These two tracks ["Feels Real" and "Do It (Right)"] read a bit corny on paper, but Lambkin’s knowledge of genre, song form and structure and how to make music evolve (i.e. filters, not just slapping in new sounds when something gets boring) bundle up the awkwardness with cool to present fresh ink amidst the droves of novice DJ nostalgists.

The Block Brochure, ponderous though it may be, is curated carefully and put together in a way that will actually hold up over time.

A record that spits in the eye of assertions that they don’t make records like they used to.

It is a very direct, very intimate half-hour of songs.

It's to Ejstes credit that he's stayed his course, continuing to pull together nostalgic and post-millennial sounds instead of chasing a mass audience that he probably couldn't have kept anyway.

Martha’s music may be good for you or good for the planet or good for society, but at its heart, it is just damned good.

If metal evokes power, and punk evokes weakness, this record is a dive down a well of powerlessness, sinking deeper than they’ve gone before. It goes down swinging blades.

It's All True is exactly what mature dance pop should sound like in 2011.

Perhaps in the end it’s best to just say that The Besnard Lakes sound like themselves; they’ve certainly found a way to refine their own sound, and the jarring beauty that can be heard in A Coliseum Complex Museum is a prime example of it.

Certainly, people will inevitably point back to Mogwai's similar peak-and-valley approach, but Mono manage to make both the valleys more subtle and beautiful, and the peaks more powerful.

There's a bit of Starbucks gloss to this record, a too-easy-to-like quality that may at first put off serious listeners and music heads. That evaporates pretty quickly, though, as you recognize that its lucid simplicity, its artful artlessness is not a trick, but achievement.

You'll hear a hint of Arcade Fire in the shout-along choruses, a whisper of Neutral Milk Hotel in the tales of deformed love, an intimation of the Decemberists in the pantomime sea shanties that explode into rock. They're all pretty faint echos, though, the vaguest kinds of familiar outposts in a sea of strangeness.

["General Hospital" is] a rare mis-step on a collection of songs that's beautifully judged, possessed of an idiosyncratic melodic logic that few can equal.

This is, in other words, still serious music, yet it is not necessarily somber. Probably not coincidentally, When the Roses Come Again provides the perfect soundtrack for a drive through a land of woods, farms, and small towns dotted with Dollar General stores and cell towers.

The Block Brochure, ponderous though it may be, is curated carefully and put together in a way that will actually hold up over time.

It’s full of sharp edges and rough noises, but it’s also kind of like a pillow. How do they do both things at once? That’s a mystery, one that makes for one of the best rock records of 2021.

Zomby's achievement with Dedication is in plausibly connecting these austere sounds to underground bass music. The best DJs can do this, but few producers even try.

When it comes down to it, though, I can look at the track list and sing you back the most important lyric in any song. If pop music is meant to create a shared experience, consider this album a success on a whole bunch of levels.

True with its fey, reverb-soaked vocals, its synths and the jangle that recall the late 1980s/early 1990s when college rock started to segue into indie rock, is fun and catchy and worthy of an audience.

Kill the Lights, his second full-length, follows 2016’s largely acoustic Confront the Truth and 2014’s moderately more abrasive Dissed and Dismissed and amps up the voltage somewhat, especially in the anthemic “Jasper’s Theme,” site of this disc’s best electric guitar licks.

Pretty much everything else in Meluch’s body of work can fit somewhere between this LP and Sonnet, but surprisingly these two disparate poles are unified as the best work of his career.

The personal songs, about Choi’s dissatisfactory early education and immigrant family, have a whiff of mythic American meta-story, while the historical ones are deeply felt and eccentric.

The now-well-established ensemble pulls off a notable twofer with Give the People What They Want. It’s made a full-length album that hangs together as a distinct whole, and it’s also written a collection of unique songs that stands tall as an example of what still makes the genre vital.

Everything about Snow feels worn-in, the loose but precise way that guitars and drums and basses coalesce around melodies, the seen-it-all cadences in which these songs are sung, the bemused sense that here we all are again, still mired in a dissatisfactory world, still shrugging away things that hurt and perplex.

