It's probably best that the album we've been waiting so long to hear is as safe as Guero is. At this point we just want our Beck, and Guero is as Beck as Beck can be.

Way Out Weather is a sonically dense record--Gunn’s de facto opus by breadth and scope--but lyrically it is impersonal, preoccupied by small pleasures and moments of private reflection that, while individually beautiful and poetic, do not suggest a self-aware attempt at making a masterpiece.

That she is able to incorporate these technical talents into solid songwriting is what makes This Is It the success that it is.

These songs, nearly half a century old, are as relevant as ever. They should have never been hawked to commercial singers, but delivered as broadsides to the public or as protest music to audiences (as many of them were). Active, agitated citizens should be the recipients of these songs.

Good Bad Not Evil covers a wide range of territory, but never feels needlessly eclectic. Every stylistic experiment employed over the 35-minute runtime is a welcome departure from their signature slime rock

It’s a party album, which means it’s utopian. It’s a solo album, which means it’s rebooting. “Next Level Charli” doesn’t sound like a version we’ve never heard before; it sounds like the very same, not even accelerated but integrated, at 100% synchronization rate.

Grizzly Bear are an Animal Collective that decided to go more intelligible and accessible instead of running naked through the woods on five hits of sunshine acid while screaming in tongues.

His choruses are instantly memorable and his word-soup lyricism easily places him in the upper echelon of intelligent emcees, somewhere between MF Doom and Dose One.

The finished product is brilliantly, beautifully schizophrenic.

If Tempest was hellfire apocalypse romance, prophesied steampunk armageddon, then Shadows in The Night is the revelation of the true nature of the American songbook.

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.

This album is a consistent, expansive collection of modestly experimental pop songs (covering familiar aesthetic territory, and exploring broad and intertwining personal/familial, political, theological, and philosophical themes), and well worth repeated listens and eventual internalization.

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.

How to Dress Well has most often been described as a distorted take on R&B, and I suppose that's most accurate, too. Love Remains substantiates the hearsay with slow, soulful requiems that begin to feel like lovingly sculpted effigies of some of the genre's more immortal catalysts.

Were brevity the chiefmost virtue of popular music, "Baby Birch" would be a turgid waste of time, rather than the deft and skillful creature it is. The same sentiment goes for the rest of the album; there is a depth to the material here that rewards--nay, demands--repeated scrutiny.

Those who like Mercury Rev like them a lot; so while The Secret Migration doesn't happen to migrate into new territory, they are the type of band that could go on making the same album forever and we wouldn't care.

Pressed together, it becomes apparent how pleasurably the band’s entire discography has crystallized. Capturing the quicksilver violence of youth may be beyond us now, as it is for Wild Beasts, but we still make time to celebrate the night’s dark chemistry.

As evidenced by their name, The Body is seeking something more basic, using techniques that link us on a primal level to that most universal of human certainties: death itself. Together, they give us both the forest and the harpies, the tortured and the torturer.

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 invites its listeners into that silent continuum that makes music whole.

While it may not carry the same intrigue of a college student self-recording a lo-fi opus between classes, this new Twin Fantasy elucidates the masterfulness of an incisive indie savant whose creative reach had, until recently, exceeded his grasp.

Apocalypse is keenly observed, distinctly humane, and predictably idiosyncratic; it is yet another minor triumph from an artist who, despite his constant self-deprecation, seems incapable of offering up less than his best.

Megafaun, with reverence to everything and without reference to anyone, are quickly carving their own path both through and away from their musical roots.

Although Watching Dead Empires In Decay lacks content other than song titles, it evokes spaces that need no explanation.

Wide Awake! is the album in which America’s most consistent punk band once again distill their myriad influences, this time with a whole new list of reasons why their minds never push the brakes.

The style hasn't changed, the lyrics haven't suffered, and the charm and charisma is still clearly evident.

Alpinisms is an undoubtedly singular album, setting the bar quite high for this burgeoning trio.

Freetown Sound is a clapback, a healing song, a historical re-embodiment of the (infinite number of) (also) black experience(s) contained within the vantage of a single individual.

An invigorating breath of fresh music.