As much as they respect the deep-house gods, Caracal sees Disclosure wrestling to resist and thankfully losing.
Everything Is 4 recalibrates a bit, updating Derulo’s sound to current trends with 11 precision-tooled three-minute-and-change pop songs. But it also shuffles in nuggets of pop’s past, revealing an artist with both a finger on the zeitgeist and an appreciation of his forbearers.
Song for song, Revival rivals Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion for breakout pop album of the year, but if it similarly falls short of greatness, it’s due in large part to a lack of originality.
The singer-songwriter's first album in five years, Divers, adds electric guitar to the mix, yet stays true to her original template of epic poetry set to masterful harp-plucking and vocal ascents that climb toward the stratosphere.
One listen to Vulnicura confirms what's been evident for a long time, but will still continue to come as a disappointment for many: Björk firmly belongs to the world of the avant-garde.
Janet has calculatedly played the humble-grateful card countless times in her career, but Unbreakable, a ready-made collection of deep cuts, is one of the first times she's given a fully convincing performance.
Emotion is further proof that Jepsen is capable of translating broadly understood emotions and experiences into unshakable earworms.
If there's a distinguishing feature that differentiates Robyn's Love Is Free ... from both last year's Do It Again and 2010's Body Talk EPs, it's that the songs on the singer's latest mini-album take a decidedly more purist approach to the retro stylings that were hinted at in her previous work.
His winking in-jokes and one-liners might have gotten the Internet's attention, but Ratchet wins you over when it reveals that this smart-aleck's got a beating heart too.
As with Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, another work whose laser-focused assuredness counterpoises the ambivalence on display here, Wildheart stands out as a collection of songs about the significance of roots, using an assortment of West Coast imagery to communicate the splintered state of the artistic psyche Miguel presents.
For an album that deals in low stakes, Sometimes I Sit and Think finds Barnett hitting some incredible highs.
Tidy this album isn't, but like There's a Riot Goin' On or the distended jams of One Nation Under a Groove, the uncompromising messiness is the point.