The core of his sadness may still be a mystery to me, but his monument to it, in all its eccentricity, is by far the hardest thing to ignore that he's done yet.

Port Entropy, Shugo's fifth LP (depending on how you reckon Fragment, his 2003 CD-R self-release), decisively occupies the realm of the waking: the nimble, the abstract, and the exciting.

Her efforts have crafted a soul album that is resistant to any claims of mere charlatanism, a record that brings a modern tongue to a classic style.

Despite having ties to shitgaze, this isn’t a record obsessed with that aesthetic, and this works to its advantage, since these songs clearly aspire to be bigger than that and have very real potential to be.

It provides the kind of visceral excitement absent in so many of those other albums.

Becoming a Jackal is downright convincing-maybe sustaining-even these few weeks after first hearing the thing. I'm surprised, though maybe I shouldn't be, by just how cool and atypical that feeling is.

Sure, there’s no “Watermelon” or “Communism”, but Be’s wit presents on a grander scale than a dependence on sprinkled, chucklable oneliners would allow.

[A] beautiful little album.

Mr. M is something to behold in its details: the kind of record that seems to open up gradually over time, graceful and pretty sure but brimming subcutaneously with many yet-undiscovered pleasures.

Each moment is devoted to the continuing shifts in dynamics and song, and Aloha sounds sharper than ever before.

To me this sounds like clear-headed music for lovers of straightforward disco pop--an unblemished set that asks haters and the insecure alike to wait behind the velvet rope where they’re most comfortable while the rest of us throw a cloth over the lampshade in the living room and put on a really great record.

More than any other melodic recording this year, Earth Grid feels truly timeless.

Tryptych is something of a good trade convention, showcasing just how Demdike's samples become reborn with a strong modern edge. You feel like you're privy to seeing something here that's all set to sweep across the market.

Trouble has its highs (the second chorus of “Rivers,” all eight minutes of “Shooting Rockets”) and lows (“The State,” a messy rocker that all but collapses in upon itself), but the band’s prowess and Bejar’s vision makes the songs an impressive, if jagged, piece of work.

Nothing on Thursday sounds like filler.

Poised as hyper-indulgent fellas, Smother is a startlingly controlled album, one that's exactly as smooth and smoldering as its moniker posits.

Even if this time around the music takes a more prominent role, it’s this delivery that gives ExitingARM a sense of unity.

Skin of Evil is hardened, seamless, and totally unrelenting, everything full-bodied and visceral about Frog Eyes squeezed until it sublimates. This is scary, ethereal shit. It’s also a gorgeously captivating half hour of bedroom pop pushed screaming out of bed.

Everything in Between is the sound not just of potential realized, but of expectations exceeded.

Brightblack Morning Light is a chambered catacomb of meticulous design, a long-player so calm and unassuming that genre modifiers flock to its veneer, are swallowed into its depths, and murdered.

Enter the Vaselines serves as a timely reminder of the old ways we found music: for Cobain, one dreams, as a record in a bin somewhere, and for the rest of us, a recommendation from a friend, a cassette loaned around like a dirty one-hitter.

Space is Only Noise is delivered with an impressive restraint, especially for a debut LP and from an artist of Jaar's age, its songs warm and dense whilst seeming full of negative space, gentle and humorous whilst threatening claustrophobia.

As fun and crafty a debut as you’re likely to hear this year.

While Tones is tighter, smaller, and more to-the-point than its predecessor, I’m not fully convinced that it’s as good as Field Music.

OS's greatest feat is in its restraint. The urge to collapse into all-out roaring is there for the whole forty-three minutes, but Skodvin and Totman have made a sort of pact: you stay feathery on the piano, I won't go to Hades in the mix.

In many ways, Kensington Heights is what maturity sounds like, done right: too young to relinquish their punk energy and too experienced to let it limit their songwriting, the band has combined their twin urges into a single path.

It is markedly less frenetic and more cohesive, and for that it is pitch-black and menacing, and for that it is head-and-shoulders the better record.

Like all of his records before it, Devils & Dust sounds at once like everything and nothing Bruce Springsteen has ever released.