L’Ami du Peuple is a predominantly rewarding album, despite the occasional misstep and despite its unambitious stylistic orthodoxy.

Like blues, the disco formula works--it’s both beautiful and timeless (well, timeless since the late 70s). But it doesn’t always feel as fresh as it once did--paradoxically, given the heavy-lidded sensibility the music embodies.

All of the delicate, precious tom buildups that segue into invariably lofty choruses, all laced with the same pining slide guitars, overlay the record with a strummy, mid-tempo delirium that sets in once the considerable swagger of the first three tracks wears off.

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

The result is a rap album that fundamentally challenges the notion of what a compilation is.

It’s a nebulous, dense, paranoid web of utterly unfiltered expression that’s utterly or negligibly fascinating depending on how much you care about Yeezy.

With Love’s desire to obscure any traces of the artistic hand that made it is both its most compelling trait and what ultimately prevents it from ascending to the aesthetic nirvana it imagines.

Field of Reeds may initially come across as inhumanely taut, straining, and indistinct to begin with, but this is the sound of precociousness finally arriving at a purpose.

The songs on This Is Another Life are so well written, so finely paced, and so relatable in the sentiments and predicaments they weave together, there’s little justification in chiding the album for not making it patently clear that art alone doesn’t redeem misfortune and anguish.

many of these songs see Campos and Maker presenting compelling musical ideas that simply aren’t expanded upon in an equally compelling manner. Still, Mount Kimbie frequently succeed here in capturing inspired, stirring musical ideas.

Where the dog-eared, snapshot ambient wooze of Twoism and Geogaddi once harbored a feverish throb, Tomorrow’s Harvest now prickles with hollow spaces: a fragmentary, pixelated symbolism has been lost in the construction of an outline of a broader system.

This album is no disaster, no Moonbeams and Bluejeans, but the benign flatness here suggests the ineffable whatever that made The Fall fascinating has fallen away, and it looks very far gone.

With Personal Record, Eleanor commits even more strongly to straightforward, sentimental, and concise songcraft.

Other Life is a collection of poignant, emotionally powerful pop songs; but on a more conceptual plane, this album is a self-referential commentary on music itself, an intense examination--and, ultimately, an extremely heartfelt refutation--of the hollow, ironic appropriation that defines much of contemporary music.

For now, The Redeemer’s many tangles make even some of the most personal music this year sound tedious.

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.

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.

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

There’s enough pulling power to draw you in, just not enough to get you hooked.

It’s in her artwork’s texture that Hval’s voice fascinates.

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.

There are few surprises, but each element finds its own breathing room such that the layered space of each track is fully audible.

Tending toward minimalism as opposed to shock musical tactics, Cosmin TRG doesn’t thrill with throat-grabbing statements, but of course that is far from his intention.

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.

For those with autumn coursing through their veins, they’d do well to assuage their summer by keeping Dirty Beaches’ Drifters/Love is The Devil coursing through their headphones.

Random Access Memories is by no means a perfect record, but it consistently possesses an inspired, organic sense of a vitality, a quality that is often denied by the cut-and-paste status quo of EDM.

They have laid down some astounding tracks here, but as a whole, the album is not on par with any full-length the band have released since Alligator.

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

It’s an honest delivery, but they are essentially preaching to the choir.

Abandon’s hammering slow pneumatic-drill beats are not so much an all-out assault as a grueling siege, in which the beleaguered inhabitants of the psyche find themselves starving, barely existing in a rising cesspool of their own shit and vomit, ridden with epidemic disease, turning to cannibalism and to frantic final Decameronesque debaucheries.

Nocturnes points the way out, with Hesketh having demonstrated not only the willingness and the ability to grow and develop, but also to retain a sense of her individuality and a keenness for what may set Little Boots apart from the rest.