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.