Tame Impala's music revisits a time when guitar effects and studio tricks were music's newest frontiers; when rock was barely old enough to drive and violently threw conventional ideas out the window.
Tame Impala is more about impact than innovation, sure, but the music still stuns on contact.
If music ever needs FDA approval in the future, bands like this will be the reason why; Magic Kids' sugar-coated songs paint a mental picture of smiling clouds and double rainbows, with a unicorn or two tossed in for good measure.
More than a quarter of a century into the band's career together, it's inspiring to hear Melvins continue to deafen new generations of listeners.
On their 20th album together, Melvins' members still know how to throw their weight around.
Cryptic messages and abstract statements are littered throughout the music of Happy Birthday, but it hasn't made the band's sun-baked pop-rock any less infectious.
Being a hotbed of international travel, of course Panama's music is as diverse as its population. Throughout the '60s and '70s, it wasn't uncommon to hear intricate mixtures of calypso, jazz and cumbia throughout the isthmus.
Short-sighted music fans might scoff at the revivalism of, say, Ariel Pink, but plenty of acts have built healthy careers around the art of bringing back the past.
Naturally, underground music often gravitates toward experimentation and the abstract. That's understandable, and more often than not, it feels great to dive into a difficult album and swim a few laps.
Souljazz doesn't reinvent soul, jazz or the fusion thereof, but it plays all of the above with the passion that drove its forefathers.
Grooves are important to John Talabot - they're pivotal. That's the case with most dance-music producers, but there's something especially sleek about the Spanish producer's debut album, 'fIN.'
Ab-Souls Outro' serves as a jazzy, spoken summation of 'Section.80's themes. Guest cohort Ab-Soul opens the song with one urgent verse after another: Flowing freely like the saxophone behind him, his words advocate veering outside life's most predictable pathways.
With heavy hitters like 'Who's in Control' and 'Stunde Null,' it's easy to imagine British Sea Power wailing on Flying Vs in front of a packed arena of screaming fans.
The Beach Boys set the bar for pop sunshine more than 40 years ago, and the genre hasn't changed that much since. Surfer Blood's 'Floating Vibes' rounds the usual bases with an upbeat attitude, and the string swells closing the track are a must, but the band manages to infuse all those old sounds with fresh energy.
Brand New Wayo: Funk, Fast Times and Nigerian Boogie Badness 1979-1983' covers a short chunk of time in Nigeria's musical culture - one that might have lasted longer had the label spearheading the movement at the time, Phonodisk, not been so financially mismanaged.
Outside of Peruvian rap-rock, few genre tags raise eyebrows quite like the words 'Nigerian disco.'
Electronics, samples and vocals are all fed into The Log.Os' music, and a fresh take on soul comes out. The band's songs splash around in the same gene pool as neo-soul artists like Erykah Badu, but they reach forward to pull ideas from glitch-hop producers such as Flying Lotus and Prefuse 73.
On 'Kaputt,' singer-songwriter Dan Bejar reevaluates his band's sound and drifts away from the David Bowie comparisons that have plagued even his best albums.
A Hawk and a Hacksaw may be from America, but the band's music sure isn't: Since the beginning, Eastern Europe has been an unwavering source of musical inspiration, not to mention fertile touring ground, for the group.
On its fifth full-length album, 'Cervantine,' A Hawk and a Hacksaw's love of the Balkans continues unabated, but with new songs and collaborators. In 'Uskudar,' the music finds an equal balance of sweet, sour and earthy sounds with nimble string melodies and a grunting tuba.
