Though the experience of these songs are much easier to digest than their previous releases, Nick and Paul are still creatively pushing themselves with this album.

As a propulsive work, fueled by immediacy and intensity, Devour rejects the attempt to escape the body through the gear-consumed noise fetishist.

Despite the absence of a unifying theme or motif, these primarily acoustic songs breathe with a plethora of everyday detail that obscures their often nonexistent innards.

At heart, Watch the Throne is a Kanye West production. It's more of a holding pattern than the seismic leap of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but WTT covers a ton of territory with aplomb; Kanye's hallmark versatility and tasteful maximalism as a producer are again in full view.

Time & Space explodes with positive energy, emphasizing the rebuilding of oneself while the band itself builds together as a unit.

It's a mix that works just as well on the dance floor as the bedroom.

By focusing on his aesthetic and retaining an interest in the possibilities that exist within slow music while setting himself time limitations, Porter has created a record that is as bold and as breathtaking as we might have ever hoped for, regardless of the projection it is set to generate.

The music is personal--an interior look--softly sung with more than a smidgen of sass and blitheness

God is Good shows a clear effort to steer their boat past the Nile, past Yemen, and into new territory.

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.

It’s an album of stitched-together aspects that feel incongruous, though interesting.

Strange Weather, Isn't It? is undoubtedly the band's most streamlined effort to date.

Singles leaves the listener in much the same state as their other records: loving what exists, warts and all, yet still gazing expectantly toward what remains to be seen.

For all its restrictions, Jazz Mind is a tasty little album.

Happiness In Magazines is one of the best garage rock hybrids to have been released since The Strokes hit it big.

It's Dirty Three as they've always been, testing their limits, but still producing some of the prettiest and most artful music around.

While Nothing Was The Same won’t do anything to win over Drake’s detractors, doing pretty much nothing new for the rapper except bringing in more drill-style hi-hats and scaling back the obsession with 808s.

Ultimately, what we’re left with is an EP built around a great pop song, two good ones, and a throwaway.

Wildflower isn’t going to shift any paradigms, and it’s not going to leave the same impression on the world that Since I Left You did all those years ago, but none of that makes it any less of a delight to listen to.

Serenity and temperance are peculiar words to use in praise of popular music, yet these are In Another Life’s most appealing features. Its greatest achievement entails the mindset it creates and invites the listener into, as the LP humbly ventures into well-tread musical territories.

e Kranky audience is likely to find the work here to be a charming retrospective. Newcomers should approach Reinhardt’s stuff as a pretty gateway to an era whose ideas continue to fertilize today’s pop.

Normally seen driving his hardware into the ground, here Ekoplekz is streamlining expanding.

Musically, Somewhere Else treads the ground between organic performance and arrangement, as well as the efficiently expansive possibilities of minimalism and pop in electronic music.

On Punk Authority, Pete Swanson distills punk as a generic signifer and punk as an ideation even further.

Konnichiwa confidently struts and showcases the emcee’s vibrant, exciting personality traits perhaps more than pretty much anyone else in Britain, grime or otherwise. Skepta’s music inhabits the good, evil, and the delightful grey areas in between.

The strength of Creature rests in its ability to reconcile the energy of her debut album, albeit and perhaps unfortunately without the youthful spirit, and the growth of her second album, without sounding in the least bit labored.

@#%&*! Smilers walks its own path as a uniquely beautiful addition to Mann’s already impressive catalogue.

Waiting in Vain captures the modest landscape of America’s backroads and countrysides.