Saturation Brockhampton

Paradigms is an honest attempt to expand musical horizons, capturing the essence of the unique prog vibe by focusing on the genre's most important aspect: variety. Featured musicians on the album include drummer Craig Blundell (Frost*/Steven Wilson), bassist Kristoffer Gildenlöw (ex-Pain of Salvation), guests Derek Sherinian (ex-Dream Theater), Alex Argento on keyboards, and the lovely jazz vocalist Houry Dora Apartian. Project by: guitarist and founder Shant Hagopian…

The band's second album, released a few scant months after their debut, found Darryl Way and co. still edging away from the Curved Air ideal, without doing anything to truly alienate that band's loyal followers. Indeed, there were moments throughout Wolf's career when they sounded more like the original Air than that band's current incarnation ever could. Of course it's the mad violin that best confirms the similarities, but one can only dream of how dramatic this band could have been had they only reached a wider audience. Listening to Saturation Point is like walking a tightrope, a taut, nerve-bending ride that takes you from the eccentric peaks of "The Ache" and "Two Sisters" (combined, one of the greatest album overtures of the year), to the boleric attack of "Toy Symphony," a cut that raises the specters of Caravan and ELP, even as it shakes off comparisons with anything else…

It was worth the wait for Colombian-American songstress Kali Uchis’s first full-length. A romantic collage of artists and sounds she’s encountered along the way—Tyler, The Creator and Bootsy Collins on “After the Storm”, and Gorillaz’ Damon Albarn on the surfy “In My Dreams”—the album draws on Latin pop (“Nuestro Planeta”), hypnotic R&B (“Just a Stranger”), and high-flying psych-rock (“Tomorrow,” with production from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker). It’s a sign of Uchis’ artistic vision that she pulled so many creative minds into a single body of work that sounds so distinctly her own.