With this album, NOTS continues to reinvent itself in interesting ways that make sense for them. An experiment, an extension, a logical next step that you didn’t see coming, 3 is a significant move ahead for a band that is always worth watching.

The duo are clever producers. The album doesn't have the lopsided minimalism that's typical with the collage approach. Percussion is only as crisp as the leads and fills the spectrum evenly.

For all its formal and conceptual experimentation, there is a visceral, emotionally unsettling core at the heart of Lack 惊蛰.

Havasu is raw with current and remembered emotion, but there’s love at the center of it – for the girls at school, for the places he went and even for the family that misunderstood him— and that warm forgiveness makes it all the more powerful.

In Of Tomorrow, Lawrie sacrifices some of the pummeling noise and subterranean murk of previous albums without losing his ability to draw listeners into his twilit world. With his voice to the fore and some shafts of melodic light, he once more tweaks The Telescopes’ sound in ways that remain compelling.

Hell-On is Case’s most idiosyncratic album, but it’s also her most generous and grounded. It is her strongest--as in it projects strength, the kind that comes with vulnerability.

Living with the Living is Leo's most diverse album yet, a sort of musical "This is your life," where the artist revisits styles and forms that he's loved in the past.

Lonely harmonicas, keening fiddles, plinking kalimbas, and vaguely dubby drums twist in and out of the interwoven vocals, their melodies like ivy vines climbing a fence; the lyrics grow on you just as slowly, requiring several close listens before they start giving up their secrets.

Cosy Moments moves slightly toward pop-and-hook than the last Kinski album did, but more than maintains its integrity as an outsized purveyor of aggressive guitar rock.

This is a powerful piece of work, as serious about the trippy silliness as about the pitch and heave of amp overload. Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, like its title, is several things at once. It rocks like a hurricane, dreams like a lotus eater.

These two groups disappear into each other as naturally as vapor disappears into the air, and the general atmosphere favors an industrial interpretation rather than a drone or doom-metal one.

Comfort Of Strangers is the best thing Orton has recorded since her debut.

For Those I Love is a wonderfully open-hearted portrayal of young Ireland akin to contemporaries Fontaines D.C. or the Murder Capital.

On their 21st album, Three, their usual album-length evolution is divided into three 20-minute acts, much like 2006’s excellent Chemist.

Regardless of the frames built around them by producers or the press, Amadou and Mariam make great pop music, and their new album gives us more of it.

These 40 minutes for maybe the most well-rounded Los Campesinos! record yet.

Brian Borcherdt has made rough, beautiful songs out of broken bits of things, haunting atmospheres from the gritty transience of dust, and that's something worth doing.

Everything is sharp and lucid and full of impact.

The closer “My Will” is a hymn that induces chills, the choral heights a total wave that subsumes the tom tom trot. Those rhythms make this add up to more than folk + rock. But the ancient rhymes transcend equations.

It’s almost as if they didn’t need the help from guest luminaries such as Angel Olsen, Jeb Bishop, pedal steel player Allyn Love and superstar engineer Brian Paulson (who mixed the album with Miller), but perhaps it’s those additions which make How to Dance such a consistently strong and clean record of a band with a unique southern voice.

This album is louder, catchier and more memorable [than King Tuff]. It doesn’t break rules or upend conventions, but it fills its songs with more oomph and pressure than ever.

The ingredients that make up Dark Crawler are a tasty mix, and Danjah could do worse than keep cooking with this recipe.

The result is a strong collection of the sort of rock songs at which No Age excels: swiftly paced, inventively layered and riffy, simultaneously caustic and gauzy.

Barely a moment passes without her voice proudly standing front and center, leading the listener through bittersweet songs that surrender to the ebb and flow of how it feels to be a twenty-something woman in twenty-first-century America.

Magnificently noisy in some places, forebodingly quiet in others and at all times distended from full cognizance, Dream Weapon is a balanced, well executed step firmly away from Genghis Tron’s former selves. Call it their Year Zero.

The fact that Untouchable gets in and gets out in a little over a half hour adds to its classic rock ’n’ roll charms--the accomplished playing, engaging production and dizzying variety of mid-tempo reveries, adolescent rushes and inconsolable ballads boosting its overall appeal.

