The jump from one record to the next is made even more revelatory by the English producer’s refinement and assuredness.
Tramp is simply her most fully-realized album yet, and that’s all there is to it.
The Italian duo have put together a timeless and beautiful dance record that slides easily to the top of 2012's best.
Despite the unwelcoming persona, repeated listens will uncover an embarrassment of spine-tingling details and hidden corners that any headphone enthusiast will revel in.
Everything here is bigger, and feels more important and wise, even than the spectrum of ego on Bromst.
Swing Lo Magellan is generally celebratory, relishing in life, music, collaboration, and creativity.
Hive Mind, offers a more arresting and intricate, at-home listening experience.
He’s now picked what tricks he could from Lamar, and grown beyond his input.
It manages to sound familiar while sounding entirely new, all the while making it clear that this is a sound only Lambchop could create.
It plays like the best dubstep singles collection never released, typifying the genre’s bruised and reclusive paranoia while transcending it.
Centipede Hz is dense and unforgivingly full-throttle ... and home to some of the band’s best and most involved lyrics to date.
Ware might still be feeling out her surroundings, but considering the results, getting to see that evolution take place is an exciting and exceedingly worthwhile prospect
If Khan’s last two albums were tapestries, this one is a prayer book, adorned with pictures of the exalted, stained with tears, and almost too personal for the eyes of strangers to look upon.
This is a high point in his already illustrious career; a labyrinthine and ultramodern take on hip-hop that will likely age like a Cabernet.
The end result is a quieted, more suppressed record that steps delicately from one note to the next and shines even more of a spotlight on the twin vocal sentiments of longing and crumbled romance.
Celebration Rock is in perpetual motion, driven by a visceral sense of urgency that most modern guitar music is so sorely lacking.
Since there’s so little to grab onto, The Idler Wheel might be better understood as an emotional statement rather than a musical one.
Oshin is undeniably a record tailored for driving around with some friends in the dead heat of summer, but the music also packs a range of raw emotions
This kind of high-emotion, omni-genre electronic music is becoming the measure of artists working without geographical or scene ties and Held is one of the best examples.
Nü Sensae are one of the most formidable punk outfits working right now and Sundowning is the work of a band whittling themselves down to occupy the very tip of fury.
Allelujah! seems more immediate and more organic, but instead of feeling blown away by it’s unreachable drama and grandeur, with a decade of age behind us and the band, it feels inhabitable in a way Godspeed never has before.
The aching sweetness of Bloom’s ten tracks should override any misgivings one might have about the band’s seeming lack of stylistic evolution.
The resulting album is one that is deceptively simple, a send-up to the aggressive cultural awareness of old-school rap on the surface, filtered through a hundred different post-apocalyptic scenarios, musical and lyrical.
Ty Segall Band bring a sharpened and astonishing lighting-in-a-jar kind of intensity to the proceedings others are hard pressed to capture.
Shrines often operates like a series of paintings, each of its pieces a variation on a theme, the full breadth of the artist’s vision only realized within the context of the whole.
Free of any hip genre-signifiers, 2 sees DeMarco find his home in an endless jangle, humming down the Main Street of your brain with a guitar slung over his shoulder.
Echoes of Silence is arguably The Weeknd’s most fully formed album-oriented statement thus far.
Spiritualized have mastered the use of these instruments to be able to lift a song effortlessly from its standard verse into a magnificent chorus.
It functions, without a doubt, as Evans most accomplished release of her career and one of the more accomplished ambient albums in recent memory.
It rages, rages more, tapers off, creeps up behind you, knocks your block off, takes a step back, then does those last two simultaneously – and that’s just the first half of the album.
While there are utterly heartbreaking moments throughout, they are usually balanced with enough optimism and hope to make every tear a little easier to swallow.
The album is vital and alive, and it culminates into these unsuspecting breathless, religious moments that reach well beyond its surface qualities.
With Twins, Ty Segall has once again tapped into the well of 60's garage rock and come out with something vital, new, and undeniably his own.
It’s also one of the most cohesive and powerful records to come around in a long time, and it doesn’t tire after multiple spins.
It’s complex, destructive, and infinite.
This record, as much of Elverum’s work is, is a grower in the most beautiful sense, and one that I can’t imagine will lose its brilliance any time soon.
Just be thankful that the new Swans are as clever, as terrifying, and as proficient in their craft as presented on The Seer. There still aren’t any other bands out there quite like this.
Ekstasis is a challenging listen, but a rewarding one. It’s fiercely experimental and aggressively unfamiliar. Yet it’s an album that doesn’t try to intimidate or hide within its unfamiliarity.
It’s an album that ceaselessly overflows with love and a desire to reach out and relate, and it’s this that makes such a heavy album so accessible and so resoundingly good.
I Know What Love Isn’t is more than a great pop album – it’s the most singularly rewarding statement from one of the more uniquely gifted songwriting voices of the past decade.
This album is meditative, layered and confident, simultaneously cooler and more temperate than its predecessor.
Frank’s strengths are his versatile voice, the breadth of his songwriting capabilities, the way he mixes and matches old aesthetics and ends up with strange new combinations
The record has an engrossing, alternately glassy and foggy tactility, as if you’re groping blindly through a dark, thick dream logic-riddled haze only to find something smooth and cool and comforting at its center to wrap your sweaty limbs around.
Kill for Love‘s pop numbers are leaps and bounds better than almost anything else released this year, and when the album pulls away from them, it can’t help but lose quite a bit of its strength.
UTQC is a testament to imagination and vision and the capabilities of the human soul by way of music.