I think it’s safe to say that this third Volume remains the most autobiographical of the bunch.

The album’s certainly well-produced, occasionally catchy, and at times even soothing in its simplicity, but it can also be dull and uninspired, like something I might put on when I want inoffensive background music for a relaxing social gathering.

A few forgettable collaborations and sing-by-number hooks aside (the usually spirited Seu Jorge sounds especially enervated on “Favela Love,” which languishes until a jaunty guitar riff revives it well after the four-minute mark), many of the guest verses on the record pleasantly surprise.

Part of how Cronin succeeds in making the listener feel good are his failures: the outsized ambition and the pushing of his practical capacities remind the listener than they’re being spoken to by an everyman.

If the album can be considered R&B proper, it’s one of the most consistent and fulfilling longplayers the genre has yet birthed.

Monomania will be remembered as the album where Deerhunter veered from their carefully acquired sound as opposed to constructing a more pronounced encapsulation of it.

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.

It’s great to have a thematically consistent and well-executed Thee Oh Sees album.

For being as spare as it is, Zomes’ music is incredibly full while maintaining a hazy, idealistic distance.

Much as every black witch’s cloak is undeniably part of a discourse that includes both Black Sabbath and Black power, The Haxan Cloak is in a dialogue with contemporary dubstep, and with Excavation, he proves that he has much to add to the conversation.

The songs of his that have stood out most are the ones that at least try to meet the listener halfway, the ones that betray the deep-seeded enthusiasm underlying Vile’s laid-back, stoner(-esque — he’s a family guy, now) cool. While such material can still be found on Wakin on a Pretty Daze, locating it is becoming more and more of a chore.

The majority of tunes on offer here do very little to build on the ideas and panache exposed on Soft Control.

The absence of transportation and deliverance is ultimately what enables Recurring Dream to realize its pessimistic vision of the confused mechanisms we use to delude ourselves into thinking all is well, and despite its conceptually-necessitated limitations, the album is not short of moments of resonance and emotional impact.

Prolific folks like Presley tend to forget the presentation of an album, and Cyclops Reap seems like a step in that direction: not just a collection of songs, but a collection of songs that work well together.

Total Nite still feels to me like lateral growth, neither distinctly worse but certainly not better than what preceded it.

Ghostface and Younge’s filmic vision comes together with great aplomb, and yields one of the bloodiest, most ambitious, and straight-up funnest hip-hop albums of 2013.

Unlike the greatest movements of his previous albums, Wings of Love’s diversity is its greatest fault, as 14 tracks visit musical fads long forgotten and ill conceived.

The eponymous Stygian Stride LP might come from a period of psychological and technical excavation, but the music stands on its own in the halls of modern electronic music and psychedelia.

Seabed is drained of an expressive self.

The Terror may be The Flaming Lips’ most concise statement to date.

Rock music is ultimately about a wild feeling, and Milk Music are delivering it in just the right place.

Overgrown is a remarkable effort from an artist who continues to do things his own way, regardless of the consequences.

There are a few scorching solos throughout, but most of Ensemble Pearl witnesses the musicians paying more attention to atmosphere than technicality.

All of a sudden, the hooks sink deeper; the simple solos, redolent of Pavement/Malkmus to the axe-max, sound better; and, most of all, the songwriting is muscular.

This is no walk in the park, it has to be said, but Wolf is going to be remembered as the record that sees Tyler deploying his tact as an astute beat-maker and a producer more than allowing his reputation as a Satan-worshiping neo-fascist to swell any further. Musically, it’s a step in the right direction.

By no means is The North Borders sterile, but there isn’t a notably invigorating spark either--at least not of an obtuse or intense gesture.

This album is easily taken as it is, a good side portrait of the parts of America that are somewhat still in the throes of modernity (if we all aren’t to some degree).

YOKOKIMTHURSTON displays an issue that affects several contemporary aesthetic forms when they become institutionalized: no matter how transgressive, shocking, or committed an artistic statement can be, it still remains enclosed within the safe, whitewashed, antiseptic confines of the art gallery under the sheltering halo of “high-culture” values, for the admiration of a see-but-do-not-touch enlightened elite.