With Mind Bokeh Bibio recognizes that our happiest, hands-in-the-air, hedonistic moments are shadowed with memory. A bit of hiss, crackle or distortion can evoke the sadness under the celebration.

Now two albums on, she’s found a way to transcend and expand upon it and open her solitary music to include us all.

A bit of guitar jangle pushes up under her voice, a subliminal rumble of bass, but mostly, notes are allowed to ripen, carry and decay slowly, on their own terms. On a record that runs a flag of hedonism over brainy complications, here is the real thing, swooning, wordless and headily scented.

This is a fun summer record, and just as bitter and conflicted as any fun summer record could be. There is still an art to misanthropy, and Free Energy has it down to a science.

This album is very aptly titled, since it is nearly always evoking a kind of nameless, non-verbal good feeling that sometimes lofts us up and out of our tediously tick-tocking lives. Are Euphoria bubbles up and out of the mundane and time-tethered into unreal, glowing landscapes of altered experience.

For the first time in years, Godspeed is both operating at peak strength and not (as far we know) about to go on hiatus.

All Tense Now Lax at times evokes luminaries like Coil or early Current 93, but ultimately exists as its own beast, one that is never predictable, always challenging and achieves that oh-so-rare feat in rock music now: it turns the genre inside out and pulls the remains into a brave new form of noise.

They turn their wit into complex sentiments, making for an album that encompasses more than it delineates, even as the writing stays specific. Two voices don’t make for a proper community center, but they do make for something potent in a potentially bleak context.

It’s a lot less singular than its predecessor, but that makes it a more directly exhilarating experience.

Clearly steeped in the great tradition of the British folk song, yet able to combine its structure and ethos with rock rebellion from both classic psych and more recent guitar rock, Erland & The Carnival's Nightingale is a distinctive exemplar of folk revivalism for the age of indie.

One of the best things about Balf Quarry is the way it builds on the game-changing craftsmanship that Magik Markers brought to Boss.

These New Puritans are still thinking the same off-kilter, rhythmically intricate thoughts, but filtering them through a whole different music making process. Either way, it’s impressive and quite lovely. Nicely done.

There's a freedom in her voice and a joy that is apparent.

Five albums in, Roberts seems to have only scratched the surface of the folk song repertoire and his contributions to its curation, performance, and preservation. Recommended.

The result is a fascinating, successful hybrid.

There's nothing self-consciously modern or calculated about You Are Not Alone, no visible strain from trying to mold Staples' style into something she's not. It's just her, as she is at her best, and Tweedy deserves credit for bringing that out.

Over its 23 songs, Iron & Wine’s sound changes, from scratchy sparseness to well-appointed sparseness and through to the jittery clamor that marked The Shepherd’s Dog, but the underlying world doesn’t.

Refuge clocks in at over an hour, an hour in which, as stated earlier, not a whole lot of stuff happens. And yet maybe it takes that long to clear out the buzz and chatter, to slow down, to focus on one sound at a time and to find a stillness. It’s too long, it’s too slow, it’s too eventless until it’s not, and then you’re there.

The band does what it does best, which is couch surreal oddity in unstoppable catchiness.

The ratio is fixed, and any intimations of possible ineptitude is eradicated in a batch of songs that transition from anthem to chaos with ease.

I like this relatively blunt, unadorned Tracey Thorn – not that she was ever forced or florid in her expression, but Love and its Opposite offers her most complete disarmament yet.

Thanks to Sherwood’s production, all nine songs on Rainford are engaging on the macro level; you won’t have to work hard to enjoy them, and you’ll remember how they go later, and the micro; they are, in the classic dub tradition, rich with bizarre surprises.

The Bug can still shock, and with so many highlights here, it’s hard to complain.

Throughout Megafaun, the balance between expectation and surprise is maintained neatly.

The recondite spirit remains, but the sense of restlessness has disappeared, and with it much of the impertinent energy that propelled "Gone Ain’t Gone." What we gain in its place, though, is more rewarding: a closer look at the mechanics of Fite’s itchy-legs sophistry, the nature of his controlled eccentricity.

