Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel is wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords will serve you more than Ropes will ever do.
This is the most distilled Fiona Apple album yet. While her celebrated previous work was marked by eclectic musical flourishes courtesy of producers including Jon Brion and Mike Elizondo, The Idler Wheel is fearlessly austere in comparison. She worked with touring drummer Charley Drayton on the album, and his touches are light and incisive. Speaking of the record’s signature clattering percussion– including thigh slaps, truck stomps, and “pillow,” according to the credits– Apple associated the homemade sounds with an increased freedom: “I just like that feeling of: ‘I’m in charge, I can do whatever I want.'” And this musique concrète approach is not random. Every single waveform is pierced with purpose, from the muted heartbeat thumping through “Valentine” to the childlike plinks popping around the uncharacteristically optimistic “Anything We Want” to the chugging factory sounds that give “Jonathan” its uneasy rhythm. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Liars – WIXIW
For this album, Liars holed up in a studio under the 101 freeway in L.A. and learned how to produce electronic music. The space has no windows and is situated in a forgotten area of the city, where the glitz of L.A turns to grime and decay. This environment shaped the contours of WIXIW. It is an album about sequestering yourself and digging deep inside your own head. Beginning with opening track “The Exact Color of Doubt” it’s clear that, sonically speaking, this theme translates into an expansive yet intensely intimate sound. Sweeping, dreamlike synths circle around sparse percussion and Andrews’ voice (something like an unpolished Thom Yorke) meanders aimlessly. It’s a song fit to be played during a nighttime scuba diving excursion. In fact, most of the record feels deeply associated with water. Specifically, being alone and deep, surrounded on all sides by pressure and the unknown, looking up at one guiding light on the surface. Read the full review on Pretty Much Amazing

Smashing Pumpkins – Oceania
This is the album that needed to surface back in 2007. With Zeitgeist, Corgan lost himself amidst a complicated jigsaw puzzle that was always destined to lay unfinished on the dining room table, namely because he kept looking for the missing pieces in other boxes. It didn’t help that the only support he received was himself and producer Roy Thomas Baker, whose sensationalized, glossy production made everything feel as real as a Hasbro action figure. On Oceania, however, Corgan exerts a different kind of authority, one that’s level-headed enough to go somewhere, and with people behind him. The songs actually feel like songs and not tracks digitally titled “Smashing Pumpkins anthem.” But why? Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

Hot Chip – In Our Heads
Over the years, Hot Chip retained their sense of humor, largely in the visual sense (funhouse torture devices, boy bands getting attacked by laser beams), but something not-so-funny also started to take place: As they perfected a savvy alchemy of dance and modern pop, their music became more serious. Amidst the big, beating heaters, dancefloor deconstructions, and “Simpsons”-soundtracking anthems, there emerged sincere ruminations on love, protection, and the pleasure that one derives from simply experiencing life, all of which were fully realized on 2010’s excellent One Life Stand. The band’s most concise and uniformly gorgeous album to date, One Life Stand also represented Hot Chip’s most clear-eyed material yet, suggesting that the group was, somewhat soberly, growing up. Read the Full Review on Pitchfork

Rush – Clockwork Angels
“Clockwork Angels” has 12 tracks and is approximately one hour and six minutes long – a respectable length considering we are talking about a band that is simultaneously considered one of the best classic rock and progressive rock bands still active today. While I’ve read online that Alex Lifeson strongly denies that “Clockwork Angels” is a concept album it does come across like a concept album to me, and it seems it also does to novelist Kevin J. Anderson (a friend of Neil Peart), who has stated that he will be writing a sci fi novelization of the album. I’m certain this will be an interesting novel, with Kevin J. Anderson describing the plot as follows: “In a young man’s quest to follow his dreams, he is caught between the grandiose forces of order and chaos. He travels across a lavish and colorful world of steampunk and alchemy, with lost cities, pirates, anarchists, exotic carnivals, and a rigid Watchmaker who imposes precision on every aspect of daily life.” Read the full review on Absolute Guitar

