As the album unfolds, the band’s experimental impulses show themselves, but in a pithier fashion.
Mykki Blanco’s full-length debut album, Mykki, explores an inner life lived on both sides of an ironic wink.
Formal rigor, not raw originality, is the guiding force behind Crystal Castle’s Amnesty (I).
As its anagrammatic title suggests, Ullages aims for what remains in the post-punk canon.
The album’s chief strength is its fine balance of the concrete and the abstract.
J Dilla runs through rap commonplaces circa the turn of the millennium.
Hellenic allusions are especially well-represented in the album’s loose restaging of the Ascension as a surrender to darkness.
Imperium Simulacra is attentive to builds and variations, offering up the band’s most mature songwriting to date.
Dystopia’s sustained virtuosity, with riffs sprouting like fractals, feels like a form of reparation.
The Catastrophist finds Thrill Jockey’s flagship band where we left them on 2009’s Beacons of Ancestorship, playing fusion for a post-IDM world.
O’Malley and Anderson’s blunt singlemindedness on stage is often counterbalanced by formalist nuance on record.
The concept, naturally, is blackjazz, still as ill-defined as ever, and it’s hard to shake the feeling throughout that Munkeby is up to some next-level mischief.
Powers is blessed with one of the more appealingly idiosyncratic voices in indie rock, a kind of eunuchoid Appalachian warble.
Sing Into My Mouth is a surprisingly essential document for fans of both Iron and Wine and Band of Horses.
Between an arresting start and a lavish finish, Beach House’s latest loses steam.
Most of VII: Sturm und Drang is devoted to Lamb of God’s merciless three-guitar attacks.
The ornamental bluster of Refused’s Freedom masks a basic tunelessness.
Moonbuilding 2703 AD is the Orb’s most cohesive work in ages.
Absent the lightning-in-a-bottle voltage of their heyday, Faith No More’s Sol Invictus is shockingly no more than adequate.
Most of Dark Bird Is Home takes a tone of celebratory resignation to fate.