All of the songs here are strong enough to be bolstered (rather than swamped) by their rococo touches and period piece flourishes.

Friko’s songs are real, true and felt. Songs like “Where We Been” and “Crashing Through” build from small beginnings, voice, guitar, piano into huge anthemic refrains and breakdowns.

Saloon might not attract the same short-term attention as some of their higher profile rock and pop peers in the UK, but this second album affirms that they have more to offer than many of their compatriots.

It takes a unique kind of ambition to produce something like I See the Sign, but the wonder isn't just that he does it, but that he does it so well.

It seems often as if the songs come to life more through sonic detail and aural shape (a variety of distortion tones, drum sounds, reverb ranges, and the like) than in compositional changes of direction, harmonic depth, or hooks. This doesn't, however, make the music dull. Instead, there's something compelling about the way Young Widows use these details--a shimmer, a hum, a scrape--for drama rather than relying on the often cheap dramatics heard in "heavy" music.

The second half of the album mixes up longer, quieter intervals of unreality (“The Healer,” “Walking Again” “I Can Still See”) with more bangers (“Swampland” “Red Eyes”), and packs less of a wallop than the onset. Yet there is no question that 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo is more like Ubu’s earliest material than anything Thomas has put out in years

The work is too much for casual listening, and it refuses to be background music. And so, perhaps live performance is the most appropriate setting. This double disc captures both the awkwardness of performing such inward-looking material and the communion this sort of sharing carves out. Elverum’s lyrics are searing in their specificity.

This is a wonderful album, easily as good, though perhaps less immediately accessible, than last year’s "Rites of Uncovering."

Far is a bright and gratifying listen; one that doesn’t aim at ideas above its station or flounder in search of unity.

With this revised version of the band, that role has evolved. There are more reflective pieces characterized by subdued piano accompaniment, and occasional touches that make the rock music distinctive.

Despite coming up against a couple of creative cul-de-sacs, Comma largely succeeds in blending the most appealing elements of ambient, kosmische and electro into a heady brew.

Whether you want to get lost in the detail, immerse yourself in the whole or a combination of the two, this album will reward, awe and occasionally terrify you.

In Longtime Companion, he puts the drawl and shuffle of country into the service of a very peculiar vision, embracing and even seeking out the contradictions.

Salvant shows off a sharp wit in the talk-sung, “Obligation,” a fluid sophistication on “If I Lost My Mind,” and a little bit of swagger on the brief, piano-pounding “Trail Mix.” Her original songs are as varied as the covers.

These songs are massive, yet also bent and personal in a way that lets you in even as they blow you back against the wall.

If some albums make you lean in, strain to hear, fill in the negative space with your own silent ponderings, this one flattens you like a road roller. Its nightmarish sonic textures reach up out of the disc much as the figures painted in Netflix art-horror disaster Velvet Buzzsaw did, but without the comic relief.

Stevens inspiration or jumping off point for The Age of Adz was outsider artist Royal Robertson, and, much like Robertson's artwork, the themes in the album vacillate between the mundane and heartfelt and surreal and grandiose.

Another subtle evolution of Fec’s homogenous sound palette, Ultima II Massage is a reason to keep you coming back 11 years into his career to witness him experiment with his inimitable aesthetic.

Overall, High Violet feels more like a protecting-the-franchise record than a new phase in the National's sound. And yet, even so, a handful of its songs rank with the band's very best.

Fireraiser Forever! is an often galvanizing collection. Feck and Evans cast an acerbic but humane look at contemporary life and the band is in fine form. Their indie garage sound is nothing new but fans of this kind of scrappy raw sound will find plenty to like.

It’s another high point in an increasingly strong discography, one that demands more than just mild praise.

It's as wild and heterogeneous as the rest of the band's work, and manages to bring all the elements at play in their music into the tightest, most carefully balanced equilibrium they've achieved yet.

This one is subtle, but very much worth exploring.

