Honest is transporting in ways that few records are, and no matter how strong the beat selection might be or how perfectly the guest list is curated, credit is due overwhelmingly to Future for being able to sustain and justify such a broad range of moods for the duration of the record.

With Tigers clocking in at a brisk 35 minutes, she definitely leaves you hungry for more.

This is a sexy album.

The pleasures that Pleasure describes are mundane to the point of tedium, trite beyond cliché. And the music itself is, despite the strength of Feist’s voice, mostly intolerable.

What makes Since We Last Spoke such an indisputably groundbreaking record is Rjd2's ability to create such an intricate pastiche of diverse musical styles that it seems like a wholly new genre in and of itself.

Beyond nodding more explicitly to the sounds of the early 70s than Ghost’s or Batoh’s work usually did, the real difference--the thing that marks The Silence out from these earlier projects--is a kind of poise and effortlessness, which is drawn out by the richness and immediacy of the production.

For the most part, it’s the moments that pivot between shadow and light that provide the most pleasure. “L’Inconnue” emerges from its chrysalis around the 1:40 mark, Legrand singing in French as a heavenly choral loop begins to surround her voice. Both musically and lyrically, the development feels closer to the sound of falling in love than anything they’ve made, an ecstatic payoff that ranks among their finest work.

While the second half of the album is a miscue -- eschewing the sunny innocence that makes his music so likeable -- I know what'll be in my CD player all spring.

The band isn't doing anything that hasn't been done before, but damn if that doesn't seem to matter a lick while listening to the record. It's just too youthful, effervescent, and charming.

Bill Orcutt is a mid-career eponymous release. This is a familiar signifier of artistic reinvention.

Sweeney brings an array of agile guitar playing and striking harmonies that create a more contained, musically astute Billyvironment.

Another Life, chameleonic as it is demonic, aggregates its influences and kaleidoscopes them into earworming shards of electronic puncta, a diabolical mimesis whose loathsome grin belies its functionality as dance music.

Chalk it up to Lanois, near-death experiences, or the wisdom of youth. No matter the cause, this is the Neil Young to embrace.

Deep meaning and well-crafted pop.

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.

The more I listen to Tones of Town, the more I can’t get it out of my head.

Lucky Shiner feels at once painfully intimate and intercontinentally expansive

The Morning Star is both an Exaltation of the Guitar and a magician’s vanishing act: Bachman himself, noise-man under the role of hypnotist, embracing chance and slippages and sloppiness and draperies.

Though it shrouds itself in chaos, Bottomless Pit is ultimately Death Grips’ most straightforward, morbid, and brutal report from the deep end yet. Like watching a great beast eat itself, there is little in the way of elegance or grand design to this music, yet it remains throttling nonetheless, as relentlessly blunt as it is overwhelmingly meaningless.

Black Sun is spotty and rusted, and it is likely that it will be interesting to most for this or that track - a grimy slayer, a leftfield floorfiller - or for the fact that it has a fantastic musique concrète apocalyptic vignette featuring Flying Lotus for a coda.

Lekman perfectly funnels his signature sound of gentle string and horn melodies, audaciously appropriate sampling, and often corny balladry into a well-oiled, 12-song machine.

The result is a cache of songs that are somewhat transposable with one another, but they’re undeniably well-crafted pieces of music, let alone psych-pop.

Sure, Street Horrrsing doesn’t overtly delineate any new sonic set, but its execution and relative brevity reflect highly on these two venerable artists.

Fabulous Muscles contains some of the band's best songs since Knife Play.

Peppered with dissatisfying, mommy-daddy emotastic lyrics, Jeff Tweedy impressions, and Four Tet-inspired, stop-on-a-dime, into-something-totally-unrelated segues that don't really belong on a country-twinged "let's hang out, drink, and make a record, dudes" kind of affair.

Rainwater Cassette Exchange is another reason to head down to your local cassette exchange and a great nightcap to polish off one of last year’s strongest albums.

As ever, the music of Rob Mazurek has numerous layers to confront, peel away, and embrace.

There’s enough texture and variety to Drop to make it a consistently engaging listen, although on a song-by-song basis, it doesn’t quite stack up to the albums preceding it.