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.

Because they sound so assured in this sound and its deviations, and because they carry ideas to exciting ends, I want to believe.

Meshes of Voice is a truly engulfing piece of apodictic expression, and it should be danced, sung, knitted, and talked about, if not because it collapses these categorical distinctions itself so that its blood can run, then because keeping your head still and your voice silent is lying.

There are tons of memorable hooks and verses all over 10 Summers.... All of these moments fly by and come across as natural and effortless, even “formal” in the platonic sense.

Brill Bruisers is an enthusiastic correction in course, as well as a reminder that age doesn’t always equal solemnity or, for that matter, slouching toward self-importance of any kind.

On one level, these tracks might be compared to ambient music in its non-teleological synthesized progressions that are more concerned with exploration than attainment. But there is still an astonishing feeling of fluid movement maintained throughout, thereby avoiding stagnancy.

Each of the nine songs here (this album, unlike Why There Are Mountains or Lenses Alien, feels less like a suite and more like a collection of individual songs working together toward a theme) merits extensive and attentive lyrical consideration, though such an analysis deserves a treatment not feasible in a standard-length review.

This album has the power to make you feel uncomfortable enough to look away from yourself, which isn’t easy.

They finally turned their funhouse mirrors inwards and crafted a Mature Album in a way that only they could, refracting their own past work through the same broken prism that they’ve spent years pulling pop and rap through.

Decimation Blues examines with more boldness some of the possibilities hinted at in his previous recordings and brings them shuddering to life.

Foundations of Burden is special, there’s little question of that, but the precocious virtuosity of the performance doesn’t change the fact that the material is far from challenging.

No longer a statement and certainly abandoning the vanguard, it’s still some sort of map of some sort of territory, a specific body and a specific sexuality in a specific sonic present/presence.

Mozart’s Sister’s debut is a living monument to dead stasis.

At eight songs in 34 minutes, it’s the band’s shortest, but it’s also perhaps the best distillation and presentation of their sound, coming off like a stranger, dreamier sister album to Shake My Head.

After awhile, the monotony becomes wearing. Television Man is a disappointment in the sense that it’s a lot of the same, save for the two instrumental tracks, based on keyboards, that sound like attempts at making warped VHS soundtrack music.

Exciting things are still happening amidst routine and constancy, and sometimes submitting isn’t settling or getting saved; it’s letting yourself get moved against all odds. And that may be rock & roll’s only remaining saving grace, one that Spoon continues upholding and confronting with every album.

While many of the album’s stronger tracks are also its most spacey and elusive, the sequencing emphasizes just how important the clicking, EDM drums are to the project’s core.

Bulldozer is essentially just an impersonation of a Snares record circa 2005, masterfully percussed but otherwise unsubstantial.

The Voyager is a collection of catchy songs intended for those who have lost confidence in catchy songs.

The Phoenix is, ultimately, a collection of immersive and impressively well-produced analogue techno tracks, bound up in a package with overt cultural references that tend to distract rather than add to the experience.

These Days is full of potentially enlightening ideas, and its beats and hooks are often mesmerizing, yet Ab-Soul spreads himself too thin here, his abstraction resulting from a kind of undertaken emaciation, a renunciation of tangible substance in favor of nebulous spiritual impressionism rather than from a perspective-driven distortion of this album’s strong central themes.

It’s impossible to predict which of today’s hit songs will become tomorrow’s classics, but at least Mandatory Fun, Weird Al’s 14th studio album, delivers on the laughs.

The Old Believer feels like a creative plateau, all the more disappointing for the fact that the band’s last album left them standing on the cusp of what seemed like an even greater breakthrough.

This is, after all, a rock album, so don’t expect anything too innovative, but do expect moments of beauty and lots of writerly oversharing.

Gamel is OOIOO remembering themselves and what they do best, which sounds like something they’ve never done before.

The tracks as a whole may come off a bit uniform, containing little in the way of surprise, but Family Crimes is nonetheless a sweet reward for those of us who’ve spent years following Jeweled Antler and everything after.

Ishi may be a lullaby, calling Ishi’s and Gengras’ friends to rest, but ultimately it imparts a peace to all who oscillate within the flux of the universe.

A lot of W.C. Hart’s lyrics are preoccupied with the idea of locating yourself within the whole whorl of the earth-psychedelia-human experience, be it from underneath, above, sideways, chronologically, anyhow, anyway, somewhere between the “rock and stars and sand.”