I think Keveikur will, for awhile, make a lovely soundtrack as I walk along the shore.

The result is a rap album that fundamentally challenges the notion of what a compilation is.

It’s a nebulous, dense, paranoid web of utterly unfiltered expression that’s utterly or negligibly fascinating depending on how much you care about Yeezy.

With Love’s desire to obscure any traces of the artistic hand that made it is both its most compelling trait and what ultimately prevents it from ascending to the aesthetic nirvana it imagines.

Field of Reeds may initially come across as inhumanely taut, straining, and indistinct to begin with, but this is the sound of precociousness finally arriving at a purpose.

The songs on This Is Another Life are so well written, so finely paced, and so relatable in the sentiments and predicaments they weave together, there’s little justification in chiding the album for not making it patently clear that art alone doesn’t redeem misfortune and anguish.

many of these songs see Campos and Maker presenting compelling musical ideas that simply aren’t expanded upon in an equally compelling manner. Still, Mount Kimbie frequently succeed here in capturing inspired, stirring musical ideas.

Where the dog-eared, snapshot ambient wooze of Twoism and Geogaddi once harbored a feverish throb, Tomorrow’s Harvest now prickles with hollow spaces: a fragmentary, pixelated symbolism has been lost in the construction of an outline of a broader system.

This album is no disaster, no Moonbeams and Bluejeans, but the benign flatness here suggests the ineffable whatever that made The Fall fascinating has fallen away, and it looks very far gone.

With Personal Record, Eleanor commits even more strongly to straightforward, sentimental, and concise songcraft.

Other Life is a collection of poignant, emotionally powerful pop songs; but on a more conceptual plane, this album is a self-referential commentary on music itself, an intense examination--and, ultimately, an extremely heartfelt refutation--of the hollow, ironic appropriation that defines much of contemporary music.

For now, The Redeemer’s many tangles make even some of the most personal music this year sound tedious.

Their strangeness marks them out from more typical death metal bands, while still retaining their brutality and extremity, a distinction that results from the ideas that animate Portal’s work and their commitment to forming their music into a vehicle for the monsters to which they bow.

While there is an abundance of elements that are “of the norm,” a joyous and haphazard mashing of non-standard pop ingredients drives home the album’s directive: a deranged, wonderful projection of polypop-delirium.

Songs Cycled--cheeky, geeky, and critical as ever--is his most approachable take on the whole sprawling mass yet.

There’s enough pulling power to draw you in, just not enough to get you hooked.

It’s in her artwork’s texture that Hval’s voice fascinates.

This isn’t an album that I foresee myself returning to very often, but under the right set of circumstances--such as the live performance that I attended last December--these are songs that contain the potential to deliver an unforgettable, emotionally cathartic experience.

There are few surprises, but each element finds its own breathing room such that the layered space of each track is fully audible.

Tending toward minimalism as opposed to shock musical tactics, Cosmin TRG doesn’t thrill with throat-grabbing statements, but of course that is far from his intention.

All heavy-handed metaphysics aside, RP Boo proves on Legacy that he is truly a deft master of the drum machine, inspired by the potential in pure sound.

For those with autumn coursing through their veins, they’d do well to assuage their summer by keeping Dirty Beaches’ Drifters/Love is The Devil coursing through their headphones.

Random Access Memories is by no means a perfect record, but it consistently possesses an inspired, organic sense of a vitality, a quality that is often denied by the cut-and-paste status quo of EDM.

They have laid down some astounding tracks here, but as a whole, the album is not on par with any full-length the band have released since Alligator.

It’s an album of stitched-together aspects that feel incongruous, though interesting.

It’s an honest delivery, but they are essentially preaching to the choir.

Abandon’s hammering slow pneumatic-drill beats are not so much an all-out assault as a grueling siege, in which the beleaguered inhabitants of the psyche find themselves starving, barely existing in a rising cesspool of their own shit and vomit, ridden with epidemic disease, turning to cannibalism and to frantic final Decameronesque debaucheries.

Nocturnes points the way out, with Hesketh having demonstrated not only the willingness and the ability to grow and develop, but also to retain a sense of her individuality and a keenness for what may set Little Boots apart from the rest.