No Love Deep Web includes some of the group's most accessible material; "Lil Boy" and "Deep Web" are the type of glitch freak-outs over which Lil Ugly Mane acolytes and Crystal Castles fans can come together.

Beyond the Fleeting Gales is a genuine and unpretentious promise from Crying that they are here, and so are we, and together we can save the world, even if it’s just for a moment.

If Snares is complexity incarnate, Lanois is distilled modesty. These are strengths that are realized individually but create discord in tandem. Their pairing is like eating apple pie topped with cheddar cheese: some are sure to find enjoyment in the combination, but for the rest of us, these pairings are best avoided.

The LP plays at depth and synthesis while making do with simply reproducing indie electro-pop tropes.

Although Anchor feels lacking at times in terms of experimentation and exploration, its affirming energy and confidence never come off as suppressed, and it is through this lens that its true ambitions are revealed: play like you’ll never leave this place.

Sandoval and her collaborators may never modify the melancholy torch that they bear, but they keep that fire masterfully for those of us who still have a yen for patient, no-frills sounds that happen to serve as a miracle balm.

It hits just as furiously and sloppily as all the old Markers standards, no matter its label, run time, or production quality.

At nine songs in length, Go is short enough that its purposefully naive milieu never becomes rote or oppressive.

Ultimately, the listener must be contented with the reality that Parallax Error Beheads You is a record that truly speaks for itself.

It's an enjoyable record (if somewhat slight, for a full-length), but its best moments are a lot like those faded mom-and-dad photos Huntai likes to use: iconic, intriguing, but not quite his own.

Wonderland isn’t a very good album, but it more than succeeds at being a mess. Is this meant to be a Marxist critique of capitalism, or is it a maximalist celebration of the same? I’d argue that it’s both, but much like Berglund, I have too strong a sense of the fact that I do not understand what it all means.

Pretty okay.... The lyrics, typical alpha-male self-pity material, aren't all that bad, really, but they're often curdled by the delivery.

32 Levels is a line in the sand, rather than a high watermark, for Clams Casino and the genre as a whole; a fertile growth outward, rather than a zeitgeist-recapturing album.

Here, obsessed with his own mortality, Conor isolates himself from what stirs his best writing.

Although it remains, at its foundation, an exploration of themes that Pierce has long explored, Songs In A&E becomes more than the sum of its historical variants by directly placing emotional vulnerability at its focal point.

Walker is still ultimately a troubadour at heart, a keeper of old languages retelling us stories from years past, and Deafman Glance shows that he’s continuing to sharpen his tongue.

It’s his intensity of focus coupled with an impressive range of motion that gives this album its real strength and maturity.

It's a great introduction to the wide range that Broadcast works with, and it holds together as well as any of their albums.

It’s a trippy album, but it doesn’t trip into too many psych clichés, or perhaps it has fooled me simply by tumbling into all of them.

Dance music gets one step closer to an honest depiction of euphoria; yes, yes, you’re drooling quite heavily, but at least you’re drooling through an earnest smile.

Sacrificing none of their self-effacement in their pursuit of a more emotionally direct style, WHY? have stumbled upon something uniquely personal yet utterly commercial.

The timbres of the modular synth, in my opinion, are dull, but that doesn’t mean that Venetian Snares hasn’t created interesting music from his machines.

He's best when he's less accessible.

Their developments are nothing if not honest, even if the gruff, muffled intimations of hip-hop sound awkward or antagonistic, even if the softness of these pieces evades any conventional sense of emotional directness.

Hendy now seems to be making a bid for the sort of omnivorous, stylistically noncommittal psych-hop that's been relatively popular - marking critically acclaimed hip-hop milestones - for more than a decade now.

No one wants to see a zombie in the rear-view mirror, and nobody wants music that reeks of old trends, but both have their uses. Bands like Weekend have us looking nervously over our shoulder as we drive recklessly into the future.

Like the flatness of a reflective pool, Skip a Sinking Stone stretches out in stunning beauty, giving listeners a gorgeous reflection of soaring, spectral synesthesia. But beyond a skip along the surface, the release is hesitant to move toward anything of a prescriptive statement; though, with lightness and transience so central to its theme, maybe that’s by design.

Plastic Anniversary is unfamiliar, strange, unsettling, and wonderful.