V may be more intimate and introverted than Ancestral Star or Lost in the Glare, but it is no less cinematic. It’s a remarkable return to the fore for Porras and Caminiti.

Ex Models are not afraid of the gaps created by their minimal approach; they use the silence to contrast the unholy racket they can make.

Amid the brightness and snark of another consistently entertaining Fujiya & Miyagi record, it’s a reminder that even our modern Lucifers have many dimensions to them.

The New Pornographers’’ songs have always been swift, busy little things for the most part, that’s a large part of their joy, and even if some of the more overt ebullience has been toned down here, the richly arpeggioed repetitions and steady melodic sense on display here means that, “bubblegum Krautrock” or no, this is still heady, catchy stuff.

It's not a return to form so much as a complete reinvention, this is an album that highlights a particularly buoyant Animal Collective, one that’s managed to expand their sound in surprising ways while still retaining the same basic creative impulses that made them such a joy to watch develop over the past decade

It is in the spaces between words and drums, and in the general structures of the songs... that El-P most clearly exhibits growth. And it is these points on the album that make I’ll Sleep an intriguing release.

Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline is a return to the same blissful twilight as before, virtually unpaused.

Their charisma lets them make a few risky moves (such as the African percussion on the extended closer "Church") and yield massive returns.

Continue as a Guest sounds exactly like a New Pornographers record. It’s energetic, insanely catchy and occasionally thrilling pop music. The compositions are dense and clever and complex, but not too much for their own good.

It’s clear that she’s going for something beyond mere sonic anxiety. What this record succeeds so well in doing is bringing you into a very particular feeling of emotional velocity.

Each piece is seemingly quite simple in terms of overall construction, with sustained atmospheric tones juxtaposed with spare melodies traced out in the foreground. However, pop on your best headphones, focus on the interplay between the layers of these richly detailed mixes, and you’ll find plenty of instrumental texture that’ll raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

Ultimately, this album manages to sound like all and none of these, making Barn Owl a band that's becoming harder to pin down and easier to appreciate.

Jurado’s records are always slow burners, but this minimalist one takes an especially long time to catch fire. It sounds like less than it is for half a dozen spins and then suddenly rears up, fully-formed and out of hiding. It may not be as mesmerizing as the Richard Swift triad, but The Monster That Hated Pennsylvania is its own odd, quiet, disconcerting triumph.

The lightness of PUNK isn’t toothless escapism. Rather, it’s a challenge to find sweetness, joy and individuality in a world that trends toward cynical conformity.

Venom Prison makes songs that are just as musically violent as the stuff their deathgrind peers churn out, often thrillingly so. But the Welsh band lifts the subgenre out of the thematic gutter. ... This is a terrific record.

You could miss whole philosophies by following the guitar line too closely…and forgo featherbeds of tuneful pleasures by worrying too much about the words. And yet, ride the line just right, and meaning floods translucently simple songs, lighting them up from inside and transforming them.

It isn't as succint, and heart-wrenching, as Someday... and it may not have the slicing modernity of HNIA's earlier works, but the idea of the project propels it still.

Their sound--two guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, vox--is basic and elemental, drawing on rock, country and sometimes soul, though Among the Ghosts has less of the Memphis horn sound than previous albums. Still the force and authenticity of these tunes is undeniable.

In the end, Giving is a more than satisfying swan song for this lineup.

By the time “Civil Weather” floats to a halt, it’s hard not to want more from Oneida and Rhys Chatham, either separately or, on the basis of this LP, together.

That emptiness tempts a listener in, and puts you in its place--you, in a sense, step into the record’s point of view. This invitation to intimacy is a powerful move that most club music is simply incapable of.

No Keys again has no indelible riffs, but it doesn’t seem to be missing them anymore. Instead Dommengang goes deep into the abyss of buzz and croon and humming mystery and finds something beautiful, maybe what they were looking for the whole time.

Limbo could have passed as a follow-up to this year's excellent Mr. Impossible, and likely would have met with the same acclaim.