Good Luck and Do Your Best is dull, an affair that lacks curiosity because the answers are in front of him. None of the production is outright bad, just done before by the likes of Four Tet, Nujabes, and John Talabot.

Skin is the sound of Flume reaching for great heights and almost grasping what he seeks there.

Dangerous Woman shouldn’t be taken particularly seriously as any kind of “maturation,” but that it still has some pretty good songs on it. Not counting the bonus tracks, there are only two outright throwaways.

On Dynamics, Frankel and Millhiser made an unnatural-yet-understandable misstep, but on Crime Cutz, they’re hoping to regain their footing and play off their awkward slip by reverting back to what worked for them in the first place. It’s fun hearing it work for them again.

This is a vibrant, uneven, irresistibly likable, and occasionally transcendent release from an artist who shows no signs of falling off anytime soon.

The best release from one of the most exciting artists of the 2010s.

Even if Colour doesn’t drastically alter Blake’s sound, it widens and refines it, keeping what made his first two records so memorable while hinting that there remains ever further room for growth.

A Moon Shaped Pool is the best album we could expect from a rock outfit already into its third decade of existence, and a superb work from the last important band left in the universe.

While this sort of economic chords and vocal/guitar/bass/drum hardcore punk rock record is easy to come by, what’s rarer is when its aggression--not necessarily just in the vocals and lyrics--comes from someplace genuine.

Songs on Oh No never outright fail, but they don’t all inspire the same level of intrigue and enthusiasm. There are moments when Lanza sings entirely in falsetto over an ambient afterglow where you will get FKA Twigs deja vu.

Will is a wobbly baby step from a well-honed sound to something greater. There’s not much reason to listen to it over any of her other albums, and it’s less interesting for the music it contains than the music it promises.

The most critical takeaway is how nuanced every single track is on behalf of Kaytranada’s unparalleled attention to and manipulation of detail.

Even if I miss the personal struggles of I Am a Bird Now and The Crying Light, Anohni and her collaborators have created a dazzling musical artifact. Hopelessness ultimately betrays its title, and its banner-waving, because the voice at its center is fundamentally the opposite of defeated.

Yes, Views is both overlong and underwhelming. But there’s a glimmer of something more poignant beneath its bloated surface.

On Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing, Roberts and Hoorn deliver a beautiful album filled with bombastic, gothic and anthemic hymns that aim for deliverance.

There’s plenty of substance to be found here if you look hard enough.

Basically, this particular ambient music doesn’t lend much intellectual export or posterity that Eno so often claims to pursue. (Being slower isn’t necessarily a sign of intellectual maturity.) His approach may show it, but that’s his prerogative. Nothing wrong with staying in a mood, but this mood--whatever it is--sounds pretty played-out to me.

The sparks of great art are there, but the brain behind the creation lays dormant. Time will tell where Domo goes, and honestly Genesis isn't a bad beginning.

Not To Disappear is an intermittently pretty affair with painfully little substance, an album that spends so much time wallowing in its own self-indulgent loneliness that it fails to offer up anything listeners can actually relate to.

Despite some glaring issues, Sept. 5th manages to stay listenable, and offers occasional glimpses of genuine inspiration.

It’s a better seasoned Feast of Love, yes. But when the wagon still has wheels, it’s hard to knock them for continuing to ride it. It’s still as smooth as it’s always been.

Clocking in at roughly 47 minutes across a charitable eighteen tracks, Always Strive and Prosper does not seem to break any new ground.

It’s a rare album that sounds this warm, this easy, this melodic, this fierce, this startling, this unforgettable.

The songs on Please Be Honest are in keeping with the constant state of evolution and experimentation of most GBV albums. Which is to say, the songs are hit or miss.

It’s dripping with oldness, but it’s far from good.

These tracks don’t feel futuristic, but they shine with a blinding light, capping one of the most impressive arcs of any album so far this year.

What he’s presented us with, essentially, is the skeleton of Animal Collective’s fleeting creativity, stripped down to its roots, revealing that even at its rawest, purest form the music still has an instinctive grasp of sincere emotion and beauty.

Add production issues that have marred the bulk of their discography to the lack of tune and we have something that never lifts off: everything sounds mixed at the same level, resulting in mush.