Jack White – Lazaretto
When not channeling both key sounds, one or the other can usually be traced with ease. The bass-breaks and jerky-keys of opener “Three Women” play out between almost humorous lines of description (“Red, blonde and brunette… They must be getting something cause they come and see me every night”) alongside guitar work like some of Hendrix’s bluesiest blasts (“Red House”, “Here My Train A Comin’”), while the drums that keep his beat will always be reminiscent of Meg’s simple structures. Here, however, the outcome is something much deeper and more elaborate than similarly-styled White Stripes numbers. Read the full review on The Line of Best Fit

Tombs – Savage Gold
Savage Gold betrays no indecision, from the production choices to the stunning execution. Working with American death metal demigod Erik Rutan in his St. Petersburg, Fla., recording studio, Tombs mostly mustered the heaviest elements of its sound—breakneck blast beats and high-stacked guitars, irascible screams and punishing repetition—for a cohesive, propulsive, and definitive statement. Tombs made the decision to keep it relatively simple on Savage Gold, and that mandate has reanimated the band for 57 extreme and urgent minutes. Read the full review on Pitchfork

First Aid Kit – Stay Gold
This barely twenty-something duo manages to occupy a lyrical and musical space well beyond their years and place of origin. They tackle weighty subject matter with the allusive grace of road-weary veterans and not only are they conversant in Americana, but they seem intent to imbue it with a new pop sensibility. While The Lion’s Roar was an exercise in infectious melancholy, this time the sisters from suburban Stockholm appear eager for change and keen to move on. There’s heartbreak, loneliness and homesickness here, but the album’s subtext is restlessness. Read the full review on Exclaim

Fucked Up – Glass Boys

Glass Boys sees the band revisiting more concise musical forms, but as ever, there is a point to the album. The notions of growing older, responsibilities and compromise seem to be troubling the band, and in particular, vocalist and focal point Damian Abraham; clearly he’s has been looking inward and asking some searching questions. Opening track Echoboomer makes no bones about it. From a relatively delicate opening the album bursts into life with Abraham’s serrated roar holding its own above the colossal thrum of his band. “I can still hear who I was meant to be. I’m the reflection of a dream” he howls as he battles with the idea of staying true to himself by exploring his past. The conclusion he appears to draw is that his words and the band’s music will outlive him, but there is hope that he’ll hang on to his youthful ideals in the line: “I can still be the boy I used to be.” Read the full review on Music OHM

Bob Mould – Beauty & Ruin
Nothing on Beauty & Ruin truly resembles experimentation, as Mould, unburdened of so much baggage of late, seems joyously unconcerned with proving anything to anyone other than the fact that he can still craft hook after hook. “Little Glass Pill” opens with a airy folk intro before plowing straight into a bleary-eyed, Sugar-style rager, while “Forgiveness” feels forced in both its ham-fisted jangle and its stiff attempt to add some small amount of textural dynamic to the album. Thankfully, “Forgiveness” is the only track here that feels disposable, although “Let the Beauty Be” and “Fix It” come close; the back-to-back songs usher out Beauty & Ruin on a sentimentally gooey note that finds Mould content to mouth banalities like “It won’t seem so bad” and “Time to fill your heart with love”. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Neil Young – A Letter Home
a certain eeriness is very much in evidence throughout A Letter Home, an album that opens with three minutes of spoken word in which Young addresses his late mother, urging her to make amends with her ex-husband in the hereafter. The eeriness is largely due to the effect of the recording booth’s distortion on Young’s voice. Over the last 50 years, his idiosyncratic vocal style has gone from causing widespread dismay – “we sounded quite good … then Neil started singing,” as one member of his early 60s combo the Squires gloomily recalled – to comforting familiarity. Young sounds as he always did, but the Voice-O-Graph seems to give his singing its strangeness back: enveloped in its warped, wavering noise, he suddenly sounds less like a legendary rock star than one of those oddball denizens of the old, weird America dug up by Harry Smith for the Anthology of American Folk Music. The sound sometimes jars with the material – not least Willie Nelson’s cheery tale of touring life, On the Road Again – but more often it potentiates it. If You Could Read My Mind, written by Young’s Yorkville contemporary Gordon Lightfoot, is transformed from easy-listening chart-topper into something haunted and strange. Sung as a duet with Jack White, the Everly Brothers’ I Wonder Why I Care As Much sounds chillingly desolate. Read the full review on The Guardian

