Stuart Berman

This is the sound of pristine pop music blasted through cheap, blown-out headphones—and every time it seems like a song is about to decay before your ears, you sense both the sadness and liberation of knowing that nothing lasts forever.

Disgraceland also proves there’s a fine line between writing songs about being bored and just being boring

To Be Kind adheres to a policy of transcendence by any means necessary, even if it means repeatedly bashing you in the face with a mallet until you’re seeing stars and colors.

Spiderland’s greatest legacy is not that it motivated a cluster of semi-popular bands in the late-90s and early 2000s to adopt its whisper-to-scream schematic. It’s the boundless inspiration it perpetually provides for all the bands that have yet to emerge from the basement.

What at first seemed like a fairly straightforward, traditionalist roots-rock exercise has very gradually, very subtly blossomed into something wondrous and profound.

If the Strokes savvily refashioned NYC iconoclasts like the Velvet Underground and Television as dance-party pop music, Manhattan is what’s become of your head-shop CBGB t-shirt after another 12 years of laundromat visits.

As much as Voices tries to get in your head, it too easily recedes to back of mind.

The album is less concerned with asserting a specific worldview than examining the difficulties of keeping one’s moral compass steady in a society that’s becoming ever-more indifferent to the things you value—and how one must remain all the more resolute once kids enter the picture. 

Five Spanish Songs never feels like an vanity-project indulgence, but rather a clear, concerted effort on Bejar’s part to communicate why Luque’s songs are so special to him. 

Compiled from the band’s 2012 world tours, Not Here/Not Now is the fourth release and second double-live album Michael Gira has issued since reviving the Swans name in 2010. Of the songs featured, only three have appeared on previous recordings, and the lone 80s-era track that figures offers an idea of where Swans are heading on their upcoming album.

...Like Clockwork simply foregrounds an aspect that’s been lingering in the Queens’ music since the beginning: beneath all that volcanic riffage, Homme has always been a sucker for a pretty pop song.

If the story of Lysandre is so significant to Owens that it demanded its own song cycle, his musical treatments don't always do the material justice.

While it ably captures the band's ferocity, Metz is less a recreation of the band's live shows than a surveillance-video document of it, one that's been edited and manipulated to maximize dynamic impact.

As a showcase of a seasoned master in his element, Silver Age's bounty of direct, distorto-pop hits measures up to Mould's gold standard.

It's one thing to be heavy, and it's another thing to be hooky, but Slaughterhouse is the rare garage-rock album to do both so well simultaneously

 Silversun Pickups have a way of making their most grandiose gestures sound passive and timid.

With The Something Rain, Tindersticks strike the sweet spot between experimental sprawl and hot, bothered soul

Audacious to the extreme, but exhaustingly tedious as a result, its few interesting ideas are stretched out beyond the point of utility and pounded into submission

The psych-pop outfit's contribution to the long-running LateNightTales series is heavy on obscure turn-of-the-1970s psych-folk and the more pastoral end of 80s post-punk and indie.