While the tension and confusion have passed, we are unfortunately left with a pretty disappointing piece of work.

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

Your willingness to stick with McPhun from here on out depends entirely how much you enjoy listening to music that sounds like a meticulous recreation of 80s dance pop.

Keep things simple, reminded by older folks of a time when it was totally acceptable to admit being part of the KISS Army.

On 20/20, the Timberlake/Timbaland team seems content to set up a basic (and more often than not, bland) hook, repeat it ad infinitum, and tack on some superfluous bits until the desired, bloated end product comes into being.

It’s not so easily classifiable as “country,” but easily classifiable as really great pop music.

Taken as a piece, Somewhere Else can’t live up to those giddy heights, but its sweetness is still to be savored.

While Moore’s aesthetic interests are rangy and Chelsea Light Moving most certainly exist to make them a compelling reality, the disc’s final act seems to be the most keyed-in to his recognizably arty, bookish-punk iconoclasm.

Perhaps what is most obvious is that Untogether may have benefited from Blue Hawaii turning it up just a notch or two.

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”).

What falls from the mouth is indeed valuable, in the case of Fear of Men.

For Pickering, electronic music is as powerful as any supernatural promise, and on House of Woo, he demonstrates his dedication to the beat with a most persuasive degree of conviction.

It’s an accomplished one, and Fernow sometimes impressively commands the stylistic cues of the electronic musics he’s discovering. But the cold, calculating position of producer feels alien to Prurient as a project, where once Fernow torched his soul.

Total Folklore is a captivating release of memorable, “hummable” tunes dressed in the trappings of noise and “difficult listening.”

The lack of vanity, the frank way it strives for accessibility only serves to further magnify the greatness of Anxiety. It does the most ideal thing art can do: it tries to make sense of life itself, without pretense or guile.

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.

James seems to be in a good place, and thankfully for us, he’s managed to capture and translate it quite well into his music.

While it still has a few standout moments that grab the listener and spark a mood, it’s only occasionally eventful and, ultimately, doesn’t reach the heights of its predecessor.

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.

True Minds continues a proud tradition of celebrating dead ends and lost causes.

A well-done lo-fi pop album lost of the things we’re used to: contexts and whatnot that make both us and the analytical process feel much easier, helping us pretend that we really know what’s going on and how to get behind the ideas.

The non-stop purging of masculinist bile can be exhausting, but that can and should be considered a measure of success, a sign that, despite whatever growth has been exhibited, success hasn’t changed Pissed Jeans.

The stronger songs to these brittle ears are the ones that feel like experiments within an album.

Even with all of this depth, Push The Sky Away finds Cave doing more with less lyrically.

There are solid structures to these pieces, the result of audio engineers who know how to combine materials. But there’s an elegance, too, in the manner in which lines pick up from each other, rhythms are doubled or halved, textures complement each other.

What we have on The Jazz Age is music that’s haunting itself.

As an exercise in artfully executed pop maximalism, {Awayland} is unquestionably a treat.... All he needs now is something worth saying.

It’s obviously well-crafted and well-executed.

There are gestures in her music that are so touching, or so beautiful, they leave me dumbstruck.

The album’s strongest cuts reveal an undeniable energy and excitement on the behalf of its creators, but those moments are much too sparse to draw in many from outside of Putnam’s cult of true believers.

The impressions made are that the sublime, the relinquishing of the self can only come with work and time. “-” seems to come from a similar place as The King of Limbs’ latter tracks, which speaks to the notion of human fallibility and fragility, helping make News From Nowhere a decidedly beautiful album.

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

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.

It sounds promising at first, but then it slumps into a bed of mediocrity that Toro y Moi has already proved he is more than capable of avoiding.

Reasons to Live sounds like old summer afternoons.

Armed with bolstered production and the band's strongest songcraft to date, Alamanac represents not only the next step for Widowspeak, but perhaps the next point in our never-ending discussion of what "real" folk is in the 21st century.

Lysandre is full of problems/problematic things, and most of it rests on one of the album's biggest problems: the insistent, ever-present "me."

