Load Blown is stunning. It engulfs. While sacrificing little if anything to compositional templates, the record is remarkable listenable.

For all the sturm und drang on Half Divorced, the component parts of each song are well-differentiated and clean. You get a clear sense of both the individual performances and their interaction.

Da Mind of Traxman marries the soul of the past with the bangs of the future so fluidly that the sound's innately harsh nature has been marginalized, making for an all-around enjoyable experience no matter the location.

While it makes no effort to conceal its intellect, it solicits an under-the-table emotional connection the Seas and Cakes of the indiesphere simply will not allow.

There may be an idea at the center of the record, but it’s overwhelmed by the sheer visceral quality of the songs. You listen and your guts shake. The whole room seems to shake. One is reminded of a clause the Body have quoted from Hrabal’s foreboding writing: “my whole room hurts.” If that’s akin to the affect the Body are seeking, they have succeeded.

This isn’t a case of trying to reinvent the wheel so much as it is reveling in just how very good you’ve gotten a making wheels in the first place.

At its best, jazz is a genre capable of evoking every other musical discipline, and the deftly-played music on We Are Sent Here By History serves as an energizing reminder of that. It’s deeply felt music that makes for a rewarding and often thrilling listening experience.

Wavering Radiant is strong enough on musical merit that decade-strong devotees deservedly ought to join new converts in welcoming the latest Isis album into the world.

The combination of bile and hook, of wiry, mistrustful intelligence meshed in danceable synth pop works throughout the album, the contradictions bristling without overwhelming the tunes.

Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois pits Lanois’ laconic style against Funk’s frenzy until the contradictions between them are heightened and collapse, resulting in a deeply weird and captivating album.

There is machinery working even in the greenest corners of this sonic garden, whooshing and clicking and percolating in the interstices to make everything look a little brighter and more colorful than life.

A dramatic, often fascinating work, it inspires repeated and careful listening, and stands alongside the best of Bachmann’s work.

One skippable track makes for a slight mark against an otherwise strong return to the world. After decades of teases, EPs and live stuff, a few good singles would have been satisfying, but with a quality album, it’s certainly nice to have the Chills again.

This kind of detail-heavy album can make you feel like you're missing something if you're not paying attention. Each listen can run the risk of feeling incomplete. But by that same token, it also means it can feel new each time.

Like the last two Damien Jurado albums, this one takes a while to sink in, and it’s backloaded, so you have to get all the way through for the payoff. And yet, if you’ve taken the other two Maraqopa journeys, it is remarkable how this third installment augments and complements them.

The energy ebbs and flows between these two poles, so that intellectual inquiry becomes a gateway towards straight-on freakery, and wild intuitive leaps make sense of complex formulae.

You may stumble upon an experiment or a minute-long fragment here and there, but the deck is stacked with memorable songcraft and an attitude that understands silliness without succumbing to sketch-comic dead ends.

Mekons are the equal of any post-punk band on both sides of the Atlantic, and they are still very serious about proving it.

Snaith rips the rarefied sounds of modern pop from their established context and forms nonlinear compositions constantly in flux.

Out of Range is serene and difficult, trippy and literate, loosely countrified and footnote-ably dense and referential, a zone-out record with a library card. Not many albums simultaneously slow down your pulse rate and rev up your brain, but this one does.

Aware of the vastness but alive to the myriad small beauties that flit in and out of view, seemingly oblivious but alert to the potential threat of your presence. Carmen Villain captures these delicate balances in her music and invites the listener to ponder their passivity and question their gaze.

Newsom is, obviously, not the first musician to get technically better at what she does while we’re looking on, and not the first, either, to elicit a twinge of regret from listeners who liked the rawer, wilder beginnings.... Divers hides its sting not in an unusual voice, but in its lyrical and musical complexity, and it’s a good trade after all.

Future Times takes a few plays to sink in. Its balance of the monumental and the delicate, the personal and the epic, shift as you listen and only draw you in gradually over time. Stay with it, though. It’s worth it.

Until the Colours Run is a huge improvement, though: bigger, messier, louder and more transcendent. If you’re into Speck Mountain, The Besnard Lakes or No Joy, this one is worth a spin.

The tunes tend to unfold at mid-tempo and with the logic of a short story as, once more, Jones composes and performs, with seeming effortlessness, a set of memorable melodies that reward repeated listening.

Overall, Almanac Behind is perhaps the most successful of Bachman’s “noise records”.

Mirror Traffic arrests those indulgences and presents Pavement fans the best opportunity yet to stop worrying and love The Jicks.

Their latest is just as bright, bold, and bludgeoning as their past work but adds complexity and depth to their sound.

It’s remarkable, throughout, how well Purim has held up, as a singer, as a jazz composer and band leader and as an artist. You wouldn’t know, from listening, whether she was 80 or 60 or 20. The songs are vital, pulsing with bright energy, imbued with a lifetime’s skill but effervescent. Not many women got to play as pivotal a role in jazz as Purim did. This retrospective makes the case for her importance without getting bogged down in it.

