There’s an attempt here to go back to the relative atmosphere of at least Going Blank Again, but the resulting music ends up sounding like the more reverb-heavy, turn-of-the-millennium British art-rock bands.

With five songs, Jack establishes himself as a well-schooled artist in musical history and a fine performer with his traditional adaptations.

Whether Kimya is trying to find the light side of death or losing faith in her heroes of past, she comes off rather upfront, upbeat, and positive.

If there’s a problem, it’s that this batch of songs doesn’t quite show off Donovan’s gift for weirdness as much as previous Sic Alps outings.

The album’s pervasive sameness hinders sustained interest.

The Silent League sounds pretty, but their gooey emotional stuff doesn't run very deep.

Pressed together, it becomes apparent how pleasurably the band’s entire discography has crystallized. Capturing the quicksilver violence of youth may be beyond us now, as it is for Wild Beasts, but we still make time to celebrate the night’s dark chemistry.

With a bevy of somewhat indistinguishable tunes, a production aesthetic that keeps everything front, center, and earsplitting is a problem.

The album's distinctly lacking in structure or direction.

While The Floodlight Collective offers a great set of songs, I’d still like to see Pundt deliver a more idiosyncratic album through which we can truly hear him expose himself.

The Visitor seems especially appropriate in this age of additive excess. It’s less a demonstration of O’Rourke’s ego than of his conceptual vision, which has always been relayed with an innate sense of purpose--a rarity these days.

C-ORE offers its own representation, served by the idiosyncratic artists involved.

This is just a modern rock record, and it definitely won’t change your life, but it’s more than competent and beyond clever.

Early Grass Widow gems like the haunting "Lulu's Lips" suggested a band that was really going to deliver one day. Past Time confirms those suspicions with firm resolve.

Pan Am Stories is an early masterpiece for Knight, an ambitious photographic travelogue constructed out of the raw materials of bedroom psych-pop.

The Pipettes are only fresh in the sense that they've appropriated Spector-influenced girl-pop for a new era.

Sometimes Avi Buffalo’s entrance into the gauntlet of the undisguised voice leads to a pretty song or two, maybe a moment of blissful pop; but more often than not, the songs whimper without much intelligible emotion.

Riceboy Sleeps is an elegiac set of powerfully evocative songs, functioning at its best as lovely background music while flipping through the pages of the art book it's bundled with. Listened to unaccompanied and in its entirety, the experience is frustrating and unpleasant, and its bloated feel renders a lot of it impotent.

Witch is a solid heavy metal album that is nearly as much fun to listen to as it probably was to record.

Ultimately, 13 is a lens buffer for viewing Supersilent’s previous interrogations of how conditioned humans process sound and space, yet it needn’t in itself be a normative work.

Perhaps they still haven’t quite gotten there with La Di Da Di, but they’ve come somewhere close.

What we have on The Jazz Age is music that’s haunting itself.

James seems to be in a good place, and thankfully for us, he’s managed to capture and translate it quite well into his music.

An enjoyable yet essentially average release that plays it very safe, sticking close to preconceptions and relative “rules” of electro/synth pop without straying too far from the groundwork set down by the figures from another era it quotes and, to some degree, replicates.

A Day with the Homies is a generous record, littered with gestures of friendship. The music is pleasant and simple, the melodies nurturing and whole.

The production is lush and crystalline, and the melodies are dense and aplenty.

The bad news is that Tears isn’t as gripping as Kingdom’s earlier work (notably 2013’s Vertical XL). Tears sacrifices the ping-pong polyrhythmic beats that made his earlier material so compelling and replaces it with something simpler.

Paracosm is, at the very least, beautifully rendered wallpaper, and it’s hard to blame Greene for living in this fantasy for as long as he possibly can.