Like blues, the disco formula works--it’s both beautiful and timeless (well, timeless since the late 70s). But it doesn’t always feel as fresh as it once did--paradoxically, given the heavy-lidded sensibility the music embodies.

It's more pleasant than arresting.

While this release is ruminative in nature, the temperament isn’t far removed from the classic record with which this release shares a striking visual resemblance.

Although it lacks the conceptual cohesion and embroidered orchestration of their last three albums and has a few weak tracks, Animal Joy adds sentiment to intellect, an undefined rebellion to Shearwater's heady songwriting and thereby challenges that duality.

Internal Logic is a well-constructed album, more punk than post-, stronger in its ideas, and a welcome departure from so-called "love" songs prevalent in modern bands inspired by the early 60s. It's a strong statement from the band and a treat for those who revel in such influences.

McCombs doesn’t want to be known any better than he already is, but here, for once, he shows that he understands everyone else a far lot better than he has to date.

Every song is serrated with pixel edges, and Alice Glass’ sometimes morose, sometimes lilting like a Valley girl vocals vibrate with such catchy and violent gloom that it’d send any human/marmoset/sentient being into an epileptic dance session.

There are very few metaphors for the limitlessness of human creativity and ingenuity as powerful as that provided by space, and now by Public Service Broadcasting.

Taken as a piece, Somewhere Else can’t live up to those giddy heights, but its sweetness is still to be savored.

YG’s songs about women are just clumsy from a basic storytelling standpoint, rehashing the same clichés that you’d find on a Hotep Facebook group. It stunts the flow of 4REAL 4REAL. ... But while he oftentimes plays the role of hyper-masculine rapper, he also defines his anxiety in deeply traumatic and thorough ways. He has a knack for boisterous exuberance, stressing the finer things while being relatable to regular people on every block in every town.

Talk Normal invoke the bare and abstract, not the fully rendered or figured, and it feels like they are making not only the kind of music we never thought we'd be missing out on, but also the kind that would be hard to live without.

It doesn’t require the patience or emotional/intellectual involvement that albums I typically listen to require. The cool thing, though, is that it does have quite a bit of redeeming value.

The album pursues a house sound consistent with 2011's Ital's Theme.

This recording renders music back into its essence, that language that, instead of communicating meanings, is, as Adorno has it, the human attempt, doomed as ever, to name the Name, which has been dispersed.

Prolific folks like Presley tend to forget the presentation of an album, and Cyclops Reap seems like a step in that direction: not just a collection of songs, but a collection of songs that work well together.

The result is an album that feels more like a compilation than a true collaboration.

With The Trip, she's split the difference, crafting a modestly arranged work that showcases a variety of strengths we already knew she had.

It’s a thoroughly digestible record, then, freed from the downstroke neuroses that basically defined Hot Snakes or the labyrinthine catharsiscore mounted and milked by Jehu.

There's a sort of imposed solipsism here, when tones sometimes seem to have different throb rates depending on the listener's caffeine intake. But Morgan himself is absolutely aware of, and screwing around with, conventions, assumptions, and expectations.

The production on each song is a little too repetitive.

The righteous Southern revival swagger of these electrified riffs collect over Jago’s drums to rain down the real rawk people have mistakenly praised Kings Of Leon for providing, absolutely destroying them at their own game.

This album does nothing to disrupt their two-decade streak of psychedelic, cosmic, post-rock transcendence.

Tonight’s Music celebrates the space between the excessive and the unfinished, refusing us resolution, promising us a little everything.

Why Bother? may not have quite the same sonic guitar depth as Gimme Trouble, but the mechanical, industrial-punk synth work, inching closer to perfection with each release, does an admirable job of filling in the aural gaps.

Autechre present a uniquely realistic vision of our present-future: always problematic, limited by human nature and other complications, yet driven forward by incredible optimism, perpetually fixing itself and, adapting to new contexts, engaged in a constant state of becoming.

The fact that Best Troubador manages to outright milk unqualified whimsy from the life and music of one of country’s most rugged, ambivalent heroes--well, it’s really something.

That Toro Y Moi's new record Underneath the Pine is distinctly a product of his songwriting, without sounding exactly like his 2010 debut, suggests that chillwave may still have some legs to it after all.

The only drawback is Hutch Harris' vocals.