It brings out the best in Toth both as a musician and a songwriter.

There are enough genre-hopping and synergistic, trans-genre partnerships present on the tracklist that Long. Live. A$AP, its commercial bets hedged, feels not unlike a myriad of other major-label rap disappointments from nearly any other era of rap.

It's perhaps not as immediately satisfying as their early work and not nearly as charming as their intimate mid-career efforts, but, after several careful listens, the album feels as powerful and urgent as anything else in their discography.

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.

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.

I catch myself unknowingly enjoying Lights Out whenever I quit trying to overtly "listen" to it.

On The Odds, there is a sense in which The Evens are tensing the muscles of their quiet/loud rock within its short range.

Blunt has proven himself to be a master participant in this aesthetic float-game, and The Narcissist II is his demented billet-doux to the gratification that continues to elude.

Despite their best efforts, Free Reign marks just another step in Clinic's journey to unfortunately become even more forgettable.

This is Jack Tatum's Platonic pop record, and if it doesn't meet the expectations of critics, for lack of soupy textures or the rough edges of home recording or whatever, it's because he exceeded them.

Cut the World may not be essential Antony and the Johnsons, but it's a recapitulant compilation of some of their strongest songs, in some of their strongest iterations, while presenting stimulating ideas for reconsidering their music and our own planet.

Elverum has never sounded more comfortable as a producer of volume and viscosity.

While Nookie Wood suggests lusty concupiscence, naughtiness, and vim, these conjurations are foundered by big production and mastering straight out of 90s alt-pop radio

Thankfully, Connected, despite the richness of its sounds, is spacious enough to leave room for the imagination (with the slight exception of "Trios," which teems with movement). That's not to say it's empty.

Instead of commanding attention, Relief allows it to drift, preventing the listener's final escape into the contentless void of sonic oblivion.

While the remixes don't contain the same level of shambolic personality that the nascent originals do, they are still a testament to the fact that Friel's work is full of possibility.

This very refusal to cohere, to make sense, to play the game of identity and otherness, of harmony and disharmony, makes Bish Bosch this year's only necessary work of art.

Just to Feel Anything never quite seems to justify itself in the way that Does it Look Like I'm Here did, to compel you to pay attention in spite of its apparent familiarity, by whatever method. And as a result, it just feels like a lot of wasted energy.

Quarter Turns embodies a shadowed and daunting environment with such an abundance of beauty that it bears contrast rather than resemblance to that damning abode, for the former remains an uncontrollably agreeable environment, despite its grim and unnerving allure.

Sequitur contains powerful resonances with the past, and it certainly reorganizes some beautiful moments that have been left behind, but some of these moments were left there for a reason.

After several spins, it appears that 'edginess' is precisely what's missing here; in fact, the listener is left pining for it, as almost every track floats along at its own pleasant, blissful pace--easy to swallow but difficult to digest.

No Love Deep Web includes some of the group's most accessible material; "Lil Boy" and "Deep Web" are the type of glitch freak-outs over which Lil Ugly Mane acolytes and Crystal Castles fans can come together.

The female overcoming time and space in the way that Herndon does with Movement is so frustrating and frightening.

There's something inherently adolescent about an EP that veers sharply from genre to genre, each song an island, completely separate from those that precede and those that follow.

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).

By forging a path from hardcore punk through sludge and doom metal and influencing many others along the way, Neurosis have worn their influences on their sleeves, yet have still managed to evolve by sounding more intensely like themselves.

Even though (III) is Crystal Castles' most unified album, the text of Glass' voice is still faceless and without words--empty.

Compared to the discourse and debate surrounding the new album, the music itself is somewhat of a non-event: two epic 20-minute-long LP sides, and a 7-inch of drone tracks.

Soundgarden's best material conjures a dense atmosphere of gloom that renders Cornell's angsty lyrics portentous and significant. But few of the songs on King Animal evoke much of anything in the way of feeling.

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.

He's best when he's less accessible.

It may not break much new ground, certainly not for instrumentation or other reasons given, but it's one of the most solid albums all year.

Paradise is the best attempt (yet) to cohere a deeply incoherent artist.