This is clearly a departure point, unexpected but more than welcome.

The lyrics on Red Devil Dawn are some of his most poetic to date.

Trapist isn't experimenting anymore; the trio is using the tools they know best to subvert nostalgia and keep you ill at ease.

If it was a foregone conclusion that the long-awaited Iron & Wine/Calexico team-up wouldn't result in anything revelatory (or incendiary, as it were), it was almost as inevitable that it would be rewarding all the same; safe, not sorry, sad and elegant as ever.

One of the great pleasures of The House at Sea is that you can enjoy it without thinking about it, on a purely sensual, intuitive level, without feeling that there's nothing there to consider.

In short, they pay the best kind of respect to material they love, finding a way to live inside it and change it and make it breathe.

Nosdam is most similar to the New Jersey trio Dälek, although Nosdam's beats tend to be a bit bulkier and he seems to approach his music with a psychedelic sense of wonder rather than with Dälek's anger.

Whether she’s howling about airport security machines, falling in and out of love or lust with someone or turning a jaundiced eye on the past, these are as solid, anthemic and moving a set of songs as any Against Me! have put out.

Who Is the Sender? has a gently melancholy, a resigned aura that looks lovingly on this world but also speculates on the next. Both elements, the careful observation of what is and the restless querying about what may be, meld into a wise and spiritually resonant whole.

For those unfamiliar with this exemplary quintet and its composer, there's no better place to begin.

The Hypnogogue is anything but minimalist. It starts with a big concept, adds dramatic, room-filling rock arrangements and extends for over an hour. And yet, there are very few intervals where you wonder if things might have been better if they were shorter or more pared back. The Church is going out with a bang, not a whimper, and we’re lucky to be here to hear it.

For post-apocalyptic strains of electronic music, there's no one better at the moment than Andy Stott. Luxury Problems makes for one hell of a calling card.

This record doesn’t want to be anyone’s friend, but if you’re ready to feel, it’s real.

Even now, with this seventh album, the old thumping insouciance remains, while the subject matter becomes increasingly morose. These are the kind of songs that could easily, in the live setting, lead to sweaty euphoria; you realize almost as an afterthought that they are all about death.

Going Places is a monolith, the cacophonous capstone to a career that never settled for less. It’s two guys arriving at their musical endpoint, culminating nearly a decade of work with one final refinement.

Cold Showers uses that cavalier attitude behind such a simple bedrock of references--Joy Division (a song called "New Dawn" all but writes a countermelody to "Insight"), The Church, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Strokes, Interpol--that creates a level of tension across Love and Regret that sustains them far better than any of their peers.

Knuckleball Express is the best Howling Hex album since Nightclub Version of the Eternal.

It’s another landmark release for this deceptively versatile and forward-thinking artist, and perhaps, just perhaps, his most effective album to date.

At 44 minutes, Life, and Another is lengthy compared to many new albums, but its 16 diverse tracks all earn their inclusion, each piece of the tapestry finely crafted and lovingly stitched into place. Few albums released so far this year have felt quite so magical and transportive, carried along by a mischievous dream-like narrative.

It’s atmospheric, infectious and enjoyable.

The entire panoply of sounds from past recordings is brought to the forefront and depleted prejudicially. Sonic serpent rattle, centrifugal drones, cottony flashes and fizzes, dog-whistle squelch, electronic hives freed of their bees – the whole lot's here, and it's incrementally larger and more agitated than prior show-'n'-tell sessions.

Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest is a quiet album that will tell you about the succession of small, resonant moments that make up a day, a month, a life. Sit still for that, soak it in and let it breathe, and you start to see the glow behind the ordinary, not just in Callahan’s album, but in the world itself.

We Cater to Cowards is a satisfying and sometimes thrilling record. Particularly in its final third, it finds a snarling, crunching groove that slots alongside the general feeling of our current socio-political conjuncture.

While Diaper Island doesn't represent a significant break from VanGaalen's existing body of work, it ultimately haunts and endures in just the right amount--making this one of the strongest entries in an already consistent discography.

Throughout, Moore’s light touch and heavy sustain and Gunn’s fingerpicking complement each other perfectly. ... Let’s also hope that Gunn and Moore release more music soon.

Finders Keepers has managed to extract another handful of diamonds from a shaft seemingly unsafe for further exploration.

While bubblegum’s reliance on the hook has afforded Collins the opportunity to write some of the catchiest songs of his career, Ooey Gooey Chewy Ka-Blooey!’s strongest selling point is its extraordinary attention to detail.

It is really a much more modern album than the Americana tag would at first suggest, and the songs are as instantaneous and memorable as the best pop music.

His creative arc reaches its most carefully detailed and elegantly pastoral on this new album.

Even at its most abstract and cerebral, Fluorescent Black is made irresistibly catchy by its wildly eclectic tracks (courtesy of unsung genius Earl Blaze), at once the smartest and most ig’nant windshield-rattlers out.

