The band's strongest offering to date.

Expo 86 puts up a good showing. The best songs are catchy as hell but complex enough to stay sharp even after repeated listening.

New Material works as an excellent signpost of where the group has been and where it’s headed.

Drone Trailer is another fine addition to MV & EE’s ridiculously prolific, yet highly impressive output. Even with its scant six tunes, it’s unlikely anyone will be left hanging long if more music from these two is what they are after.

These fine-detail improvements are what make This Is Happening LCD’s best work to date, though mumblings about how Murphy might be repeating himself a bit remain valid.

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.

Allways, then, is simply a welcome return from one of Chicago’s most consistent artists, reaffirming their primacy among contemporary exploratory rock bands.

It manages to captures our curiosity without giving away too much, gently nudging us to explore.

While the center of Blackshaw’s compositions will likely always be guitar, he has shown with this album that he can write music for several different instruments and do so incredibly well.

An intriguing and mesmerizing compilation of songs that underscores any love you already had for Broken Social Scene.

Harvey Milk never quite match the achievement of their canonical works, but, nevertheless, they've succeeded in stretching the running joke without dissolving into self-parody. Or perhaps more aptly, they've delivered on the promise of self-parody with a record of genuine insecurity, unsettling pessimism and inherent, indisguisable humanity.

The songs are better than solid. They're catchier than catchy. These songs are just good.

This CD is in itself a bold challenge to producers everywhere to step out from behind the laptop and explore the creative, spontaneous elements of live interaction.

Not only is it exciting to hear Youngs challenge himself with genre conventions, but it’s also comforting to know that no matter which mode Youngs adopts, it always sounds like him.

The Long Shadow of the Paper Tiger cements their place at the forefront of contemporary dance music. The songs are funky and immediate, but display a global consciousness that puts them in a class of their own.

Essentially, it’s the effects of Aesop’s modesty that keeps him afloat above some of his equally skilled contemporaries. (This, in addition to the dope factor, more than makes up for the moment when the album overwhelms and shapes into a part-primal/part-industrial drone.)

The strings and tympani gradually fade out until we are left in silence. The moment serves as an appropriate conclusion to a singular work from an extremely talented new voice.

A supernal set of tracks ends Preparations, movements of pure reverie that complete the album in fitting fashion.

Blade of the Ronin’s greatest success lies not in avoiding the commonplace, but rather in their commitment to pre-SDCC juvenilia, as well as to a more holistic sense of sincerity.

This is undoubtedly a stronger effort than Shadows Collide, and maybe that's due to [Frusciante's] ability to just let the music fly instead of attempting to overwork things.

Albarn doesn't give us a "Clint Eastwood" or a "Dare" this time around, but in spite of a messy and patently artificial conceptual framework, Plastic Beach feels clean, shiny, and new.

A lot of W.C. Hart’s lyrics are preoccupied with the idea of locating yourself within the whole whorl of the earth-psychedelia-human experience, be it from underneath, above, sideways, chronologically, anyhow, anyway, somewhere between the “rock and stars and sand.”

The sound design of the album is conventionally breathtaking.

Together, Stetson and Neufeld have succeeded in not only melding their respective sounds, but also refining them.

In destroying himself, Chasny has unearthed deeper, simpler fundamentals in his craft and, in doing so, breathed new life into his musical voice. With Hexadic II, Six Organs of Admittance is born again.

Arca suggests a sort of shift that is so well-defined, confident, significant, and grounded in the artist’s own past aesthetics that it capably reconstitutes its onlookers’ iconic definition of the artist.

Blackheart is ongoing and nearly seamless, unselfconscious in its refashioning of 80s guitar licks, steel drums, 256-bit EDM, flutes, and trap snares.

Family is a work of purpose, from a band whose previously wandering attention-spans rendered any chance of artistic success accidental.