Its songs are mostly amalgams of tired pop music tropes/techniques and trite realizations

Centipede Hz feels celebratory.

This is a solid set of space rock that will melt plenty of faces, even though it doesn't seek nirvana in Six Organs of Admittance's usual ways.

Mature Themes lives up to what's promised on the tin, but only relatively so.

While Nothing Bad has great, well-written, dynamic pop songs, the album suffers from length.

Maybe we're supposed to love this album because it's the musical equivalent of a KFC Double-Down, filled with fancy co-stars and production, deep-fried, and devoid of any intellectual or nutritional value.

The Seer delivers on its promise. It's an exhausting and maddening document, but one can't help but emerge from it filled with a renewed radiance.

Through his exuberant, alien compositions, Deacon seeks to manifest for us the wild places of his country, the barren plains and arid deserts, and in the process, reminds us that they are things worth preserving.

The digital readymades provoke an interesting set of concepts and questions, which is good, but results in an album in which a majority of the heavy lifting is performed by the extra-textual aspects of the project, providing undeserved depth to a series of obsessive repetitions of the banal.

Tracer glimmers with the CD-ROM gleam of early-90s intelligent techno.

Yeasayer soar with sublime choruses that are everything that pop has been trying to realize: high-art dionysian bliss contained in three- to four-minute bursts.

[Bring Me The Head...] is the perfect accomplice to the contorted bliss of a seductive daydream.

TRST is a f**king great dance record. While it is so much more than this as well, considering the negative connotations "dance" can have within much music discourse, it's initially, at least, the album's most notable appeal.

The LP plays at depth and synthesis while making do with simply reproducing indie electro-pop tropes.

Hardly a return to form, Researching The Blues (complete with the burp at the end of "One of the Good Ones") is nevertheless a document of a band having a good time doing what they love. When the hooks are this strong, it's hard not to have a good time with them.

Intermezzo displays Bishop in top form, and if this is an interlude, the next act should be spectacular.

The compositions here are rich, complex, and moving, and they consistently bring out the best in their (very talented) collaborators.

What Shackleton has done with this mammoth album is create a full-bodied, visceral experience that meditates on the nature of the essence of a sound in a time and the space of time in which it appears, and the narration only presents the voice as the confrontation with time.

From the simplicity in songs like "Lightning Thunderbolt" to the momentary pause before the tempo jump of "The Rule of the Game," the lyrical content of the album depends on the musicality, which itself attests for the album's strongest moments.

What is perhaps this record's greatest strength: Baroness has crafted an epic collection of heavy music with two distinct spheres: the hard-hitting paranoia of Yellow, and the more organic, earthiness of Green.

Mysterious Phonk feels extremely private in ways that are powerful but not entirely sorted out yet. Purrp finds numerous occasions to talk about smiling in the face of a cold world, but even a facetious smirk never really cracks, and the world is cold in only the most brightly-lit, fantastical, and dystopic ways.

Ocean's work is almost as good as those he references; his lyrics are almost uniformly terrific, sensual, specific, and unpredictable.

Earth's greatest strength is also its structural weakness; to continually enact the tremulousness of all origins is to refuse to get going, to depart

While acting more like a well-constructed argument than a manifesto, Unsound shows that you can still fight into the later years.

Aesop has tremendous control for a syllable-stuffer; he's Kweli with restraint, knowing when to rein in the racehorse flow and slow down for emphasis, never loosening his grip long enough to stumble over the vigorous drum-driven beats, which - to the benefit of Aesop's gruff narration - are simple and unobtrusive and angry and allow whatever he's talking about at the moment ... to sound not only compelling, but also hard.

Simply put, the music on Swing Lo can't support its great ideas. To quote Dylan, "a song is anything that can walk by itself." Maybe time will prove me completely and utterly wrong, but as far as I can tell, nothing on Swing Lo walks by itself.

Pretty okay.... The lyrics, typical alpha-male self-pity material, aren't all that bad, really, but they're often curdled by the delivery.

Marion's guitar and synth bedroom pop project continues to be immediately enjoyable, simply because he never seems to be reaching for something that's outside of his grasp.