There’s a newfound purpose to his dilettantism, one that invests the album with more weight than anyone had any right to expect.

Nouns sounds as homemade as something released on a Warner Music affiliate could be. It’s crafted with a sense of pleasant haphazardness, gelling into one of those rare situations where everything that is thrown at the wall sticks.

Maybe that's the key to the whole album, how it can seem to be a blog-fisher one moment and slap you upside the head another: it dissolves before you actually know what hit you. But for a lot of us, that's all the more reason to dive right back in.

Shows Skinny Puppy at the top of their game once again.

If you like gorgeous folk, then this album is for you. If you don’t, well, The Hold Steady released something not that long ago.

Real Estate might not be the best classicist-leaning pop record of the year (that dubious honor goes to the more stylistically varied "Album," by Girls), but it certainly is the most confident, the most assured, and the most unassuming.

Despite any missteps, Bermuda Drain is laudable simply for its willingness to branch out and discover new ways of expression.

It involves not a disconnection from, but an exploration of the material potential in his instrument(s): an excursion to the outer limits of instrumentality, a commitment to resonance as the product of granular viscera: of throats and diaphragms and guts and lungs.

Ishi may be a lullaby, calling Ishi’s and Gengras’ friends to rest, but ultimately it imparts a peace to all who oscillate within the flux of the universe.

Contact is aggregated purge and celebration past the self, flesh seared back and stomp soldered to somnambulism.

On The Echoing Green, Cantu-Ledesma has brought a newfound clarity to his work, carving distinct shapes of mellifluous guitar lines to impose against his towering sonic architecture.

As ever, the Brooklyn four-piece triumph when they succumb to the dreamier elements of their work, of which Expect the Best carries just enough to sustain the listener across the finish line.

Phases nevertheless reaffirms its singer’s preeminence in the current milieu of indie rock. Pulling from material as recent as January and as early as 2010, the album aggregates Olsen’s previously unreleased work into a collection that vacillates between retrospection and contemporariness.

In spite of every effort and explicit claim to the contrary, it doesn't really sound like they're having that much fun.

You could diagnose I, Gemini as a frustrating text, a scattershot indulgence that only occasionally succeeds as a collection of songs: it is.

COW makes no claims to reinvent the wheel. Yet its heightened attention to detail marks a new focus for the duo, who, with less tools than ever before, manage to find a sound that’s wistful, wide-eyed, and surprisingly full of sounds new to the act, if still par for the course within the wider realm of contemporary composition.

Ripatti has extended himself beyond what reticence he may typically exhibit: his generosity and, yes, conviviality have birthed another notch in an already remarkable oeuvre.

Here she sounds more focused, and her delivery more triumphant.

Even if it frontloads the strongest and newest material, Black Velvet provides a largely engaging second side. The one exception being his cover of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” originally released as a single in 2011, which feels somehow more gimmicky than the (solid, even if it highlights how cloying Cobain’s lyrics could be) Nirvana cover preceding it.

Sagittarian Domain is a noble quasi-failure, an enjoyable and driven jam that, despite its reliance on certain tired tropes of its obvious Krautrock influences, nevertheless succeeds when it focuses its exploration on texture.

Their liquid funk/R&B/hip-hop hybrid has never been more refined.

Aloha sound more like Genesis than ever.

He continues to chart new territory, using his latest album to highlight sonic textures and what they seem to suggest about a metaphorical city. Working within those constraints, he's captured the nuance of living in many real cities and, in so doing, has crafted one of the stronger releases you'll hear this year.

If you were hoping for a predictable outing from Ben Chasny, you won't find it on The Sun Awakens.

Schoolboy Q is neither a great lyricist nor a technically dazzling rapper.... Happily then, the production on Oxymoron is uniformly solid.

Ultimately, this album is a useful index to effects and samples you might want to import into Ableton Live at this moment, but not much more than that.

Tragicomedies isn't terrible, but its significance hinges on two established and already surpassed mediums.

It’s breathtaking, it’s assured, it’s a perfect finale, it LIVES UP TO THE HYPE.