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