Death – III
The group’s spiritual side can also be seen on the lo-fi guitar jam “Free” and the album’s would-be centerpiece “We’re Only People”. The latter is a nearly nine-minute workout that meanders it’s way through it’s first half with slow strummed guitar before bursting into a full-on pop number, the ultimate message of which is essentially “life is short, all we can do is make the most of it.” Although it doesn’t quite land as the grand statement that David might have envisioned, it’s still a solid framework for a song that would have probably only improved with further attention and studio time. The Lord even manages to worm his (or her) way into “Open Road”, a number that sounds like Hendrix trying to write a country song, which turns out to be a surprisingly enjoyable combination. Read the full review on Pop Matters

Damon Albarn – Everyday Robots
Typically, Albarn keeps himself at a distance while addressing social ills and malaise, but on this record, he also implicates himself. Following a fitting sample of 1950’s English comedian and performer Lord Buckley courtesy of producer Richard Russell, the album-opening title track brings the point home with its first line, “We are everyday robots on our phones/ In the process of getting home.” Backed by exotically intricate string arrangements and subtle electronic blips, Albarn’s voice is free to envelop the compositions, drawing close attention to his lyrical content. The subtle instrumental flourishes throughout Everyday Robots never overpower Albarn, creating enough open space for an entirely reflective, delicate effort. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

Chris Robinson Brotherhood – Phosphorescent Harvest
On his latest effort, Chris Robinson and company ride straight for your soul, guns blazing. Following up on their first two albums, Phosphorescent Harvest is chock full of pleasant surprises. Chris makes his roots known, as he yet again channels the sounds that inspired generations past, using his versatility to bring them to new light. And before he’s through, he will be sure it all comes back into style. Read the full review on Blues Rock Review

Cloud Nothings – Here and Nowhere Else
It’s easy to get lost in the urgency of Cloud Nothings on this album and not really consider what is being talked about. “Psychic Trauma” features a chorus constructed by Baldi’s fractured bark, which will have many recalling Kurt Cobain in a comparison that proves more apt than we’d like to admit. But no one’s going to call this mere idol-aping, as Billie Joe Armstrong steps into Cobain’s place as key influence on album closer “I’m Not Part of Me”. Elsewhere, “No Thoughts” concludes with a rise in intensity octave to heights Cobain would have been hard-pressed to match. Moments like the outro to “Psychic Trauma” or the bridge of “Just See Fear” seem to unfold unrealistically, capturing studio moments in ways that you always hope to hear but rarely ever do, putting you practically in the room with the band. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

Thievery Corporation – Saudade
Though countless songs have “saudade” in the title, the condition of saudade isn’t usually conveyed through words. It’s evoked. Its wistfulness radiates through every element of the music — from the sound Joao Gilberto makes humming that iconic introduction to “The Girl From Ipanema” to the yearning melody itself to the precise chop of the rhythm guitar behind the voice. You can’t just order up saudade. There’s no setting for it on a drum machine; no software emulation available. It comes seeping through the music, between the notes, as delicate and evanescent as a May breeze. Read the full review on NPR

Mac DeMarco – Salad Days
DeMarco isn’t a greenhorn – he’s been recording and releasing raunchy rock ‘n’ roll for five years, first under the great pseudonym Makeout Videotape, and now simply as himself. Salad Days is his third release for Captured Tracks, after the album-sized EP Rock And Roll Nightclub, and subsequent album-sized album 2. For the uninitiated, he’s like a bluesy Ariel Pink, an artist unafraid to blurt out incredible tracks with amazing proficiency to vast swathes of acclaim but not knockout sales. DeMarco probably doesn’t give a shit about either. Read the full review on Music OHM

London Grammar – If You Wait
There is not a single weak track, but amongst the many highlights is a spellbinding cover of French house artist Kavinsky’s “Nightcall”. There’s a particularly gorgeous moment around the two-minute-thirty-second mark when the instrumentation is peeled away and, for a few seconds, you think the song will end – before Reid’s dazzling vocal is re-introduced amidst a haze of swirling keys. It’s nothing short of transcendent. Also, the flawless sequencing leads to an album that begs you to drink in its beauty by listening to it from beginning to end.