All in all, the album is a genial bird’s eye view of life presented in aphorism, perspectives from a man well aware of his aging and embracing it. There’s something joyful even in the moments of tension, as if their eventual dissipation is a given.

The subdued guitars and steady percussive clip-clop are a noticeable change from the band's usual jangly late-afternoon pop, but even on the richest melodies lyrics and delivery drive the album.

Leo was impressive even when he was an unmitigated idealist but now, older and less sure of things, he is even better.

Anyone seeking the nightmarish flipside of a Herzog soundtrack will find H-p1 a rewarding listen.

The sections of ORO are turns utilitarian and incongruously beautiful.

The A List of Burning Mountains performance is a stand-out LP, which shows a pleasing growth of confidence to expand beyond the confines of hyphen-rock.

The pulse and stomp of opener “City of Angels” or the sparkling twilight balladry of “Misery Remember Me” are classic examples of what Ladytron has always done well and why it’s good to have them back. Especially on the back half of Time’s Arrow, though, there are some new wrinkles.

Despite its scant 35-minute duration, Meek Warrior distills the entire history of experimental pop. Just as impressively, it finally bottles the frantic eclecticism and The Gods Must Be Crazy absurdity of the Family’s live show.

From All Purity will never have the impact of Earth’s second album, Khanate’s self-titled debut, Take As Needed For Pain by Eyehategod or Sleep’s drone doom bible Dopesmoker, but it contains all the important ingredients that made those records so essential.

He and his accompanists perform perfectly, with Barker’s elegant leads being one of, rather than the exclusive, focal point.

With piano, female vocals, strings and extra percussion, this is the fullest, most expansive Om album to date.

It’s restlessly beautiful stuff.

After dancing through all these keys of fear, loss, and distress, the record ends with “Send for Me,” a simple and moving pledge to come pick you up, whatever happens. The slow bloom of warmth feels hard won, but not even remotely fragile.

The end result is as fascinating as Silent Servant has ever been.

There is nothing but the interlocking parts that together combine to become something new, something wholly different than merely the additive sum of their individual atoms: the “It.”

The more you recognize its complications, the better Tidings sounds.

I Learned the Hard Way is the sound of a revival band revived, stepping out of the shadows of its idols while remaining true to the essence of its form.

Skeleton Closet is like a good novel, full of implications and shadowy contradictions and complexities. It’s pop craftsmanship with a touch of vertigo, an uneasy sense that something dangerous resides underneath.

It’s a calm, beautiful oasis in Mascis’ coruscating career path, prettier even, because of the carnage before and after.

While it doesn’t wield the heft of a Hop Along release, Likewise demonstrates Quinlan’s adept melodic sensibility and enviable vocal delivery. It’s a short, sweet collection, easily digestible and ripe for revisiting.

A successful homage, What the Brothers Sang seems to distill and convey this vision, showing us the Everlys through McCarthy’s and Oldham’s eyes, but in such a way that allows their distinct aesthetic to shine clearly through.

It wouldn't be a Low record without plenty of unease, but the soothing, uplifting music works at cross purposes to the lyrics.

If you’re a fan of the Whigs, Do to the Beast will push all the right buttons and even add a few new ones for you to think about.

For an artist working with such a recognizable palette, Sadier manages to keep painting in bold and striking colors. In terms of the production, this is decidedly Sadier’s best-sounding solo album to date.

While Antiphonals can’t help but seem like a comparatively minor release next to Cantus, Descant’s 80 minutes, it shares many qualities with previous Davachi highlight, 2018’s Let Night Come On Bells End The Day: refined, reflective, and uniquely moving.

It's clear that none of these songs really require amplification, that they, in fact, drive the beauty of Diamond Mine. Still, Hopkins's deft touch somehow adds to, rather than subtracts from, their elemental simplicity

This is Blitzen Trapper’s fifth album, and there’s a sturdy professionalism evident on each of the songs. But it’s such a faithful recreation of a particular style that its appeal will in all likelihood be correspondingly limited.

Much of this record is quietly beautiful, and its laments gather weight with repeated listens.

Islet have lovingly crafted their own kaleidoscopic little world. It’s easy to step inside and get lost there for a while among the colorful flora and fauna.

The n’goni and Cheick Diallo’s flute indicate that Touré is going for a more pan-Malian sound; whether that matters to you or not, they give Alafia a more varied sound that its predecessor without sacrificing the propulsive, calabash-driven feel of its predecessor of its immediate predecessor Koïma.

Less encumbered by the colonial detritus of Konono's overdriven drums-meet-junkyard sound, the Allstars let the rhythm section breathe and get funky with indigenous instrumentation. No distortion necessary.

What unites the songs, if anything, is a breezy insouciance that belies careful construction. You get the sense that, like Yeats’ women, this is an album that must “labor to be beautiful.” It hides the work very well behind a sunny façade, but you don’t get movie-perfect string swells and luminous vintage keyboard lines and cheerful blurts of all-hands brass without a certain amount of forethought. Consider Collins the impresario, taking what his collaborators give him and polishing it to a high gloss.

