None of the other songs are as instantly arresting, aside from “Plenty of Girls in the Sea,” which proves to be just as fruitless and repetitive as the aforementioned single.

in the end, most of it turns out hypo-real, turns out less enticing and engaging than its eroding object, and this more than anything else is what makes On Oni Pond such a disappointment.

Janelle Monáe’s The Electric Lady is simply wonderful.

Even ignoring the tectonic shifts in music over the past decade, this is by no means a novel or inventive album.

Known for their micromanaged and micromanaging tracks, it’s fascinating to see that even their words about themselves are efficient, each phrase and constituent particular effervescent in their appearance and disappearance, yet wholeheartedly lunging themselves into place, forming a whole crystalline and formative structure.

For the moment, it’s surely a worthwhile project for players and listeners alike, an album of unusual synergy, exploration, and focus that expands both artists’ repertoires well beyond genre constructions to create something both unique and replayable.

The initial mystique of The Weeknd is gone, and we’re now confronted with the work of a young man who possesses an impressive voice, an incredible ear for production, and a complete lack of purpose in his confrontational, intensely graphic lyrical obsessions.

The Worse Things Get is a no-brainer Album of the Year.

Largely, Repave demonstrates that the collaboration between these Wisconsinites remains quite fruitful, yielding several songs that rival the finest moments in their respective catalogues.

Chelsea Wolfe’s songs don’t often sound like they’re supposed to, and therefore they always sound exactly like Chelsea Wolfe.

There may be less surprises over its 45 minutes than over the course of earlier efforts, but Rutili’s hand for slanted folk songs that possess their own select personality is as strong as ever, and for this reason, we have at least one thing whose reality is equal to its unreal paradigm.

Whether exploring a lost little town or his own lost soul, Will Sheff proves an excellent tour guide.

Stay Trippy distills the sonic extremes of contemporary hip-hop into a potent hybrid of radio-friendly sheen and hard-knocking street fatalism.

This is pure, unadulterated pop music, and while its individual musical elements sometimes don’t quite add up to the full potential inherent within Dent’s ever-stunning vocal melodies, there’s always something going on that’s guaranteed to endear this music to the listener.

Engravings, his first full-length, evokes a grayness of place so completely that it is utter, that there is no there there because there is only there there.

The execution may be on point, but the personality is absent, the ideas are fewer, and the experience is all-up flat, no matter how raw and flashy the playing.

It’s a fun ride, to be sure, but once the high wears off and all that’s left is the darkness, you can catch a faint glimpse of oblivion. Hopefully we get to peek deeper into the chasm the next time around.

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.

With so much music released by White Hills, a lot of the tracks end up being mood-lighting (“InWords,” “OutWords,” “The Internal Monologue,” “Circulating”), but the album’s back-half, kicked off by “Forever in Space (Enlightened),” is what keeps me spinning.

Like a masterfully carved piece of woodwork, every facet of this record has been lovingly molded such that, when all’s said and done, the finished product looks completely natural.

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.

Doris hits a couple more high points when Earl flirts with horrorcore.

This sits up quietly but pointedly as a quiet rebuke to records that won’t try to render the depth of the world in a layered and crafted way, those that prefer to just wink, shrug, or laze.

I don’t think garage needs saving. Yet, when Ty Segall shares visions within the freaked-out space of garage, he cracks it open.

This is a profound and giving music.

Despite her best efforts, the non-instrumental tracks still suffer from a kind of sameness that causes them to run together.

Although everything here is at drum-and-bass tempo, White approaches each track from wildly different directions.

Although it’s a dark, drifting ride, Perfect View makes other recent minimal synth albums (Chromatics’ Kill For Love was so flat I haven’t heard it since last September, and I still feel bored) look positively one-dimensional in comparison, and does it in a third of the time.