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

Phantogram – Voices
The most noticeable difference, at first, between Phantogram and say Purity Ring is how frontwoman Sarah Barthel controls the songs. Barthel can easily be cooing and seductive one moment only to be breathing fire the next. Even while she’s at her most sleek, she’s still hiding daggers behind her back, after all the opening tack “Nothing But Trouble” is filled with her “shotgun smiles”. When she starts describing her R.E.M. cycle on “Bad Dreams”, be assured that nightmares will be induced. Read the full review on Pop Matters

Glitch Mob – Love Death Immortality
The Glitch Mob’s sophomore album, Love Death Immortality, truly showcases how much the band has grown since their debut full-length album, Drink The Sea, in 2010. Released on their own Glass Air label, Love Death Immortality walks the tight rope between light and dark, playing both sides perfectly against one another in a tug of war between infatuating melodic leads and deadly bass line rhythms that transcend what everyone else in the electronic music scene is doing. Read the full review on Joonbug

Bombay Bicycle Club – So Long, See You Tomorrow
The most striking feature of So Long, See You Tomorrow is the manner in which BBC manage to successfully mix eclecticism with cohesiveness. As we’ve witnessed with the transitions from blues to folk to pop that have occurred in their back catalogue, they’re certainly not a band to stick with one sound and SLSYT is not an exception to that trend. Much of the record is devoted to perfecting the middle-ground between indie-pop and dance, a feat which many bands recently have stumbled over. Read the full review on Absolute Punk

Alcest – Shelter
I honestly think that there is no other band which has had as much of a game changing impact on the underground metal scene over the last decade quite like Alcest. Despite their beginnings as just another European folk metal band with lo-fi recordings and a traditionalist pride in all things medieval, Alcest’s greatest achievements can be found in their least “metal” moments. Read The Full Review on Sputnik Music

Indian – From All Purity
In “Directional”, faint, hostile harmonies crisscross with a storm of electronic viscera, sandwiched between the dual guitars that chase O’Toole’s lead and the rhythm section’s trouncing momentum. During “Rhetoric of No”, the drums trace O’Toole’s voice like a vigilante trailing a target, the rhythm emphasizing every shift the leader makes. It’s not complicated. It’s just nuanced, the condition that makes From All Purity more than a loud record with good riffs and belligerent intentions. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Vardan – The Woods is my Moribund
Italy’s Vardan is a very exciting one-man band. Vardan (Anwech, Leaden, Tomhet) put together his solo project in 1997, but released his first demo in 2004 entitled “Hidden in a Tomb.” After an expanded release in 2007 and a split album in 2010, Vardan has released 4 album since 2012, 3 of those in the same year. With 2014, comes Vardan’s latest dark, bleak “The Wood is My Coffin” out on January 21, 2014 via Moribund Records. Read the full review on Wicked Channel

Hail Spirit Noir – Oi Magoi
Opener Blood Guru is based around a bubbling riff in a fast 5/4 rhythm. Over this is layered… all sorts of things, including lots of synth and some sweaty percussion jamming. Personally, I sensed some similarities with the last Oranssi Pazuzu: the general idea being an insistent riff looped over and over, allowing the band to experiment with instrumental textures over the top. See also the closing title track, which brings back the Latin percussion, and even forces in some free jazz splutterings of fragmented electric guitar lead. Hence what really impresses on Oi Magoi, to my ears at least, is the diversity and richness of the sounds themselves. Read the full review on Metal Reviews

Sun o))) + Ulver – Terrestrials

As with Ulver’s Messe I.X – VI.X or Monoliths & Dimensions the devil’s what brought them here, but we find God in the details. The arrhythmic sluggish sprawl of those downtuned, feedbacking axes is still developing as a compositional tool, continuing to open up space for strings to scrape, brass to cry and keys to shower into. Those Sunn O))) long-hairs are finally following their bliss out the other side of the abyss they entered via that gaping tunnel on Monoliths & Dimensions’ cover, and the able hands and sly smiles of Ulver, Rygg and O’Sullivan greet them with signature erudite adaptability across Terrestrials’ note-perfect 35-minute brevity. Read the full review on The Quietus