Tallest Man on Earth – There’s No Leaving Now
Matsson functions differently. He’s more autonomous — secluded somewhere in his home country of Sweden with each album consisting of little more than his nasal drawl, dextrous finger picking on an acoustic guitar, and sparse accompaniment. Compared to Dylan’s eight LP’s, Matsson now has three, bolstered by two strong EPs of hyper-consistent songwriting. On There’s No Leaving Now, Matsson lolls on down the same path he’s been a-walkin’, careless of the destination or the speed of life around him. The sound is more dampened than his previous recordings, even though it sometimes features more studio arrangements than any of his previous works, almost (but not quite) making good use of an eight-track recorder. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

The Walkmen – Heaven
Much of Heaven revolves around this lyrical back-and-forth, consisting of a possibly hypocritical Leithauser making statements and disavowing them almost as quickly, trying to legitimize compromises he’s made—like not being able to take his one-year-old on tour because she wakes up at six a.m.—for a career in music that’s “always been a struggle.” After promising “I’ll never leave” on “We Can’t Be Beat”, the boom-boom-bap behind “Heaven” belies the desperation of “Don’t leave me, you’re my best friend/All of my life, you’ve always been” and the regret of “I left you a million times” on album closer “Dreamboat”, whose funereal chords curl under themselves like a tail tucked between his legs. Whether addressing his partner or his muse, these empty threats and pleas will undoubtedly be familiar to anyone who’s struggled with a loved one. It’s a far cry from “Little House of Savages” when Leithauser screamed with what was then youthful conviction, “Somebody’s waiting for me at home!” Eight years later and after “some long tour that you really shouldn’t have done,” he doesn’t seem so sure. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros – Here
While the band’s debut album took the “Up From Below” name, the song’s calm tone and energy is found throughout the entirety of Here, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes’ much-anticipated follow-up. Full of reflective, soul-searching chants and quiet explosions of horns and drums, Here is an album that builds on the cathartic, communal atmosphere the band has been developing since its inception. Read the full review on Pretty Much Amazing

Sigur Ros – Valtari
Dialing back on the melodrama, Valtari feels like an early Sigur Rós record without the once-inevitable crescendos. The throwback feel is no accident: Recording began in 2007, and its earliest roots lie in sessions with a London choir four years earlier. The closest precedent for Valtari is Jónsi & Alex, the modern classical and ambient project co-led by Sigur Rós singer Jónsi that features both choral work and contributions from string quartet Amiina. Read the full review on The AV Club

EL-P – Cancer4Cure
Cancer 4 Cure is both reinvention and inversion. El-P’s first album since putting Def Jux on hiatus in early 2010 marks a break from the old order and another call to arms. Whereas Fantastic Damage served as a Def Jux coming out party and I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead synthesized the sweaty jitters of the mid-Dubya daze, Cancer 4 Cure consciously creates its own iron galaxy. None of the Def Jukies appear, save for Despot. In their stead are eXquire, Danny Brown, and a snarling Killer Mike, whose El-P produced R.A.P. Music is already the front-runner for rap album of the year. Any one of their guest spots could be a hip-hop quotable, if we still lived at a time when people cared about the Hip Hop Quotable. But my vote goes to Danny Brown, self-described as “Ric Flair/ With thick hair/ Yelling out ‘woo’/ Getting head in the director’s chair.” Read the full Review on Pitchfork

The Cult – Choice of Weapon
The end had long been nigh for The Cult, when it first came in 1995. It wasn’t just the booze and the arrival of grunge. It was as much that smart-arse Brit Pop was never going to have much truck with a man who called himself Wolf Child and wrote lyrics like, “Cool operator with a rattlesnake kiss”. More fool them. But yet, for all the brilliance of Love, Electric and Sonic Temple there was no denying things went seriously downhill after the fourth album. Still, fans have long believed in one last Memphis hip shake from the old peace dogs. And finally, on their second comeback, we now have Choice of Weapon. Read the full review on Arts Desk