Playing any of these three records on home speakers while choring through the day, their subtle modulations will melt away, their wispy chimeras passing unnoticed. An immersion through headphones, or at pane-rattling volumes, provides the magnification that these cataclysmic environments call for.

The whole album feels like catharsis, as slow dirge-y openings give way to extended instrumental crescendo, as Zedek views from a position of calm, weathered experience, distance, the roil and mess and hurt of human existence.

That Allen is able to continue to do this 45 years on from when he first introduced us to Sailor, Spanish Alice, Jabo, and Chick is as moving and mystifying as that big Texas sky.

Fullbrook is quite a good singer, a subtle lyricist and a skillful crafter of melodies, but in Olympic Girls, she pulls all three aptitudes together in an organic way that is more than the sum of its parts.

Throughout, Mirah picks her soft, knowing way through songs that soothe even as they challenge. Her melodies curl gently up into question marks, as she asks you to make sense of life and love and loss.

Final Summer is as sharp and exuberant and fierce as anything this band has ever done.

A surrealist song cycle that is both oblique and engaging.

McCraven lays down a lush musical backdrop that allows Scott-Heron’s words to have emotional impact.

Each album isn’t simply a solitary entry into the Destroyer oeuvre, but rather some tile in the mosaic or thread in the pattern.

Lost Wisdom is not a long album--clocking in at just under 25 minutes--nor is it especially elaborate. Most of the songs rely on voice and guitar alone to make their case. And yet, how splendid they are, layered and looped in madrigals rounds and descants ('Voice in Headphones') or nakedly unadorned ('Flaming Home').

Couple Tracks seizes on these dichotomies and captures Fucked Up in all of its multi-faceted glory.

If you like jagged, body-moving beats and clever kids slinging dissatisfaction, try Silverbacks.

The result is an album that is as notable on its own as it is in the historical chillwave narrative.

Despite some rather simple melodies (and even simpler lyrics), or maybe even because of them, I’m Terry hits the mark.

Some of the most likable “weird hip-hop” around.

Moor Mother, Michael Stipe, Sharon van Etten, Bon Iver, Rokia Koné, and Jeff Parker lend their talents to Oh Me Oh My, affording its arrangements and production a mutability that supports, never dilutes, Holley’s aesthetic. ... Holley without guest stars is no less compelling.

Purling Hiss’s rough but accessible rock, made with craftsmanship and taste, does a difficult thing. It pleases old indie-heads just as easily as it can draw in the new kids.

There’s a pleasing friction between the grainy or otherwise affected samples and the polished music around them. Whether they air the frustrations of pioneering artistic transgressors like Dilla and Bruce on “Poor Cops,” or propel the bombastic “Joyrider” with an echo chamber of exclamations right out of Ye’s Rick James sample on “Runaway,” they give the album an imminent sense of cacophony, of a messy world that can’t but intrude on McMahon’s thoughts. It’s a collective sound, and a haunting one.

It still has a sonic attack and extreme enough structural sense that the genre tag on its own probably doesn’t do enough to sum up what’s going on here. Baker and Buckareff are the rare creators who absolutely locked into their particular sound pretty much immediately and through many (many) releases over the years have never really sounded like anything but Nadja, and yet within that distinct soundworld they continue to find new shades in what in lesser hands would be a pretty limited palette.

As usual, band members pile multiple textures onto one another in baroque, overpopulated juxtapositions.

The Hold Steady will probably never match the thrill of their first three releases, but Thrashing Thru the Passion is the most enjoyable record they’ve made in thirteen years.

There's a sort of magic in the way this Portland threesome balances structure and chaos, pop and noise.

Despite its velocity, the album is ambient in the sense that it sounds best when heard with the same indirect, free-associative attention that’s behind it.

In times of uncertainty, you might very well look to the music Anderson interprets—folk, blues, gospel—for reassurance. But the uneasiness works its way in, even to these lovely songs. Anderson captures that conjunction of solitude and stress, of beauty in the moment and angst about what’s next, in a way that reflects very clearly on the last couple of years.

