Some Nights, with its combination of record-collector bravado and lyrical vulnerability, is a study in that sort of contrast: Its slightly peculiar over-reliance on technology only makes it more human, more lovable, and more rock and roll.
The Only Place delivers riveting drama in a rousing pop package
With such a gratifying front end, it's easy to dismiss Roman Reloaded's subsequent pop tracks as a paying of the piper
There’s definitely something welcoming about Koi No Yokan‘s comparative purity, in the band’s understanding of how little they need.
The contrast between Purity Ring's two halves is special and compelling, but Shrines goes over best when Roddick's reverent sound and James' lustful fury synchronize and break you off properly, womb-stem-style.
If it's not yet clear, Centipede does retain much of the band's earnest, knowing naiveté.
On Reloaded, he's written perhaps the most vivid rap album of the year — and possibly of his lifetime.
The loopy paradox of >>, and what makes it so addictive, is the forward momentum that sounds both like spacing out and working hard.
It's a comfortable shoe of a record, a distillation of everything he's done during the past decade, without the cultivated obstinacy.
What makes this music special is what Smith does with all that stylized sparseness, transforming it into something alive and dynamic instead of merely sleepy. Millions of late-night love-letter authors will be grateful.
I Bet on Sky is the sound of a great, influential band that, yes, picked up where they left off, but instead of luxuriating in the sentimental hue of the moment, got back to work and kept moving forward.
For all the alienation implied by the album's continually warping and waving center of gravity, there are colors here brighter than a child's watercolor rainbow.
Beautiful as Grizzly Bear is, they remain an emotionally cloistered lover, willing only to speak in vagaries, never of concrete emotional needs.
On Yellow & Green, he finds the confines of metal itself too limiting; so Baroness dive, dive, dive, dive into ’90s commercial alternative harder than a sackful of Yucks and come out smarter and weirder and better than any metal band this year.
Master of My Make-Believe turns friction into fire, its flippantly skewed pop anthems doubling as obviously personal documents of Santi White's unwillingness to let anyone get over on her.
R.A.P. Music, the sixth album by from Atlanta firebrand Killer Mike, is a stunning anachronism.
The Seer is a planet-eating Galactus of an album. Two hours long and six sides of vinyl, with three separate songs unraveling past the 19-minute mark.
The Haunted Man is her weightiest work so far.
The full Kaleidoscope Dream is startling and invigorating, a fully formed statement from an artist hungrily surging toward the front of pop music’s creative pack.
It's a completely exhausting listen, one that might prove easier to admire than enjoy. But at the very least, it's never anything less than fascinating.
channel ORANGE feels like one long, moonlit, air-conditioned ride. Songs ease from one to the next, flowing together with ambient pieces of distant movie dialogue and the sound of electronics turning on and off.