The Terror may be The Flaming Lips’ most concise statement to date.

Despite some questionable, off-putting decisions, there’s a wistful, melancholic temperature to this eponymous debut, one belied by the band’s sophomoric war metaphors and rubbery noodling, and it makes their self-titled debut one of the most essential records of the season for me.

This music took time, precision, intuition, will. But it is the same. It doesn’t demand reverence, but its immense power might go null if not for the voidless silence that could introduce it, carry it like a medium into your every day everyday.

At first listen, Tidings seemed more varied and adventurous than Steeple does. It had moments that hinted at pentatonic scales, exotic tastes of other worlds only compounded by the record's almost utter lack of focus.

Besides adhering to his familiar sonic longings and rather than dampening the message, Far Side Virtual succeeds in exciting the collective memory of that generation now so conjoined to its technological appendages.

When all these cuts add up, we wind up with an album’s worth of pleasantries.

Root For Ruin is hardly a great album, but it is an affirmative gesture toward commitment, to each other and to their craft.

As it stands, the album (along with the essential corresponding film, Icon Eye) stands as a rather moving document of the profundity of the cross-cultural and cross-generational conversation that goes on throughout all popular culture, and given the niche audiences for both Sun Araw and The Congos, this project offers a view on a very rarely explored conversation at that.

We find ourselves encountering songs that give themselves the time and space to breathe, build, incorporate shimmering choirs of backing singers and more layered overdubs than you can shake a stick at into the mix.

Discontinued Perfume has a net effect, despite its potpourri. Still, I wish they'd let some of their ideas out to roam a little more.

Cotonou Club backs up the feeling I got when I saw the group on their recent UK tour, namely that, while they're still very funky, they aren't currently laying the voodoo down like they did on those magic 70s discs.

To call Emotional Mugger a celebration of excess, as sweet as it is, would miss the mark. (Although it’s no veiled warning, either--it enjoys itself too much.) No, this is a bender with an undercurrent of anxiety.

Sadly, This is for the White in Your Eyes sees a band with great potential whose ambitions too frequently get the best of them.

Nine Suns, One Morning is unpredictable without being arbitrary.

This disconnect between Dirty Projectors’s pop tendencies with its “art” signaling is what ultimately stains the album with such a deep sense of confusion, making it difficult to parse who exactly this music is written for, if not people who are already fans of Dirty Projectors.

Full of craft and purpose, enchanting and creative, Rites is a promising tease of better things to come.

The pioneering hardiness Faun Fables capably venerates is now the domain of reenactors. The intrepid few who still seek frontiers have only the vaster dark of dreams to explore.

Equal parts 007-intrigue and spaghetti western-histrionics, this is music at its most cinematic.

As a palate-cleanser for those of us jaded on the overplay of St. Vincent or even the theatrico-folk-foray of Arcade Fire-esque energies, The Golden Record is sufficient and at its best sublime. At its worst, though, it's drifty, gossamer, and chilly.

All of the hallmarks of the band’s debut remain blissfully intact, and yet they’ve managed to engineer an LP with even more seemingly absurd outliers than minimalism and Radiophonic blips.

It brings out the best in Toth both as a musician and a songwriter.

A consistent, immediately catchy album that holds up after repeated listens.

By the force of their musicianship on Rivers, however, Wildbirds & Peacedrums manage to own that risk as one of their greatest assets.

The Phoenix is, ultimately, a collection of immersive and impressively well-produced analogue techno tracks, bound up in a package with overt cultural references that tend to distract rather than add to the experience.

His subtle turns of phrase and shifts in volume manage to achieve immersive depth even when the interplay of sax, strings, electronics, and drums otherwise lacks color.

Eden’s greatest asset is cupcakKe’s domineering voice; she wields hooks that effectively complement her verses and maintains a flow that not only justifies but also elevates her puerile sense of humor.

Born Like This is simply not as forward-thinking as his best works.

Trying Hartz works as either an excellent starting point for Danielson or the perfectly paced next step for someone getting acquainted with the work of Daniel Smith and his musical family.