Channeling avant-garde techniques into melancholic folk-pop produces an album of tremendous psychological and emotional complexity, where the interior world is—even at its most desolate—full of vibrant, complicated life.

The whole 12-part suite unfurls like a gorgeous symphony, as if the entire Space Program only served as preparation for translating a work of cosmic complexity into a language we humans could understand.

Wiltzie spends a lot of the album’s runtime in his orchestral-drone comfort zone, but whenever the terrain threatens to sound too well trod, he pulls out something like “Dim Hopes,” with its twinkling constellation of vibraphones, or “Stock Horror,” which seems in the process of being ground up and devoured by the earth.

This is a bolder, clearer, preternaturally vivid iteration of their music.

On this one, they fall short of reinvention, which also means they are still—improbably, unmistakably—Pearl Jam.

For all its oblique melodies and wobbly production, Your Day Will Come evokes a strange kind of beauty.

The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, maximally bloated with 15 (15!) additional songs. Those that stand out mostly do so for the wrong reasons.

Tortured Poets’ extended Anthology edition runs over two hours, and even in the abridged version, its sense of sprawl creeps down to the song level, where Swift’s writing is, at best, playfully unbridled and, at worst, conspicuously wanting for an editor.

Baldi muses, “Can you believe how far I have come?” Anyone who’s been listening since Turning On won’t either. Cloud Nothings have never sounded so committed to going the distance.

Perhaps an entire project of shapeshifting arrangements would be too personal for comfort, a too-clear window into Thornalley’s mind. For now, he seems content to keep us at arm’s length, his exquisite music a shield against the vulnerability of really being seen.

Rose’s voice is as pure and light as ever, but the most inspired part of This Ain’t the Way is how the album repositions that quiet register as silent rage.

Sometimes, the lyrics on One Million Love Songs unhelpfully pull you from your seat just when it’s just starting to get good. .... But the album masters melancholy anyway, using careful guitar and vocal flourishes to make the music’s embryonic self-consciousness feel urgent, like it’s yours.

It settles for being a mildly adventurous AAA rap album made by two friends searching for fun in heartbreak.

Yes, girl in red is capable of another skin-deep album about crushes and self-doubt. But it would be far more interesting to see her attempt sincere emotional depth.

There’s nothing woefully timestuck about these sensitive dance songs, though. They’re made by someone living passionately in the moment and rushing into the future at breakbeat speed.

Cummings linked with Topanga Canyon vintage king and session ace Jonathan Wilson, who freed her to focus on not holding back. That is commendable, but it results in an album that has the dynamic range and limited application of a strong flashlight. You recognize its incredible power, but you’d do best not to stare into the source for very long.

Don’t Forget Me is, in many ways, its inverse: It inhabits parties and frantic nights out, yet the tracks carry the steady, guitar-backed propulsion of a road movie. Rogers, at last, sounds sure of her destination.

The incarnation may be new, but the music’s underlying spirit, its animating force, is very much the same.

In A LA SALA, each member of the trio has several opportunities to shine while making each track sound individual, and it all comes together cohesively because Khruangbin know where their strengths lie.

The strongest songs sparkle with a morose charm. On “Dumb Guitar” and “Shipwreck,” Balency-Béarn’s plainspoken singing wafts over murky lounge-pop, giving The Sunset Violent some much-needed friction.

The Libertines may be running low on originality, but they can still produce a strong tune when the muse strikes.

It’s astonishing what he can do with so little. Marci keeps ample daylight between the instruments in his beats, leaving plenty of elbow room for his incredibly dense writing. He’s in top form here, spinning superhuman mafioso tales from impenetrable thickets of rhymes that contract and expand like gasses changing form.

Interplay does just about enough to keep everyone happy: Shoegaze fans get a sonic-cathedral finale, while Ride follow their creative whims. Without many truly great songs, though, Ride might have been wise to play to their strengths, rather than coveting someone else’s.

The Black Keys who, after 23 years together, know themselves well enough to know how to accentuate their strengths by choosing the right musician for the right song, confident that they’ll wind up with a record that sounds unmistakably like themselves.

As the geometric tones of closer “Take Me to Your Leader” blip and fold into themselves, it becomes clear that, short as it is, Exotic Birds of Prey still has the loose and expansive feel of a radio show. There’s no easier way to visit outer space.

It’s fascinating to watch Shakira take big swings and extend her dominance, but there’s a little piece that’s missing: some small token to show what made her such an icon in the first place.

Only God Was Above Us is also the most honest album Vampire Weekend have made, an encapsulation of what the band does best, melodic and abstruse in Koenig’s own masterful way.

Ultimately, the release of The Carnegie Hall Concert feels right on time, providing a welcome jolt of focus to a widespread impression of Alice Coltrane that’s started to seem just a tad vague. .... As this set shows, she always contained multitudes.