If you let it work its magic, it will -- no matter how unfashionable or cloying it may seem at a glance. It’s music to get absorbed by.
My Maudlin Career may not be the kind of album that breaks new ground or does anything particularly forward-looking musically, but what it lacks in that department it more than makes up for with intelligent pop hooks and some of the loveliest string arrangements of recent memory.
Real Estate might not be the best classicist-leaning pop record of the year, but it certainly is the most confident, the most assured, and the most unassuming.
Whether Dragonslayer is as great as any other work is almost irrelevant; it is great and it is grand, and it is all too welcome.
Craftsmanship sets him apart, and allows Insides to be as incredibly moving as it is and always will be.
For about an hour, if you can allow Fuck Buttons to control your responses, to embrace the clusterfuck of noise and emotion, then Tarot Sport might be one of the strongest albums of this year.
Born Like This is simply not as forward-thinking as his best works.
Even if Album doesn’t turn out to be all it’s been made out to be by the reams of hype already bestowed upon it, it’s certainly working at the moment.
Hospice is a work of rare beauty and a watershed moment in The Antlers’ career.
It’s the hyper-distinguishable leap from idiosyncratic-but-lovable to just-plain-lovable that makes Bromst -- and Danny Boy himself -- of increased import.
A piece of art that had too much pressure ascribed to it, that found its creators trying too hard to make a masterpiece when they could have followed a more natural progression.
With Childish Prodigy, his debut for indie-juggernaut Matador, Kurt Vile stretches and pulls the increasingly annoying “lo-fi” tag into interesting new shapes, distancing himself from his Woodsist-kin.
Logos is an admirably worn, carefully composed record detailing a kaleidoscope of sound.
If you’re looking for an argument for the full-length album, Wind’s Poem is a slam-shut case; anyone who would be foolish enough to listen to these tracks out of sequence would miss the point completely.
What The Flaming Lips have accomplished with Embryonic is impossible to ignore: an ambitious double album in an age where the single is making a comeback, a collection of music that makes a 25-year-old band sound vital and new.
Monoliths ends up standing tall not only as a watershed moment in metal, but also as a 21st-century artistic statement in general. And it may just be sunn 0))))’s strongest album to date.
While still retaining that exacting focus that has made Dirty Projectors the unplaceable enterprise that it is, Bitte Orca is merely the sound of an extremely talented group of musicians tweaking and, to an extent, reinventing their approach, stepping a little further away from left field.
On Merriweather, their art reminds us that immersion in Western tropes need not be met with scorn, that not all of its idioms have yet been exhausted, that embracing optimism and melody can still be so relevant -- and it aches in the most soulful of ways.