Tedeschi Trucks – Live: Everybody’s Talking
On May 22, Tedeschi Trucks Band will release Everybody’s Talkin’, their sophomore album in their second full year as a band. The uplifting, energy-packed double-disc set by the 11-piece ensemble led by husband-wife team Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi that recently marked their first anniversary with a Grammy win for their debut album Revelator. TTB (as their fans know them) shows off a stunning rate of musical progress on Everybody’s Talkin’, eleven tracks selected from a year’s worth of concerts from around the globe plus one new track (“Nobody’s Free”). Read the full review on The Greatful Web

Beach House – Bloom
Beach House’s decision to call this record Bloom is almost too perfect. Over the course of four albums that’s exactly what this band has done. Two people from Baltimore started by making incense-smelling, curtains-drawn bedroom pop. Now, eight years later, they make luminous, sky-sized songs that conjure some alternate universe where Cocteau Twins have headlined every stadium on Atlantis. “Bloom” is also what these 10 songs do, each one starting with the sizzle of a lit fuse and at some fine moment exploding like a firework in slow motion. The word captures the music’s slow sonority: the round, gleaming edges of Alex Scally’s arpeggios and how, in Victoria Legrand’s unhurried mouth, all words seem to have a few extra vowels. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Best Coast – The Only Place
“The Only Place” (Mexican Summer) amps up the production by bringing in Jon Brion, who has worked with Kanye West, Fiona Apple and Spoon, among others. Brion keeps the focus on Cosentino’s sure voice and swooning harmonies. Melody rules, thanks to countless wordless vocal hooks and Bruno’s surf-guitar fills. Excursions into more orchestrated pop evoke the work of Burt Bacharach and Dusty Springfield (“Up All Night”) and a countrypolitan ballad affirms that Cosentino continues to mature and grow as a singer (“No One Like You”). Cool little touches abound, from the chiming percussion that enhances the dusky “Dreaming My Life Away” to the waltz-time vocal coda in “Last Year.” Read the full review on The Chciago Tribune

Squarepusher – Ufabulum
So after the more lived-in adventures of Just A Souvenir, and the really-pushing-it-now slapfunkeries of Solo Electric Bass 1, it’s great to see him get back to Techno Town full-time. Ufabulum is Squarepusher’s stab at a stabby-synth rave album. Its creator has been canny enough to make it not at rave pace, but to realise that glitchtronica in itself already simulates the true pace of a brain on rave-drugs: slowed-down, enveloping you in its big synthy mush, yet simultaneously sped-up and hyper-alert. Ten years since his commercial peak, he’s still hitting new highs. Read the full review on Vice

Sleep – Dopesmoker (reissue)
Even though I have the first two iterations of Dopesmoker (Jerusalem and Dopesmoker), I am (quite figuratively) dying to hear this one– it’s remastered, there’s Arik Roper’s new stoner-via-Dune esque cover, there’s crazy anecdotes about the recording of the album, e.g.: Pike stated that the “song was getting slower and slower and then it got weird. We started tripping out and second guessing ourselves.” Recording the album was difficult. Pike recalled that “there was so much to memorize for that album, and we had to do it in like three different sections because a reel-to-reel only holds 22 minutes. It was really cool, but it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in in my life.” SLEEP were in the studio for one month then went home to rehearse and returned for another month. Pike noted that they ended up with two or three different versions of the song. Read the full review on Ripple Music

