Some will find the album’s often starry-eyed nature vaguely overdone, and it’s this more than anything else that will turn them off. However, for those who fall weak at the knees when the strains of R&B, soul, and hip-hop hit their ears, even in an idiosyncratically distorted form, the post-millennial quotations and evolutions of In My World will be love at first listen.

“The Line,” “Winter Queen,” and “Wingsuit” share in the rest of the album’s sterile, self-parodying style of production, but set themselves apart with their uncommon catchiness relative to the rest of Phish’s studio discography.

This is one of those genre puzzles that are rewarding to anyone with an adventurous appetite, even if your bright eyes’ve never gazed anywhere but ahead.

Although the construction of these songs are as stacked as on other F&O albums, this time around, the piling up of bridges, solos, and refrains only adds to House of Spirits’ tangible claustrophobia.

The only crime Lazaretto commits that wasn’t already covered by his misogynistic solo debut, Blunderbuss, is being really boring.

Bird’s simultaneous engagement with the words and distance from the material free his delivery to keep the album feeling lighter than I’ve implied.

On “Fuck Me Out” and “Billy Not Really,” both these dissections of Ride and the brutal rearrangements of Björk’s vocal and fidgety programming would push the ensemble’s rough, nasty but compelling sound to new levels if they hadn’t already perfected it on The Money Store. Instead, what is achieved on niggas on the moon is something that speaks differently but through the same terms.

White Lung demand attention, engaging heart-to-heart conversations while simultaneously rioting.

Daniel has successfully harnessed this concept to produce an impressively cohesive art object on all fronts, one that yields perhaps the most provocative statement any musician is likely to make all year. It just might be a little too provocative for some.

Linkin Park’s The Hunting Party is a difficult, painful, rarely rewarding album.

Its intentions are good, but it’s stuck in trying to make itself into something that it is not: frightening or bold or looming.

Glass Boys is the best album Fucked Up have released so far, by virtue of it being the “laziest” collection of their career.

CLPPNG is an excellent, beautifully-executed record.

Even though …and then you shoot your cousin never quite betrays its allegiance to either criticism or satire and is consequently an awkward, variable amalgam of both, it offers something important in its efficacy to disrupt that logic and pave out a new line of progression for a mature act.

The worldview Trash Talk puts forward continues to feel generic, as though it has passed through too many links in the human centipede of hardcore punk to contain any vital nutrients by the time it makes its way to us.

The Orwells and the very much earnest Disgraceland will be invigorating solace for anyone who gets a kick out of deadbeat rock musicians and the illusions they provide of refuge and reprieve.

Its idiosyncratic animus is something to behold, and even if you don’t like it, both the digital age and Burnett himself can reassure you with the verse, “Don’t worry; in a few, you’ll all be somewhere else.”

It has to be said that A U R O R A easily justifies its existence, and that even if its quasi-independent emotional domain won’t empower us to do away with the niggardly concrete bases of its emergence, it will at least beautify them for 40 minutes.

It’s a masterclass in formal brilliance meeting dogged idiosyncrasy on equal footing.

The Serpent is, in many ways, more reminiscent of 2002’s The Mantle than it is of Marrow, but with a refined and elegant brutality that Agalloch lacked in their earlier form.

To Be Kind launches them further along their trajectory toward this exalted condition, and at its peaks, it witnesses a dawning of an even-more-primary mode of consciousness: love.

It takes its time in becoming a thing of familiarity and character, far from rushing to win you over.

The dance songs on here awaken muscles of yours that might have fallen asleep over the last few years.

At last, HTRK are inhabiting their own spotlight instead of disappearing into negative space, and by shearing off the mystique, they’ve become much more riveting.

A mild sense of self-congratulation permeates the record, as if the attempt to synthesize several disparate elements together is somehow as admirable as that synthesis itself.

At points, listening to Bécs is to hear gauze become gossamer, and feel it too.

Waterfall is promising, but it’s perhaps the first Evian Christ release that hasn’t amazed me.

Honest is transporting in ways that few records are, and no matter how strong the beat selection might be or how perfectly the guest list is curated, credit is due overwhelmingly to Future for being able to sustain and justify such a broad range of moods for the duration of the record.