The Horror makes for a largely relentless, immersive listening experience.

The whole is so relentlessly nasty and the riffs so good that a multitude of metal sins are forgiven.

It all reminds you of how great a band Sonic Youth was, even at play, even at home trying out tunings and motifs, tossing one idea out into the amplifiers and hearing it echoed, altered, elaborated by tuned-in others.

They remain a fantastic band, constructing their own cities of sound, a strange architecture with wine-dark interiors.

Yet as disjointed as Nap Eyes’ free-associations can be, they capture a vivid part of life, the drifting area where you’ve acquired adult freedoms but adult focus still dangles out of reach.

On the surface, Tight Knit may sound like more of the same for Vetiver, and thankfully so. While the band reaches a bit further than previously, they are careful not to stretch too far, focusing instead on the continued refinement of their position as rock’s youngest elder statesmen.

No matter what tweak to the overall aesthetic Nelson may make, Pan-American’s music is as interesting as ever, precisely because there is no end in sight.

The songs feel pared back and polished and just about exactly right, whether in the gospel-swelling idiom of Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam or in the jazzier, more experimental haunts of Calexico. There’s nothing extra, nothing silly, nothing distracting, these songs are as streamlined as an otter in water, slipping through in cool, frictionless purity.

He drops his first studio acoustic disc, Several Shades of Why, and it's as lilting and boldly distinctive and profoundly sad as can be expected.

One of the best Mountain Goats records.

The songs punch and swerve and sway like organic beings, structured in a way that amplifies rather than hems in emotional resonance.

Nine bracing blasts of terse, catchy noise-pop.

It’s a lot of Gang of Four, and if you’re interested at all, you probably already have a good portion of it. Still, it’s a nicely packaged set from the best years of the career of one of post-punk’s best ever bands.

It’s this balance between distortion and purity, between chaos and clarity, that makes Red Sun Through Smoke a compelling listen. There’s urgency behind these compositions, reflected in both the intensity of IWC’s vocal delivery and the severity of signal degradation applied via his tape machines

The Psychic Paramount's music lacks words, but not a voice. These songs have a lot to say, and I'll be surprised if I hear a rock album this year that packs as strong a punch as II.

However it started, this joint project evolved into something unexpectedly powerful, and that it would be a shame if it stopped here.

Because of the language barrier and the unfamiliar cultural references, you’ll probably miss some of the subtleties, but that makes this album all the more fascinating. More than most records, it’s a journey through a strange, dreamlike landscape that resembles what you know only tangentially. Mystery, indeed, but an intriguing one.

'Seeplymouth' is a complex and beautiful song, and one that displays the talents of all the collaborators in Volcano Choir. A lot of people were enamored of "For Emma, Forever Ago" last year; they’ll be well rewarded if Justin Vernon’s involvement leads them to Unmap.

The album in hand makes a taut, succinct statement, bristling with angst and melting into melancholy. It is rather good in the mysterious way of rock records; hard to say what it does better than the other records, but it does it all the same.

The Body and Uniform seem to have found kindred spirits in one another’s daring and ferocious dispositions. The result is an excellent record, innovative and exciting, antically entertaining and deadly serious. Play it often and very, very loud.

Have You Considered Punk Music deconstructs punk music so thoroughly that it seems like something else again; it sounds more like the abstracted post-punk of the early aughts band Wilderness than anything you’d hear right now.

The resulting sound is clear and resonant, which does justice to the music Orcutt’s composed. And instead of feral yelps, ringing phones, and passing traffic, the guitarist accompanies himself with subliminally registered breaths.

Orcutt builds musical structures layer by layer, part by part. These compositions are sometimes jaggedly ecstatic – “Or head on” for one, leaps and lurches with joy. As in any congregation, sometimes a delighted, discordant, untrained voice rises in volume above the rest.