A whole range of influences are apparent at essentially any point in the album, yet it never feels like a cumbersome effort made of separate parts pasted together. Room from the Moon is involved and fluid, it’s the work of an artist channeling parts larger than herself.

All four members of Black Midi are extremely young, wildly competent, knowledgeable about all sorts of music (classical, jazz, free improv, etc.) and willing to go way out on a limb. Schlagenheim is a really exciting start, which could lead in any number of directions.

I’ll be listening to Through the Devil Softly for years to come.

An album of pristine folk-pop backed by whispery wall-of-sound back-up vocals, crisp guitar figures, and some of the best pop songwriting this side of the Shins.

With Eno Axis, McEntire again connects to her very particular world, without retreading where she’s been, flourishing in rootedness even as she expands her scope.

The songwriting [on 2019's Weeping Choir] found increasingly complex ways to channel the band’s inexhaustible energy and potent sonic outrage. Garden of Burning Apparitions forges further along that general trajectory, but this new record also bares the band’s turbulent, tumultuous teeth with renewed ferocity. It’s pretty great.

Amiable adaptability is a constant across the three concerts. Fidelity is conversely variable, but improved bootleg editions of the material and always listenable.

Maybe people with better audio equipment or a more jaded approach to electronic music have been enjoying him this much all along, but the remaining 47 percent are in for a surprise.

Though the album is closed out well enough by the droning “Atomkerne,” it’s “Be a Pattern for the World” that leaves a lasting impression.

The music is something to behold.

It is, in short, the sound of a group confidently, and unassumingly, re-defining its own universe.

O’Rourke sails these turbulent seas deftly, making small gestures laden with significance. It’s agonising and hypnotic, the kind of art that demands commitment to spend time with. Yet, while you’re immersed in it, it feels inescapable.

The music, befitting the subject matter, is at turns somber and hopeful, developing slowly and deliberately and captivating from start to finish.

No posthumous album can be heard without a sense of loss and absence. No matter how much you enjoy these tracks, you must also acknowledge as you listen that the world will go on without this singular talent.

Keeping Secrets feels like, itself, a bit of a hidden gem, murmured at you rather than shouted, a quiet one but a grower.

Even the soccer dads and middle-management types might find themselves nodding along to lyrics like, “It’s losers all the way down, stay undefeated.” That’s from the album’s flat-out banger, “Wage Wars, Get Rich, Die Handsome,” a sing-along celebration of nihilism that pounds and punches and exults in itself.

It’s the earnest balance Morris strikes between brokenness and openness--his willingness to savor the condition of being broken open--that makes the experience of this music so deeply sustaining.

It’s an interesting artifact. Better, though, it’s another strong album from the young singer. Wall’s voice alone would carry these songs, but they’re each well crafted for the coherence of the larger picture.

Welshpool Frillies digs right back into the basics. It slaps in the most elemental way, on clanging power chords and thumping rhythms and Pollard’s bright absurdities cranked to top volume.

Turns out, the news is that Roberts has made the most unabashedly gorgeous record of his career.

FACS knows how and when to apply the exact amount of pressure to engage pain points and pleasure centers.

As far as 2008 sleepers go, this album’s near the top of the pile. Don’t Be A Stranger is good advice, indeed.

Riceboy Sleeps is more like a film, shot exquisitely in various breathtaking spaces, where the plot never moves forward because nothing ever goes wrong.

Bird Songs is unpretentious and as good a "mainstream" jazz record as you're likely to hear these days.

10 unassuming but gem-like songs that live up to their past work.

He may not voice things like Ellington would have, but it doesn't matter. It could never stop, as far as I'm concerned.

The BQE is best listened to in complete ignorance of the track titles, packaging, or even professed subject matter. The music speaks best when it speaks for itself.

Like most bands, Girl Friday has never been crazy about genre labels, and if you asked them whether they were pop or punk or indie, they’d very likely just say yes. By sliding continually between categories, though, this band creates a very absorbing tension between what they are right now and what they might become in a measure or two. You have to pay attention. You can’t take these songs for granted.

Clattering drum machines and gorgeous washes of tone are topped off by a standout vocal turn that carries the album off into the clouds, a searingly emotional purge and soothing balm all rolled in one.

What To Look For In Summer is a terrific career spanning selection of some of their most loved songs the performances of which give lie to the common wisdom about a bunch of fey, romantically challenged, wallflowers. If anoraks just wanna have fun we could do far worse than spending 100 minutes with Stuart Murdoch and company.

The album is vigorous in its grooves and leaves a powerful, unifying impression with its words.

The result is a collection that transports you to place and time you’d probably never get to otherwise, rocks your body, feeds your curiosity and makes you feel at home. Well done, I’d say.

By repurposing this music with a child’s lack of regard for history, they make it fresh.

Akron/Family II really captures a feeling of happiness and at the same time melancholy, and that's what makes it beautiful: those two feelings at the same time.

Twelfth stands out even in their strong discography.

This is a hard record to get a hold on, but its vapors make you dizzy.

Pajo employs quiet space beautifully here, amplifying his hushed couplets and fret noises by surrounding them with nothing but a vague tape hiss.