This is an enthralling, stunning, deeply emotive album that perfectly marries understated electronica to sublime vocals and melodies. In a year dominated by titanic LPs, London Grammar have not only made the most perfectly formed debut album of the year – they’ve made one of the best LPs, period. Read the full review on Pretty Much Amazing

Hold Steady – Teeth Dreams
If you’ve ever had that dream where your teeth fall out or crumble apart, you can recall that tossing-and-turning feeling of helplessness and existential dread that you can’t escape from while you’re asleep. For the Hold Steady, though, its Teeth Dreams are about being trapped in reality, what happens after coming down from a high and facing up to the latent fears and nagging disappointments that all the self-medicating could fend off for only so long. This time out, there’s not so much about booze and drugs, and nothing about hoodrats, with the key terms on Teeth Dreams being frustration and anxiety. Read the full review on Pop Matters

Bad Plus – Rite of Spring
Of all the jazz groups to tackle such a hurdle, The Bad Plus seems like the right horse for the course. It’s a group with an affinity for quirky, proggy original music; a reputation for transformative covers of anything from 20th-century classical music to Aphex Twin; an evident love for music history, whether jazz or otherwise. It’s also been touring frequently for well over a decade, with sizeable fan base and media attention, making it possible for a few major performing arts institutions to commission it for something of this scope. So they did, at first performing their adaptation of the Rite with a video installation and later with a dance company. Now the music is on record for anyone to hear. Read the full review on NPR

War on Drugs – Lost in the Dream
As detailed in a recent Grantland feature, Lost In the Dream was the product of a grueling, year-long recording process. Though Granduciel involved his touring band more so than any previous War on Drugs record, his perfectionist tendencies still held sway, resulting in endless cycles of recording, revising, and scrapping. And such self-doubt wasn’t helped by the fact that Granduciel was recovering from the flame-out of a long-term relationship, the ashes of which are scattered all over his lyric sheet here. But the obsessiveness and insecurity pay off massively on Lost in the Dream—this is the War on Drugs’ most lustrous, intricately detailed, and beautifully rendered record to date. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Freddie Gibbs/Madlib – Pinata
This is the type of idea that can’t go wrong. Piñata might not even work as a front-to-back listen, but it’s a damn near guarantee you’re going to get good raps over left-field beats. That’s what’s expected, and that’s what’s given, but that’s not all. Freddie Gibbs and Madlib don’t reflect off each other in the way Action Bronson and Party Supplies bring out the best in each other when they meet. There’s a sense of reverence that extends beyond chemistry. Read the full review on consequence of Sound

Black Lips-Underneath the Rainbow
With The Black Keys’ drummer Patrick Carney on production duties for a number of tracks, Underneath The Rainbow has been recorded at various places from Nashville to New York as the band meld their usual abrasive garage punk rock with a touch of bluesy Southern rock. Opener Drive By Buddy is a perfect example of this, sounding something like a bunch of drunken hillbillies playing The Monkees’ Last Train To Clarksville, accompanied at one point by a most annoying alarm clock. Read the full review on MusicOHM

Metronomy – Love Letters
Metronomy’s Mercury nomination for their third album, The English Riviera (2011), gave a giddily high-profile to what had begun as Devonian Joseph Mount’s bedroom-produced, solo project. Their breakthrough’s thin-voiced, faintly melancholy English dance-pop seemed to bracket them with Hot Chip, following a progressively more anaemic lineage that began with early New Order. Mount is an easy-going soul, but interviews suggest he sometimes smarts at being underestimated, fuelling an ambition to progress and prove his doubters wrong. Love Letters, recorded to tape in east London’s analogue, White Stripes-favoured studio Toe Rag, certainly rings the changes impressively. It’s Metronomy’s best work to date. Read the full review on The Independent 

Aloe Blacc – Lift Your Spirit
The most contemporary R&B of the productions is on trend with the latest disco revivalist movement, which finds its expression with the Pharrell produced four-on-the-floor of “Love is the Answer” and would be right at home with the butterfly collars and bellbottom flairs decorating any ‘70s roller rink. On the socially conscious single, Blacc is delivering his best Bill Withers at the discotheque impression. The unabashed soul continues with plenty of triumphant strings and hip hop beats for the fist-pumping choral anthem, “The Man,” an epic song already featured on the national Beatz by Dre headphones commercial. The testosterone propulsions and more palatable braggadocio that thread much of the male-centric Lift Your Spirit is at its most cinematic on the funky “Solider in the City” which sports the kind of Blaxploitation scoring elements that personified such film soundtracks as Shaft and Trouble Man, if slightly brighter in tone. Read the full review on SoulTracks