Damon Albarn – Dr Dee
There’s nothing down-to-earth or gritty about Albarn’s Dr Dee, a new opera based on the infamous 16th-century alchemist John Dee. Albarn composed Dr Dee with stage director Rufus Norris, and graphic novelist Alan Moore was originally tapped to write the libretto. When Moore dropped out, Albarn helped pick up the slack. It isn’t Albarn’s first dalliance with the stage as an adult; recently he’s contributed to the productions of Monkey: Journey To The West and It Felt Like A Kiss, not to mention Manchester Opera House’s 2006 recreation of Gorillaz’s Demon Days album. But Albarn’s involvement in Dr Dee is much more front and center. His name is at the top of the opera’s companion album, which hasn’t happened since his 2003 solo debut, Democrazy. And that was just a collection of low-key demos given a limited release. Read the full review on The AV Club
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Silversun Pickups – Neck of the woods
Today, with “cooler” bands gravitating toward either the raw/abrasive or the bland/sleepy poles of rock’s axis, there’s very little action in the vast middle, where power and accessibility can combine with smarts and style (but often don’t, resulting in, well, butt-rock). Silversun Pickups has been digging around in that chasm for six years now, and while the band’s debut was too clearly beholden to the Pumpkins and the second album was too ambitious in its attempts to escape them, Neck of the Woods finds the band taking a much more natural approach. Read the full review on Paste

Norah Jones – Little Broken Hearts
The difference between this and the cafe music that first made Jones a household name is large, but the transition is anything but jarring. There are a handful of different types of pop covered on Little Broken Hearts, the studied, tried and true compositions of two incredibly smart musicians. Jones has a mastery of her own voice and delivery, fitting it with each new musical twist, and Burton knows just which buttons to push on the pop machine. Her narration in these tracks is always direct, describing specific moments in time and specific relationship details. That said, the emotional depth is in the instrumentals (from the haunting acoustics that open “Take it Back” to the finely wrought, western-tinged wave it rides to its conclusion). Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

George Harrison – Early Takes
What distinguishes these recordings, and what elevates them above the customary completist-exploiting studio sweepings that often make up the contents of similar releases, is that despite its meagre playing time at only just over half an hour, Early Takes is packed not only with the intimacy of casual home-studio sessions amongst friends, but also with some musical gems which stand alone as finished works in their own right. In the case of ‘My Sweet Lord’, arguably better than the polished and released version. Read the full review on Trebuchet Magazine

Santigold – Master of my Make-believe
It turns out that the album’s content is as patchwork as its artwork. The cover finds Santigold playing multiple characters: a formulaic Don, a Napoleon-esque conquerer immortalized on canvas, and a pair of scepter-wielding female bodyguards, and the music therein is likewise schizophrenic. Noisy and buzzing one moment, quiet and minimalist the next, Master of My Make-Believe spans pop, rock, indie, rap, and worldbeat in an exhilirating, if dizzying, tour of its ringmaster’s ecclecticism. The songs are untethered to any thematic or conceptual whole, allowing the always-playful Santigold to do what she does best: experiment. Read the full review on Slant Magazine

Jack White – Blunderbuss
Blunderbuss is filled with White’s own disenchantment. He’s loathe to talk about the personal-life specifics behind his songs, of course, but it’s hard to ignore two major events that occurred in the months leading up to the album’s creation last year: the dissolution of the White Stripes as well as his marriage to model and singer Karen Elson. As White skips eclectic through early rock, folk, and country styles in a casual and capable fashion reminiscent of The White Album, he moans of voids and angst and violence. Just as we’re sucked in by his unknowableness, this meticulous artist is drawn to the things he can’t quite get his head around, too. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Spiritualized – Sweet Heart Sweet Light
The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and Pierce may be more akin than expected after you let the open-fifth strings of “Huh?” (aforementioned 40-second introduction) effortlessly glide through you. It speaks volumes of Spaceman’s entire state of mind: utter bewilderment and shock that he’s still alive and sober after decades of self-imposed abuse. Nine minute opus “Hey Jane” rides in behind the orchestral accompaniment with a zero-gravity salute to rock of old. But this ballad radiates a nouveau riche sense of fulfilled pop majesty. Thanks to an American gospel choir, tight mid-tempo melody straight out of London’s famed Hacienda circa 1996 and his proclivity for channeling a sardonically refined Liam Gallagher, this jangly ballad is pop rock burnished to a halcyon shine. Make sure to strap in for the deliciously reconstructed four minute bridge, it makes for an unforgettably raucous ride. Read the full review on Pretty Much Amazing

