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

The Shins – Port of Morrow
A deep breath, then: James Mercer has returned to Earth. Port of Morrow, the Shins’ fourth studio album in 11 years, is a triumphant return from a project that once risked being reduced to an indie-went-mainstream tagline. It’s the perfect distillation of the Shins’ back catalog– the jangly, wistful airs of Oh, Inverted World, Chutes Too Narrow’s genre-resistant playfulness, Wincing the Night Away’s expansively detailed production. But in other ways, its colorful, detail-oriented approach sets it apart from anything Mercer’s done before. Read the full review on Pitchfork

The Hunger Games – Soundtrack
What’s the appropriate soundtrack for kids killing kids? That’s one of many tough questions that Grammy-winning producer T Bone Burnett had to answer while overseeing this set of songs inspired by the movie adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling novel about tweens and teens forced to fight to the death. Fans of the book might imagine its bow-hunting heroine, Katniss Everdeen, slinging arrows to the strains of something decidedly punk-rock. Personally, I’d like to think of her blasting Bikini Kill’s ”Rebel Girl” while she takes out Cato, Clove, Glimmer, and anyone else who underestimates her talent for ripping out tender teenage hearts and entrails. But what puts Burnett in the mood for some good old-fashioned child sacrificing, apparently, is…folk. Read the full review on Entertainment Weekly

Odd Future – The Odd Future Tape Vol. 2
The O.F. Tape Vol. 2 is a retrenchment, a return to the anarchic and nauseous lo-fi snarl-rap that introduced the group. No rappers or singers or producers from outside the group show up; the whole thing (aesthetically, at least) could’ve been recorded in Syd’s bedroom studio two years ago. The beats, mostly from Tyler and Left Brain, are queasy stumbling lurches that some out funky almost in spite of themselves. Tyler, obviously the crew’s mastermind and most visible member, doesn’t act as frontman on the album; instead, he’s happy to come off as just one important member of the collective. Hodgy Beats, actually, emerges as the MVP in some ways; he raps on 10 of the 18 tracks, more than anyone else. Read the full review on Sterogum

Anais Mitchell – Young man in America
The title should give you some sense of the scale of this album’s lyrics. It’s an appellation that wouldn’t be out of place on a thick novel by Faulkner or Steinbeck. The scale of the songs isn’t quite that ambitious, but Mitchell does set a wide-angle lens on the scope of modern American history. She uses the recurring image of the trust that children put into the hands of their fathers as an allegory about the lower and middle classes putting their futures in the hands of our government. The story of Abraham and the near-sacrifice of his son becomes a bitter view of the current recession on “Dyin Day”. She repeats the idea on the gorgeous “He Did” (“Your daddy didn’t leave a will/he left a shovel and a hole to fill”). Read the full Review on American Songwriter

Andrew Bird – Break It Yourself
Break It Yourself, his latest album, opens with a song that jumps right into these kinds of concerns. “Desperation Breeds” wrings more than a little haunt out of the precipitous loss of bee populations, and from there, we’re off to the races, winding through ruminations on the way death’s promised end point can inject meaning into life’s mundane moments (“Near Death Experience Experience”), to “Sifters”, whose point that the “moon plays the ocean like a violin” works both metaphorically and literally. Certain themes recur. One is the slipperiness of truth and memory– “Lazy Projector” throws itself straight into wondering how much of our memory is our own, while “Lusitania”, a duet with St. Vincent, transposes the thought to collective memory, capping a verse that touches on events from World War I and the Spanish-American War with the line, “We don’t study these wars no more.” Read the full Review on Pitchfork

Various Artists – New Multitudes (New Songs w/ lyrics by Woody Guthrie)
Recorded in 2009 with Centro-Matic’s Will Johnson and Varnaline’s Anders Parker, the album is part of a year-long centennial celebration of Guthrie’s birth that includes tribute concerts in all 50 states and an expanded boxed set release of Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Guthrie-derived Mermaid Avenue albums released more than a decade ago. Read the full article on Rolling Stone