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

It's in songcraft that Black Marble shine (though that's not to give the expectation of overt hookiness, which would miss the point, moodwise).

While Life of Pause appears to lack any songs with the lasting impact of tracks like “Chinatown,” “Only Heather,” “Paradise,” or even the sublimely beautiful “Golden Haze”--well-written works that exhibited a naïve clarity in purpose--it’s certainly a grower.

Unlike Patton's previous forays into the experimentalism of John Zorn or Merzbow, Mondo Cane delivers a more conventional set, heavy on romantic strings and swaying nostalgia.

This newest Cocker incarnation restages this conflict in a way that establishes his continuing vitality and creativity and confirms that his sardonic wit has only sharpened with time.

Just Like the Fambly Cat is appreciably better than its predecessor, but a far cry from the bliss we've all come to expect.

A relaxed, tender record with enough grace, humor, and intelligence mixed at just the right moments with heady rushes of musical energy that one is left captivated.

Although the production isn’t what it would be if my dreams were made reality, Rabbit Habits is a respectable re-creation with chops cookin’ allova the place.

The mesmerizing quality they create through drone beats and varied vocals engage the listener in a whirlwind of noise, and it rarely ever lets up.

The album is most similar to Apple O', but while Apple O' seemed to have a somewhat lethargic quality, Milk Man sounds fresh and fully inviting. And it's a lot better.

Even though the evidence isn’t excessively rife on Aerotropolis, it’s clear that somewhere under the shiny, retrogressive hedonism and 4/4 decadence, there’s a voice trying to escape the easy confines it has found for itself.

Its songs are well-constructed, well-paced, and all subtly different from each other.... [but] for the most part, it’s a little too “safe” and unadventurous.

Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death, perhaps Blackshaw's most lucid and rawest effort to date, explores the effects and possibilities of repetition, plunging deep into a humility that suggests the movements of this process of refinement.

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.

A Broke Moon Rises isn’t pastoral like Bon Iver, and it doesn’t trade in the woe, guts, and glory of an Explosions in the Sky. It’s folk rock as an aging human in all its requisite fallibility and disgrace, pushing through torrents of doubt and disillusionment to a place where their essential spirit can take wing.

At times, the record is just classically Surreal, a bucolic unheimlich provoking a fleeting confrontation with the unconscious. What remains most alluring about this experiment’s broken logic is the sense that you’re furtively occupying someone else’s dream.

As dub creates stripped canvases to then be used to host further expressions, so do these versions. They encourage engagement and further remixing by projecting the past and present into an unknown future.

Now seven full-lengths into their career, Xiu Xiu have hit a milestone with Dear God, I Hate Myself. Over 12 songs, they condense the best aspects of all their previous albums to craft what may prove to be their finest hour.

Heron King Blues definitely signifies a transitional phase for the band.

Marrying the weight of her subject matter and boundless ideas into such a light and airy form can sometimes yield lopsided results. But given enough space, Lafawndah can truly soar.

Every aspect of the album sounds like the full-length equivalent of a Spotify Chill Out playlist: flat, disposable, inoffensive (though “technically-sound”) 2010s muzak.

Soft Airplane’s basement-recorded mastery is equal parts charming and unnerving, and on the whole singularly spectacular.

If Departing sounded as if absurdly-energetic drummer Paul Banwatt was holding back, then Mended With Gold corrects this modesty a bit.

Yes, Virginia is the album The White Stripes would make if they were getting more passionate and creative with each successive release instead of lamer and more commercial.

Orth would do well to pay more attention to whipping his songs into shape next time around.

An unapologetically lovely affair that is sure to soothe the frazzled nerves of its discerning listening public.

The melodies don’t propel; they put buffers and stopgaps between other moments of intense sound design. Like a luxury car at a car show, they exude and ooze sleekness and velocity. But hidden within that is a terror: the terror of being surveilled, minute by minute, devoid of ontological access to the eternal or the metaphysical.

These songs won’t necessarily get stuck in your head, but the swerving asymmetry to C’est ça has you clinging to these hooks like handles on a speeding train.