The playful experimentalism and inherently subversive nature of Dead Petz is enjoyable (in a sickly-sweet way) throughout, yet it’s experimentation is akin to playing absent-mindedly with a shitty synthesizer iPhone app.

While still struggling a bit to overcome their influences, still sound no less than incredible and compelling on their debut.

Poison Season is nothing if not willing to shrug off a few of Destroyer’s newest fans if that means staying true to what the band has done so well for the better part of two decades. More so than on Kaputt, all of the classic Destroyer motifs are on full display.

The Crosswords-“Preakness” is a monster itself compared to the gentle rise and fall of the track’s 2011 studio appearance on the cross-promotional Keep cassette.... The rest of the EP, though, like most of Panda’s recent output, just washes over me lukewarm.

Although it isn’t as full-fledged or layered as a full-length Aphex work, it’s full of minor miracles, advanced lessons in acid appreciation and stirring little lines of drum poetry.

Although warmer, almost folk-rock, Pickpocket’s Locket is as visceral an experience as any Mercer project, albeit in a new way.

This new one is no less heady and singular, and even if it doesn’t do much to advance Jenkins’s captivating line in brain-hop, it solidifies his reputation as one of the most intriguing Wise Guy critics of the “thug life” still branding far too many rappers today.

While the instrumentation gives the impression of self-bricolage, made up of materials from Mac’s own private collection under a particular washed-out filter, the lyrics derive from common property, things like fragments of old clichés and easy rhymes.

DS2 finds a hellish, motivating power by articulating how it’s possible to have the best time of your life during the worst time of your life. And it all sounds so good.

Abyss neatly encompasses the totality of her career, synthesizing the artist’s prolific catalog into her strongest and most ambitious album yet, a cavernous chasm filled with beauty, brutality, and endless possibility.

Compton itself is a part of this little something too, because even though it fails to make a clear artistic statement, it houses some of the finest hip-hop production Dre has turned in for years, and proves that the city has much more going for it than just a bad reputation.

Born In the Echoes maintains a pop-sensitive groove for all but two of its songs.... But the real winners on this record as usual are the curios.

While it may lack the freshness and shock-of-the-new presented by their previous full-lengths, Key Markets marks the next logical step for the band; the sound of Sleaford Mods’ ultimate rejection.

Pain has the audacity to come correct, while so many 90s miners are content to approximate. They place themselves in the pantheon and let the gatekeepers of dubious to imperious distinction do what they will.

The problem is that what’s left--the imagined everything about this record--is that it just sounds like someone lamenting a one-night stand that ended too soon, some kind of physical communication that feels like it could have gone so much deeper and become so much more emotional.

The album’s subtlety and abstract tendencies prevent it from becoming solely a work of stock collage or pastiche appropriation.

While HEALTH and Get Color were cohesive collections of songs that created a snapshot in time of where the artists were when creating them, listening to Death Magic feels like we’re seeing not just the band they are currently, but all the bands they could be.

Here, he’s stripped aside much of the theoretical sprawl, resulting in a work that feels both minor, even by his standards, and gargantuan, even by his standards.

Even with the complete lack of song-oriented material, Instrumentals 2015 serves as an interesting career overview and a welcome return of someone who I had begun to believe had slipped entirely into the light of time.

TMLT feels like the Titus Andronicus record par excellence, it pushes and shoves at the boundaries of what such a record could or should conceivably sound like.

Like a daydream, St. Catherine is to be savored while it lasts, then let go until another day.

LP (2015) is a short and sweet affirmation for the faithful.

The most frustrating thing about Currents is that, for probably the first time, it seems like Parker is writing songs that would be pretty decent and probably interesting if he freed them from this musty aesthetic and gave them room to express themselves.

Pattern To Excel emerges in fragments, almost painlessly, with every inch of space filled, all the darlings still written.

The album may sprawl too widely, but its second disc makes a strong argument for the continuity and self-awareness of the whole package.

Whole sections that might feel accomplished if taken as isolated pieces feel misplaced in the economy of these side-long tracks.

It’s a dedicated focus on the materials that compel bodies and minds into motion that make RP Boo a continuously shining light in the ever-growing discourse he helped invent.

If Bones is too densely packed to inspire, at least that’s a good quality for a foundation to have.