Elbow – Take off & Landing of Everything
The sound of change is all over the band’s sixth album. During the recording of The Take off And Landing Of Everything, Garvey’s 10 year relationship ended, and although this isn’t a “break-up album” in the way that Leaders Of The Free World so explicitly was, it’s impossible not to hear the sound of the recently heartbroken in there (listen to a line like “I am the boy who loved her so in every song” and try to imagine it’s not autobiographical). Most surprisingly, these most Mancunian of bands have a new city in their creative eyeline: New York. Read the full review on Music OHM

Real Estate – Atlas
On Atlas, their basic sound hasn’t changed—frontman Martin Courtney’s clean-strummed open chords, Matt Mondanile’s bright leads, and a light-stepping rhythm section all squish together comfortably like college housemates sprawled on a sectional sofa—but the mood has. “I’m just trying to make some sense of this before I lose another year,” shrugs Courtney on “The Bend”. On “Crime”, he sings “Toss and turn all night, don’t know how to make this right/ Crippling anxiety.” The once-ideal pool party band, in other words, has turned to soundtracking the cleanup: Everyone’s gone, the sky’s threatening rain, there are cigarette butts floating in the pool, and we’ve all gotta work tomorrow. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Drive By Truckers – English Oceans
What distinguishes the Truckers’ 12th album from the rest of their excellent recent pack is two-fold: 1) The band came out firing hot, the batch of lean rock songs presented in their visceral, unadorned rawness, and 2) More than ever before, this is a Cooley album, with six of his compositions shaping the overall tone of the record.

Cooley’s “Shit Shots Count” kicks off the album with the sort of sly, weary wisdom of someone who’s long since dropped all idealism: “Friday night rich is all you’re ever gonna be until the fight in you on Monday’s gone.” Go to work and have your weekends and forget about measuring your life in terms of pride or shame, advises Cooley, adopting a resigned barfly honesty: “Don’t act so surprised, and try not to look so lost.” Read the full review on Paste

Nick Waterhouse – Holly
Nick Waterhouse looks like Elvis Costello and sings like a smoother Dan Auerbach. He writes tight, short songs that would make Bert Bern of Twist And Shout fame proud. You can imagine that he and Van Morrison have a similar record collection, including the Irish bard’s own classics. Unlike other genre-resurging acts like The Allah-las, Tame Impala, Ty Segall or Foxygen, Waterhouse’s main well of inspiration is not classic ’60s rock and roll, but R&B and soul, the kind you listened to in the ’50s on a Chess Records LP. Read the full review on Music OHM

Beck – Morning Phase
Naturally, after three albums in a row without much stripped down material, Beck has returned to the musicians (and emotions) of Sea Change with Morning Phase, his first new studio album in six years. And this time around, Beck not only has a more positive outlook on life, but sports refined songwriting and musicianship. That is, instead of wallowing in minimalism and his own sadness, Beck uses Morning Phase to show that he’s “tired of being alone”, but also to state that he’s comfortable in his own skin. All in all, it’s one of the best records he’s ever made. Read the full review on Music OHM

St. Vincent – St. Vincent
St. Vincent continues Clark’s run as one of the past decade’s most distinct and innovative guitarists, though she’s never one to showboat. Her harmonic-filled style bears the influence of jazz (she picked up a lot of her signature tricks from her uncle, the jazz guitarist Tuck Andress) and prog rock, two genres known to embrace sprawl. But Clark’s freak-outs are tidy, modular and architecturally compact—like King Crimson rewritten by Le Corbusier. Even at its most spazzy, there’s always something efficient about St. Vincent. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Mike Gordon – Overstep
What Gordon may have given up in control, he gains by creating a more unified and satisfying sound. Don’t worry, Gordon lovers. There’s still plenty of his off-the-wall lyrics. Take “Ether,” the first track, where he dreamily describes floating around and encountering a Cyclops and using rocket components to build a new girlfriend. Read the full review on ABCnews