Dandy Warhols – This Machine
On The Dandy Warhols’ 8th studio album, This Machine, there is everything for everyone. The band made sure each listener would find some tracks that suits one of the styles they have approached in their 18 year career. However, as a whole the album fails to truly please all the fans, since trying to cover all the ground usually leads to inconsistency . Their previous albums were all love it or hate it, but mostly following the same musical path throughout it. This is what makes This Machine one of their most inconsistent albums, even if this finds itself on the love it side more. Over the course of 43 minutes the listener will listen to something similar to what they’ve put out before, but will not be able to point out one thing that ties this album together. Read the full review on Sputnik Music

M. Ward – A Wasteland Companion
A new M. Ward album has become something of a warm blanket for music lovers. They’ve become as reliable
as the promise of the morning sun, and on A Wasteland Companion, Ward rises to the occasion. In recent years, his niche audience has grown cautious as he’s churned out records seemingly tailored to the hip soccer mom set under the She & Him moniker. With this latest outing, Ward lays all those fears to rest by putting forth one of his best solo efforts, while still incorporating the elements that made She & Him such a crossover success (aka nostalgia-drenched pop songs and Zooey Deschanel’s vocals). Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

Trampled by Turtles – Stars and Satellites
I’ve had this album for over a month whenever I’m at a loss for what to listen to, I’m drawn to Stars and Satellites like a moth to a flame. The songs, playing and production are all stellar. I could bore you by breaking every song apart but that seems unnecessary. Let’s just say this: Mostly due to their preview of “Widower’s Heart” in our live session with Trampled By Turtles, I have looked forward to this album as much as any album in years past. It delivered and then some. Read the full review on HearYa

Pelican – Ataraxia/Taraxis
Ataraxia/Taraxis is a concise, yet remarkably diverse, collection of compositions that manages to cram all the drama of 12-minute epics into more manageable timeframes. That the four tracks were recorded in four different studios is hard to tell; not only is it concise, but Ataraxia/Taraxis is surprisingly cohesive, despite its frequent dynamic contrasts. Read the full review on Drowned in Sound

The Mars Volta – Noctourniquet
The Mars Volta make music the same way a dog humps a table leg: instinctively and for self-gratification. Some people are appalled at the sight of it; others find it immensely entertaining. Either way, they’re pretty oblivious. That’s not to belittle the band, or to slander their fans as the sort of people who break out in hysterics when they see dogs humping inanimate objects (they’re so, so not), but simply to illustrate why the Volta are so user-unfriendly: because the user never enters into the equation. Omar and Cedric’s desire to self-indulge was a key factor in ATD-I’s demise, and frankly, what other people think of them is low on their list of concerns. Read full review on NME

Meshuggah – Koloss
As the nights get shorter and spirits lift, nothing can warm the cockles like a new long player from rambunctious, intense, claustrophobic, polyrhythmic industrial-strength thrash metal from Meshuggah.

But beware: these metallers can’t just play guitars and drum at lightspeed, they’re also good at maths, meaning Meshuggah’s apocalyptic soundscape comes at you in strange time signatures. Lumped in with a math metal movement with the likes of Mastodon and Dillinger Escape Plan, they have been around since long before both bands, busy inventing a sound many others have imitated for the last 20 years. Read the full review on Drowned In Sound

Tanlines – Mixed Emotions
Opener and lead single “Brothers” is as good a place to start as any, with the amniotic warmth of its bass and New Order-styled synth flourishes. “Brothers” takes its name from the first studio Tanlines ever recorded in, but it also works when translated as a reflection of a friendship over the years. “I’m just the same as I ever been/ But I’m the only one who doesn’t notice it,” goes the chorus. A lot of Mixed Emotions contains similar thematic elements in its lyrics, full of vague, open-ended questions that seem most applicable for people verging on a mid-mid-life crisis. But because of their opaqeuness, the simplest turns of phrase– when left open for interpretation– give the album a sort of emotional adaptability. For such a rhythmically-oriented affair, these smears of melancholy offer necessary balance. Read the full review on Pitchfork