Broken Bells – After the Disco

After the Disco, with the opener “Perfect World” effectively re-creating the sound of Factory Records circa 1981: the puttering sequencers and sleek-bleak synth lines recall OMD and early New Order, with Mercer doing a decent impression of Barney Sumner’s wan-but-knowing vocal style. Blessed with an infernally catchy hook, it’s the best thing they’ve done. Read the full review on The Independent

John Butler Trio – Flesh and Blood
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Nzp0XTWfjk
it should be no surprise that this album is richly textured, going from clean to feeding-back 12-string fingerstyle excursions, and then to Weissenborn–fueled exclamations (“Livin’ in the City” and “Devil Woman”), while the last quarter of the album moves to a mellower, more melodically haunting pace. It may be his best guitar record yet, and the specialness lies in that it isn’t only that. Read the full review on Premier Guitar

Warpaint – Warpaint
Despite their increased focus, Warpaint remain aloof. And therein lies their power. This is a deeply personal record, unequivocally sensual. ‘Disco//Very’ is their most fearless move yet, descending into an animalistic shambles with predatory lyrics (“Like cyanide, it’s poison/She’ll eat you alive”) and a prowling bassline. It’s the foreplay before the gently rousing ‘Go In’, which sounds like a seductive and Valium-injected take on ‘We Are Siamese’ by Peggy Lee. ‘CC’ continues the lustful pursuit, growing dizzier as the lyrics and chords make you beg for more. Read the full review on NME

Mogwai – Rave Tapes
On Mogwai’s eighth studio album, Rave Tapes, the self-described guitar army have finally dialed down their six-string sound, making for a more analog-driven LP. It’s a fitting title for a record that takes its name from the ecstasy-fueled counterculture and accompanying cassettes that dominated the British music scene in the early ’90s. Read full review on Exclaim

Hard Working Americans – Hard Working Americans
Hard Working Americans is a new quintet formed by singer-songwriter Todd Snider; it includes Dave Schools from the band Widespread Panic and Duane Trucks, whose family includes members of The Allman Brothers Band. On its self-titled debut album, the band covers 11 songs by well-known songwriters, and the result coheres as a statement of both solidarity and fun. Read the full review on NPR

Sharon Jones – Give The People What They Want
Most of the songs on Give the People What They Want clock in at a brisk three minutes, and album standout, “Now I See,” is no exception. The song is introduced with Memphis-style horns and a wickedly sly blues-based riff that slowly snakes along just long enough for Jones’ bruised lyrics to convert the track from lamentation to personal transformation. When Jones sings, “Now I see what you want to be / You Want to Take it All Away From Me,” her realization is buoyed by the band’s driving rhythm. She continues, “Once a friend, now an enemy,” in an act of declaration. Read the full review on Pretty Much Amazing

Bruce Springsteen – High Hopes
High Hopes is not going to shock anyone, but it is Springsteen’s most vital-sounding set since The Seeger Sessions. And it’s probably not a coincidence that it marks the biggest departure from his standard modus operandi since that record – it’s substantially free of regular producer Brendan O’Brian; with three covers, it’s even partially free of Bruce’s own songwriting; it introduces the (very) erstwhile Rage Against the Machine axeman Tom Morello as a collaborator to surprisingly strong effect (a bunch of the songs were recorded during a week off on last year’s Wrecking Ball tour, when Morello was standing in as lead E Street Band guitarist); and conversely it gains a populist, fan friendly edge by revisiting a clutch of Springsteen’s most beloved ‘recent’ songs. Read the full review on Drowned In Sound

