If Plowing Into the Field of Love is meant to convey anything, it’s the otherworldly passion of a world without control and without truth.

Something about the gummy aesthetic of the viscera at work here keeps I Love You from sounding too awry when its elements seem to suffer from slight exhaustion, elasticity, endocrine peaks, biological decay.

Goat devotees should be most satisfied with this addition to the collection, and the uninitiated could find worse places to start.

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

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.

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

An album that's inspiring in its ambition.

It’s not an incredibly remarkable record, but when a band is this consistent for this long, it’s hard to fault it.

With Graphic As A Star, she’s delivered an intimate reading of a revered American poet and made it entirely her own, creating her most beguiling work yet in the process.

Friley has taken the sound of his debut EP--the four songs of which all appear on Paddywhack--and maintained that arresting, zombie barbershop quartet aesthetic, while also extending it into new developments, intervening piano lines and looped organ riffs, with which it blends in ways that never jar (your preserves).

This is one lush, warm bit of earcandy that will not let you down.

Holding Hands with Jaime is a remarkable debut album. It ticks off plenty of familiar noise-rock boxes, but Girl Band massages them into a whole that feels authentically their own.

A much more serious, often less danceable, instrumental effort.

In its own subtle way, Demolished Thoughts is a triumphant statement, one of power through peace, of love through fear.

Islah is one of the more exciting major label rap debuts in recent years, and one positive to being a Gates fan is that you’ll most certainly never get tired with him.

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.

The diversity of the material provides Galás with an opportunity to showcase the full range of her vocal talents.

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.

It's the sound of restless, searching energy channeled into a bare-bones context, surging against its boundaries by sheer compositional rigor.

Ocean's work is almost as good as those he references; his lyrics are almost uniformly terrific, sensual, specific, and unpredictable.

It's conflicted, ambivalent, complex.

No album will ever move you quite like it, and if it weren't for a slight misstep, it would be perfect in almost every way.

Deerhoof may be more serious this time around, but the music’s still very imaginative and fun.

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

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.

Ephorize is cupcakKe’s most polished statement both sonically and conceptually.

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.

It’s comprised largely of several years of demos and “field recordings” and collected samples and experiments and improvisations. Perhaps that’s why it feels so novel at the precipice of a new decade; after 10(+) years of failed political experiments and improvisations, here’s a new songbook stripped of the arrogance and pretense of capitalist evangelism.