The real masterstroke of So It Goes is that it’s not: This is one for the here and now, as contemporary as New York hip-hop gets.

HEY WHAT is equally thrilling for the way they now sound impressively eloquent using it. If last time was learning and pushing towards a necessary change, HEY WHAT simply is living a different way, channeling the disarray of their noises and our world into something beautiful and moving, all the stronger for any fractures, cracks and fuzz.

Jaar attempted something ambitious with this album--it stands apart, even if it never risks a whole lot. Space Is Only Noise is unique, but also a work of modesty and, for an album that samples French poetry and is rarely danceable, it's unpretentious.

Past Life Martyred Saints was a ferociously personal record in a way that people responded to, but The Future’s Void is just as intense, even though it takes on almost entirely new subject matter and methods.

It’s somewhere between 2011’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill and, say, Peter Jefferies’s Last Great Challenge For a Dull World; there are discernible melodies here, but above them is an overwhelming sense of loss, and the musical chops to channel it.

It's an encyclopedia of rhythmic assimilation, perfectly executed, nary a lovingly adopted concept out of place. Catchy as hell, too.

It's not an intrinsically triumphant album, and in part that's why it's a triumph: comfortable, well-adjusted rock by and for aging erudites, a bit greyer, a bit wiser, but no less creative or inspiring.

This is a record full of loose ends and fractious energy, not at all compromised by its move up the food chain.

White Chalk shifts between comforting melancholy and supremely discomforting performativity with preternatural ease.

It’s that prickliness that makes this record intriguing, and durable enough to reward repeat listens.

As a cohesive statement, this very well could be their best in a very long time, if not ever.

Landwerk No. 3 is, like its predecessors, a work of craggy beauty that does homage to a world—that of pre-war European Jews—destroyed in the same wave of technology and social change that made possible the preservation of its traces in the archival recordings and, in turn, rendered the recordings obsolete.

Early music is fascinating to people in a way that goes deeper than anything else, and for musicians and artists, all those early things spill out in the things we make. Gonzalez does that here in a fun and remarkable way.

Though comprising only nine songs across just over half an hour of music, Actually, You Can is bursting at the seams with ideas.

On the whole Basement is noisy and rough, and often sounds more like the best record Heatmiser never made than the next Elliott Smith album.

All At Once shares many of the same stylistic preoccupations as War Prayers, but by carefully reworking similar material, it improves on its predecessor.

V for five, V for victory and V for very much what you want from the Budos Band.

They're not breaking significant new ground here, but neither are they standing still.

It sounds, at times, less like a proper shoegaze act and more like a memory of one: the hooks as pronounced, but with an ineffable dreamlike quality thrown in, less something quantifiable than something to be experienced. Thankfully, this is an album that both satisfies and mystifies; both are welcome qualities.

Wild Loneliness is the perfect album for this moment, in which darkness isn’t denied but is repudiated to within an inch of its life.

Another record by the Bevis Frond, and another long, acid-fried blues? That’s a gift.

Bright and Vivid gives little of itself immediately, but unfolds to a much larger extent over time.

Circular Sounds takes the craft aspect to a higher level. Stoltz’s early records were scrappy, guitar-centric home recordings, and his previous LP, Below the Branches, was a piano-dominated, primary colors affair, but this one is a study in how to blend signifiers and sonorities so that they enhance each other.

Ghettoville is a purposefully secretive record, a vision quest, a Cassavetes lens--at times challenging to sit through, but the more you look into it, the more you might discover.

This record clears a spot. And in some temporary way, wins against the ever mounting pile of post-punk consumer artifacts.

Time Is Glass is lovely music — that much should be no surprise to anyone — but beyond that, it taps into something invisible, deep and important. Is it too much to say that these songs manifest the divine? Maybe so, but let’s stipulate at least that they’re trying.

Olson’s songs are as strong as ever.

It’s a lengthy, reflective and beautiful record that mostly steers away from the more rock-oriented sound of Shearwater’s last two releases.