Radiohead – The King of Limbs
Radiohead’s eighth record, The King of Limbs, represents a marked attempt to create a considered and cohesive unit of music that nonetheless sits somewhere outside of the spectrum of their previous full-length discography. And that’s not to say that it doesn’t ripple with the dazzling sonics or scenery that have become the band’s stock in trade, but just that, unlike so many of their milestones, there’s no abiding sense of a band defying all expectations in order to establish new precedents.

Instead, we get eight songs that feel mostly like small but natural evolutions of previously explored directions. Opener “Bloom” announces Radiohead’s return with a scattershot sequence of chewed-up drum loops and peeling horns that dissolve into a rhythmic tangle. “Morning Mr. Magpie” re-casts an old live acoustic ballad in a more anxious light, its once-sunny disposition frozen into an icy glare. With its crumbling guitar shapes and clattering, fizzing percussion work, “Little By Little” sounds dilapidated and rundown. Meanwhile, “Feral” contorts Yorke’s voice into a reverb-infused, James Blake-like wriggle that pings around the stereo channel against a mulched up drum pattern that sounds sharper than glass. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Mountain Goats – All Eternals Deck
While The Mountain Goats’ last album took us through Bible verses, “All Eternals Deck” takes listeners on a loose mystic journey, John Darnielle boldly mixing his personal relationships up with the mystical beginning, middle and end of Man.

There’s the origins of humankind in “Sourdoire Valley Song”, the Fall from grace with the snakes and Cars guitars of “Birth of Serpents” and, in between, the fighting-off our impending doom. The straight-forward rock of “Beautiful Gas Mask” does the latter best, having us rise from our knees and assuring “someone’s coming to reward us, wait and see.” Read the Full review on HitFix

The Sounds – Something to Die For The new album, the band’s first release since signing with kitchen-sink-punk label SideOneDummy, is not a celebration of everything that made the band’s first two albums excellent (danceable rock, sprinkled with synth, but raw enough to keep you interested). Instead, Something to Die For is a simple, uncomplicated step in the right direction. It is more a perfection of the sound they tried for when they crossed on Rubicon, with a few surprises here and there for good measure. “Better Off Dead,” while hardly representative of the rest of the album, is the band’s most adventurous song in years. “Diana,” with some surprisingly pronounced guitar work, feels like the foot-tapper that “4 Songs & a Fight” should have been. “The No No Song,” “Dance With the Devil,” and the title track are equally as addicting. Read the the full review on Sputnik Music