FLOOD

Mavis Staples isn’t one to brandish a song like a weapon—not when she’s so good at disarmament—and here she aims to melt swords into plowshares through the cosmic force of neighborly love, wild empathy, and intentional optimism.

“Take Me Apart”‘s tension between sleek, modern sound and beating-heart humanity reveals what’s always been great about R&B: that it wears its emotions on its sleeve and provides a conduit for deep feeling.

The songs of Barnett and Vile are deliberately gnarled and unkempt, and never sound nearly as fussed-over as they probably are.

On his second album, the Mercury Prize winner is a big star and a total alien on a pilgrimage through hostile lands.

By keeping it low-key, the stakes on The National’s new album somehow seem even higher.

Seven years after “This is Happening,” James Murphy remains unparalleled at building slow-burn epics from all the fun bits of his record collection.

It’s another great Queens of the Stone Age record that’s simultaneously of a piece with the others and distinct in its character and identity.

For as much as the spiritual jazz movement of the 1970s reached for the stars, the great triumph of “The Elements” is how earthbound it feels.

On paper, “Everything Now” is the dourest of any Arcade Fire album, a significant achievement for a group whose debut album is called “Funeral.”

Is Big Boi underrated?

This band does delicate beauty so well that the stand-out moments of “Crack-Up” tend to be the ones where they let their hair down a bit.

These are songs that feel like they’re reaching for something; songs that sound like invocations.

On his third full-length, DeMarco pits the innately good-natured, easy-going tone of his music against a hint of sorrow in his lyrics.

Leslie Feist is casually virtuosic and quietly adventurous throughout her first record in six years, though you never get the sense that she’s pushing things just to push.

“DAMN.” bears our struggle and triumph, swagger and fear, success and uncertainty, love and original sin.

Nothing here wants for hooks or for energy, but the songs on The New Pornographers’ seventh album all seem flat somehow.

Colter creates music that drones, builds, drifts, and crests, never following familiar emotional beats but instead allowing them to follow their own wild intuitions.

“Salutations” maintains the tattered humanity of its unaccompanied counterpart, but somehow makes it all go down a little smoother.

There was always bound to be a straight-ahead dance-rock album from Spoon. How could there not be?

“Being You” is gnarly and cerebral, the sound of a jittery headspace that’s got room enough for every flight of fancy.