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

Pelican – Forever Becoming
The album is drawn tight as a noose; “Terminal” cranks and creaks like the rusted architecture of some angelic torture device, while “The Tundra” twists and churns and in a balletic freefall of catastrophic riffage. There’s delicacy, too, on “Perpetual Dawn,” the nearly 10-minute closer that’s poised between slow-core hollowness and majestically distorted swells of Sigur Rós-grade beauty. That doesn’t help soften the chugging bass or torque-driven chord progressions of “Vestiges,” nor the icy, unresolved menace of “Immutable Dusk.” Nor should it. It used to be that you could set your watch by the changes in a Pelican song, the ebb and flow of their albums. Not here. Forever Becoming is all about the gradual, gracefully illogical procession of heaviness—a counterintuitive lull that’s all the more hypnotic for its tendency to jar. Read the full review on The AV Club

Avett Brothers – Magpie & The Dandelion
As this explanation implies, Magpie often feels less like a tightly constructed, thematically connected album and more like a collection of tunes the band came up with while on a creative roll. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Album single “Another Is Waiting” is a jaunty, fantastic two minutes of pop bliss that is the epitome of short and sweet. “Good To You” borrows half the melody of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” transforming it into a soft, gorgeous piano-and-strings ballad (with Ben Folds slipping away from cultural relevance, the Avetts have claimed the piano-and-strings ballad throne). And on “Morning Song,” the brothers basically borrow from themselves, taking a variation of a subtle vocal melody from “January Wedding” (“because my heart and hers are the same”) and making it the centerpiece of a soulful, slow-building gem that eventually builds to a call-and-response gospel finale. Read the full review on Reverb

Black Milk – No Poison No Paradise
For his new album, No Poison No Paradise, Milk details his upbringing through semi-fictional character, “Sonny,” who endures the same hardships as any kid growing up in an urban setting. He’s a good-natured child who straddles the line between right and wrong. He faces daunting peer pressures that force him down a different path, away from the rigid Christian values instilled by his parents. At its core, No Poison No Paradise outlines the growing pains of adolescence and the daily struggles of adulthood. Read the full reivew on HipHop DX

Danny Brown – Old
This is a complicated narrative to keep running but Brown is equal to the task. In his berserk originality, writerly flair, emotional impact, and old-fashioned craft, Danny Brown belongs in any conversation about the best rappers working, and he’s at the top of his game here. His rapping is abrasive and visceral, but it’s also musical, a quality he doesn’t get much credit for because of his vocal tone. Listen to the way he rolls the word sounds “fucked up” and “knuckles” on “Dubstep” off of a perfect little woodpecker-stutter of percussion. Or his subdued performance on “Lonely” featuring a fluid, airy beat by Paul White built from two Morice Benin samples. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Dr. Dog – B Room
While the old cliché claims that you can’t ever go home again, B-Room, Dr. Dog‘s first album in their new studio, makes a pretty strong case for just building a new home. Continuing to use the same collaborative process the group began to explore on Be the Void, it feels as though a place to call their own was the missing ingredient for the bandmembers. Despite it only being a year since their last release, it feels as if Dr. Dog are refreshed and reinvigorated, returning to the studio with an enthusiasm and warmth that shines through on the album. Read the full review on AllMusic

Lee Ranaldo & The Dust – Last Night on Earth
Much of last year’s Between The Times and The Tides found Ranaldo refining his sensibility for bent-toned beauties into some (mostly) straightforward, four-minute janglers. Some sinister-toned ambient roars haunted some of that album’s corners, but most of it was sweetened with some 90s pop hooks, tasteful keys purring from John Medeski, and that strangely charming lilt to Ranaldo’s voice, akin somewhat to a crackling bonfire that never rises, burns out, or extinguishes, warbling along in a sweetened middle spot. Read the full review on Tiny Mixtapes