He’s throwing his bleeding heart into the technicolor to make sense of it all. The kinetic energy between him and Currie makes this all palpable.

This album is grand. Though it clocks in at 73 minutes, it unfolds with few speed bumps.

Even when he doesn’t break new ground, Segall and Ty Segall remain solid investments. There’s definitely something to be said for getting exactly what you pay for with a new album.

Like Stephen Malkmus or Kurt Vonnegut, Barnett looks at the mundane with a skewed perspective, turning it over in her mind and transmogrifying it into something extraordinary.

Jaar has signature tones--every musician does, and it’s hard to escape them--but he steps past expectations to make a political statement that’s still subdued, jaunty, and sharp.

Though there are near misses on Crystal Fairy (like the riffs that don’t quite reach heavy metal territory in “Secret Agent Rat” or the teeth-gritting introduction of “Under Trouble” that does more to incite annoyance than apprehension), the album succeeds far more than it falls short.

Restarter has an unwavering groove. What it lacks in immediacy it makes up for in lasting appeal.

Painting of a Panic Attack may sound bigger and thematically a little more mature, but any fans who were worried that happiness on the West Coast might change Hutchison’s relationship with his art can breathe a sigh of relief.

The grinding synths and swells of feedback take the album to newer places, but as the band continues to create, they’d do well to cherry-pick the best parts of their forebears’ evolutions--particularly the unbridled chaos of Zen Arcade-era Hüsker Dü and the expansive experimentation of later Black Flag--to continue filling out their sound.

Music for Listening to Music To is also subject to some of La Sera’s usual pitfalls, and ultimately is a bit lacking in variety. Yet as the band digs deeper into the foundation of their sound, this album points to them finding more gold in the future. In every sense, this is a smart, confident step forward for La Sera.

Sunflower Bean have all the ingredients at hand to achieve something truly spectacular. And they’re right on the precipice.

There’s a duality here, and it’s present throughout Fear of Men’s debut album, Loom.

The songs vary in each respective artist’s execution, but adhere to the label’s governing aesthetic: brash beats and sugar-blasted vocals that sound simultaneously engaged and detached from the words they pronounce.

Restorations is a band that indeed seems to believe in everything: the raw gut-punch of punk, the catharsis and euphoria of stadium rock, the necessity of looking backward and moving forward. In the hands of inferior musicians, that commitment to indulging all these beliefs would result in disaster. Here, it makes for one hell of a ride.

An album full of ugly [moments]. Ugly isn’t bad on a Godspeed record--the “wrong notes” that permeate “Fam/Famine” resonate as our inability to articulate rage--but it does result in an album that’s more bombast than beauty, which, despite the album’s themes of revolution, can make for an especially dissonant listen.

Though it doesn’t quite reach the heights of his first two, his new album, Stay Dangerous, is another solid project from one of the best on the West Coast.

Much like Speedy Ortiz, Melkbelly have the good taste and even better talent to make the familiar sound fresh and fearsome.

It’s hard not to wish Never were the way she was would stretch further and reach out to the horizon the way each musician’s solo albums have. But much like a masterfully rendered novella, Stetson and Neufeld leave you wanting more.

At its strongest, Ultra Mono offers a fresh set of urgent rallying cries for anyone interested in furthering workers’ rights, dismantling systemic racism, and knocking out a few Nazi teeth. The record’s missteps mostly come when Talbot finds himself on the defensive, a position that finds him turning out poison-pen responses to critics that probably felt better to sing than they do to hear.

There’s a powerful cohesion to the collection that makes it feel greater than the sum of its parts, with several standout fusions of singing and instrumentation/production as only Lopatin could yield.

Die On Stage is like a cold beer and a bag of chips: It’s not the healthiest meal, but it sure goes down easy.

Whereas Sleeper was Segall at his most melancholy, Mr. Face takes its musical ideas and gives them bite and vigor.

Earle further proves that taking the straight and narrow and settling down can reap the most rewards.

The Innocents is earthy melodrama for catacombs that deserves to be heard above ground. Weyes Blood’s gothic, magical realm has a dozen more doors to be opened on her sophomore LP. It’s just a matter of when the record ends up in your hands.

On Everybody Works, Duterte’s timid, but not terrified. Like any sophomore album, it constitutes a bit of a departure, but at this juncture, she has every right to experiment.

They might be the indie rock band everyone imitates in five years. You’re Better Than This is a yearning fulfilled.

Screen Violence contains cathartic moments, anthems in the dark, and they approach them with tact and enthusiasm.

McMahon’s a constantly improving songwriter, and with Love, he’s created his most fully realized and purposeful batch of songs yet.