Like the craft of the best tracks here, the album itself describes a smooth and clearly bookended parabola, an unexpectedly rainbow bridge, but one that, unlike the most well-known of these, is a pleasure, not a revelation.

Despite any missteps, Bermuda Drain is laudable simply for its willingness to branch out and discover new ways of expression.

Lonely Twin is a unified creation, concerned from start to finish with existential idee fixes like death and despair, and how humanity deals with those universals.

That mainstreaming of queerness and breaching of boundaries is the context, spirit, and thesis of Pictureplane's second album, Thee Physical.

It maintains the headstock-nodding guitar work, the coherence between players, and the alternating structure, but it winds down the pace and pokes some air holes in the top of their sound.

It's not like Again and Again is a terrible album; in fact, it's an almost uniformly enjoyable one.

Alongside Youngs' anxious, distracted acoustic guitar picking, the most characteristic sound of this album is a damaged electric guitar, pealing its mournful, inarticulate song again and again.

Last Summer sounds good; next summer could be even better.

It tends to, er, drag, but the producer's deft touch with wonky textures remains thrilling.

Ultimately, Galactic Melt is like a good bartender: approachable without being overbearing, reminding you of past buddies while keeping a slight but not uncomfortable distance&hellip and fading into context, so that when you wake up the next day there's nothing more than a pleasant gap in your memory.

At 35 hefty minutes, Dedication is Zomby's most complete statement to date. But, much like the man, it offers a number of details in one hand while obscuring other crucial signs with the other.

Ty Segall culls some some of his scene's most appealing aspects and affixes them to unusually-written, melodically appealing songs; in essence, he's an ideal ambassador for his Bay Area milieu.

It's more pleasant than arresting.

If one didn't care for White Hills before, this won't change a mind. Of their recorded material, however, White Hills' latest is perhaps their best; short of an in-person experience of the band's eardrum-shattering performances

Friley has taken the sound of his debut EP--the four songs of which all appear on Paddywhack--and maintained that arresting, zombie barbershop quartet aesthetic, while also extending it into new developments, intervening piano lines and looped organ riffs, with which it blends in ways that never jar (your preserves).

There's a primeval sense of exuberant abandon here that, again, many bands working in similar territory try to capture, but that is rarely manifested so completely. And for hookiness, this is as habit-forming an album as you're likely to come across.

On this new album, it's not so much a problem that they remain stuck in the 90s politically, but more that their music seems so irrelevant sonically and willing to wallow in a mid-tempo techno-metal goth-night ghetto.

Listening to this album suggests a universe of unheard information beyond the reach of understanding and perception, of phenomena both too brief and too enormous for us to comprehend.

Pitiless Censors is a sparkling album, a lo-fi synth pop masterpiece that manages to give endless aural delights while still being intellectually engaging, and despite having been caught at the center of a whirlpool of current movements, all of which reflect some aspect of Maus' style, he has only cemented his identity as a singular, unimpeachable figure.

Despite some shortcomings, 4 is an unqualified success in the Hawksian sense: There are at least three great songs and no bad ones.

The timing may be off, but Total transcends trends to be one of the year's best dance records, and a likely cult classic in the making.

Landing well above a genre bedeviled by the twin albatrosses of solipsistic whining and overwrought political grandstanding, lyrically Sollee's songs feel well-worn yet sturdy. But they stand out chiefly because the array of melodic and textural effects available to a cellist is much different than your run-of-the-mill fingerpickin' crooner.

Though for him this may seem to be a progress toward honesty and wholeness, for the listener the benefits are not so clear.

It's a careful mix, edging onto cream-puff territory but never surrendering its solidity.

Zayna Jumma has a similar clarity, allowing listeners to immerse themselves, for a spell, in the special magic that Group Doueh have made their own.

Ultimately, Bon Iver, Bon Iver is the sound of growth, of growing pains, and the sound of grounding, of tearing new ground. If it aches, it aches like any natural growth, with beauty and wonder.

In a word, Gloss Drop just sounds confused, and its structures don't challenge or excite.

Codes and Keys is littered with PDA for Gibbard's new celebrity wife Zooey Deschanel, but this especially garish monument to his muse would have been better placed on one of her She & Him album-wafers.