Stephen Malkmus – Wig out at Jagbags
The title is quintessentially Stephen Malkmus — a conflation of two slang terms, one dating back to the hazed-out ’60s, the other a vulgar remnant of modernity — and, as it happens, Wig Out at Jagbags also sounds quintessentially Malkmusian. It’s elastic guitar rock constructed partially out of cannabis guitar jams and partially out of punk rock squalls, both sides distinguished by wry melodicism and dexterous wordplay, not to mention Malkmus’ lingering tendency to hide his accessible inclinations under sheets of six-strings. Read the full review on AllMusic

MIA – Matangi
On her fourth album, M.I.A.’s focus has shifted. As the cover art suggests, this LP is a tight close-up on her world: her artistic abilities and credibility, her sexual bravado and simply her skills on the mic. It’s a telling move too that she calls this Matangi, her birth name, and the name of Hindu goddess of music. And on this album, the line between those two definitions is completely blurred. Read the full review on Paste

Cut Copy Free Your Mind
Free Your Mind makes friends with the listener by using three straight bangers to kick off the album: The title track is backed up by “We Are Explorers” and “Let Me Show You Love”, coincidentally the same three singles that kicked off the album’s presentation to the world. And, as the album progresses, it doesn’t cease in providing potential singles, all with hooks that latch with ease, all with a similar aesthetic and production flair to the title track. “Footsteps” establishes backing vocals and percussion sounds as strings throughout the album, the melody recalling Pet Shop Boys strongly enough to make the listener check the liner notes to see if Tennant and Lowe weren’t in on the writing. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

Midlake – Antiphon
While still noticeably Midlake, the album propels the group off in yet another direction, the more rustic elements supplanted by psychedelic, prog-rock tendencies in which the layered keyboard textures and jazzy drumming reflect the players’ background as music students. The lush harmonies and enigmatic melodies remain, but you get the sense that the band is stretching out a little more. The title-track – named after call- and-response choral singing – features harmonies that sharp and flat over smooth, exploratory bass and keyboards, while the tunes to “This Weight” and “Aurora Gone” evade the most obvious course, but lodge themselves more tenaciously as a result. Read the full review on The Independent

Arcade Fire – Reflektor
All four of the Montreal-based band’s albums have been about the tension between those two words, taking up subjects like suburban isolation and the false community of religiosity, but Reflektor is larger, at least in scope, than anything Arcade Fire have done before. Of course, the stakes have been raised considerably since we’ve last heard from them: Their previous album, The Suburbs, was the unexpected winner of the Grammy for 2011’s Album of the Year. And yet, no one involved in this record sounds to be resting on the laurels of their achievements—that includes producer and LCD Soundsystem retiree James Murphy. Reflektor is a triumph, but not a victory lap; the band never sounds content enough for that. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Minor Alps – Get There
The distance that Minor Alps creates then serves to provide the listener with an emotional starting point for the band’s lyrical themes. In other words, it helps to establish what feels like a separation from a tangible reality, leaving us to feel almost trapped within the headspace of Hatfield and Caws and sharing in their sense of detachment and isolation. The listener is really only given any respite from this through the common presence of an acoustic guitar, which seems to serve as the only apparent link between this isolation and tangible reality. Read the full review on Paste

White Denim – Corsicana Lemonade
Opener “At Night In Dreams” recalls the guitar theatrics of Jailbreak era Thin Lizzy, bursting with a circular, fuzzy lead that’s both hypnotic and heavy. Lyrically, like much of White Denim’s recent output, a high proportion of Corsicana Lemonade focuses on growing older while still figuring things out. “I know you think that it’s easy to change, but it’s a symptom of age,” Petralli sings. Since the band has all passed 30 years of age and are settling down, this mindset is an ever-present cloud hanging over them. This uncertainty paints the Texas city name-dropping title track, when Petralli sings in a whispery falsetto, “couple years I may be a rich man, where it ends up I don’t really know.” Read the full review on Consequence of Sound