Total Dust is a very nice record with a good melancholic mood.

Despite its democratic structure, Unsound suffers from a curious sequencing problem, or what we around here like to call Channel Orange-itis--but few bands of their vintage continue to write songs this prolifically or professionally.

Om certainly absorb religious images from every corner of the Old World with a certain reckless abandon, but despite a wandering path that would find most lost in appropriative disrespect, it all seems to melt effortlessly together into the band's unique tapestry of the void.

They have it in them to write great pop music or truly important experimental music, but Dirty Projectors have to decide where they want to end up before they start.

Channel Orange is going to be the standard to beat for some time. And it might very well be the best R&B album of our young decade.

Funny, relevant, incisive, compassionate, and even profound-this is the stuff a Great album [is] made of.

Coleman's exploring, surely, but he never abandons a sure-footed consistency, and the record works wonderfully as a whole.

It works, but it doesn't make sense, and can't be explained. It can only be heard.

It's not his best record by any stretch of the imagination, but it's one I'll reach for more casually and consistently than his recent stuff.

Over five years and around an international filming schedule, Riz MC has managed to use his credentials to mount a dazzling attack on what he sees going on in Farringdon Road, and has emerged with the kind of crossover masterstroke that could outshine the National Curriculum.

There's lots to love about WIXIW, but it is all so much the band's own creation that anything less than experience falls severely short of capturing it.

Taylor and Goddard's pop impulses and the dance music they've always been exploring have finally cohered, yielding a collection of songs with the potential to be as efficient on a dance floor as it is in a bedroom.

No amount of production dross can obscure the fact that Clockwork Angels still constitutes the strongest collection of Rush songs since the mid-'90s.

The result is predictably less than comfortable, though certainly not in a difficult, experimental way.

It is the best Swans live record in that it distills the essential loss of agency one is meant to endure as best as two little discs can manage.

Zimmerman's toned-down delivery and seeming refusal to belt out his lyrics, combined with the slow, slow sprawl of the tracks herein, make Dub Egg an exhausting and arid listen, even when its tracks are so individually satisfying.

Class Clown gives us what is most best and most constant about the band--their sonic restlessness, shambolic hooks, broken glory--and nothing less.

In The Idler Wheel's ten phenomenal songs, Fiona Apple seems to lay everything out on the table.

Heaven is more like a classic Sunday morning album: a modest, extremely laid back paean to the comforts of domesticity in which every song sounds like it was recorded from a rocking chair.

In the end, a few weak verses are easy to brush aside on an album this likable.

The Sister is another fine record in Nadler's growing catalogue, yet one tied more to the well-trodden tropes (lyrically, stylistically) she's built her name on than we've grown accustomed.

The Dreamer is a very traditional record, straight-up pop with a tinge of alt-country. It's easy company, a warm and thoroughly enjoyable summer listen.

AlunaGeorge can still be both pop and provocative, they just haven't hit on a reason to be so quite yet.

Banks is often all the more mesmerizing when she leaves the beef on the back-burner and takes stock of her influences.

He's pushing himself ever so slightly, and while it might not be enough to draw in the unconverted, the rest of us will want to stick around for more.

El-P's always been ahead of the curve but Cancer for Cure isn't valuable for its prescience so much as its currency of the now and the way it unites rap head nostalgia for the future beats of the past with the beats of the present.

With El-P's help, Killer Mike has produced his first unquestionably great Album.

Everything that makes Shackleton's sound a singular one is on proud display through this extensive compilation of new material.