Hit Parade is such a pleasure, well made and artfully played, deeply felt but never mushy.

Future albums will reveal whether this is as much of an offshoot as Mogwai’s other soundtracks, but this understated, solid effort reveals a lot more imagination and prowess than most bands that have been around over 20 years.

Despite the record’s minimal evolution, it’s still a joy to hear, an extension of the promise displayed on More Parts Per Million.

Third is about the potential for being, not being itself. It’s the base chemistry of the Portishead sound, a compound awaiting reaction. Which is up to the listener to produce, like the lightning that brings the Monster to life.

Honeys, like Hope for Men, has some dead spots in the middle, but this time it doesn’t lessen the impact of the whole record, or the underlying fear of sinking back into office park anonymity.

You can’t hear Signals without hearing modern London.

Every sound fits, without sounding in the least bit fussed over or premeditated. It’s more like a living organism than a band, bringing all systems together to sing its song, once again.

Perpetuum Mobile is an album of skeletal songs, many of them little more than percussion, bass, and vocals. What's remarkable is the band's ability to create an effective atmosphere with so little -- and much of the credit must go to Bargeld's ever-astonishing voice.

Though Furling is a fitting title in this regard, in the sense of closing around something, of creating a feeling of being safe and loved, there’s also a sensation of unfurling, of opening out, of expansiveness, of fearless abandon. That’s a rare balance to strike, and one that proves intoxicatingly addictive.

Here on this fourth Cairo Gang album, Kelley works in full-blooded, freak-beated 1960s garage mode--and damn if the change-up doesn’t suit him.

This is wonderful stuff, both as pure entertainment and a document of a vanished era.

Easy on the ears, Film Music’s approachable offerings are compounded by the high recording quality, new transfers made from original half-inch tapes in the Tariverdiev family’s Moscow apartment.

Black Times succeeds on its own terms and not as an artifact.

Ingenuity and sincerity (two things in which Hayes excels) are priceless, and the sum of the parts is quite a masterpiece indeed.

Mostly, though, these cuts take songs that you probably already know and deliver them slightly transformed by time and personnel and the live setting. They’re old friends, a little older, a little shaggier, but still magic: “Wolves (Song of the Shepherd’s Dog),” “About a Bruise” and “Dearest Forsaken.” If you ever loved them, you should hear them like this, too.

A tremendously satisfying and thunderous effort, and their finest work to date.

It's certainly not a perfect album, but Hello Everything represents the pinnacle of performance from electronic music's most thoroughly developed mind.

As the album advances, you get the sense that Clark is finally accomplishing what he claims to have been doing all along: making a techno record.

Here chilly, cerebral ideas provide structure for enticing pop, and the sweetness comes with a bit of vertigo.

Barely out of her teen years herself, Marling explores a whole spectrum of female experience with empathy and intelligence.

With Special Moves, Mogwai have released a "greatest hits" collection in a sense, but it's indeed more special than that. Dramatic, at turns gentle, majestic and harsh, both old and new songs blend so well that there's no feeling of weak recent material sagging amidst earlier favorites.

High Anxiety is the record that some of us have been waiting for Oozing Wound to make.

Bishop’s elaborate flights celebrate what his instrument can do, and express by example the notion that having an interesting time along the way matters more than where you’re going.

The balance of spoken word and music is well-conceived. .... Less than halfway through, the Coin Coin series is engaging and ever new.

They have always written insanely short, catchy pop songs in the modern idiom, and, for those looking for the one line post mortem, Innings doesn't just not disappoint, it delights.

The more Clark edits, the more she refines, the stronger St. Vincent becomes. At this point, it's just a matter of consistency.

Even when Ejstes and his combo stretch out, they do so in a catchy way. Sometimes they do it the old-fashioned way with a big, memorable melody. Other times it is a cool sound framed just so.

The individual tracks here are no less weighty or patient, but it feels like a fire has been lit under Morgan, moving him to make his point more sharply than any before.

Every song on his debut album is sourced from an old record or field recording, but he and producer William Tyler have gone out of their way to ensure that they don’t sound particularly antique. In fact, while they’ll rest pretty easily upon Americana-tuned ears, they don’t slot too easily into any particular scene.

These songs stick in your head in a way that 15-minute guitar jams never do, while still maintaining a bit of hoary mystery at their core.

Timbrally, this is just another Nels Cline offering with all of its variety and surprise, but musically, it's his most mature and satisfying.

Though perhaps not as unique or groundbreaking as Ugly Side of Love, Beyond Ugly is still a pretty fabulous record by a band mostly alone in a top-shelf niche.

Eyes on the Lines is summer’s quintessential pleasure, the unmapped excursion through sunlit spaces, the unhurried but never static interval for reflection, the road trip that goes everywhere and ends up exactly where it started. It’s an album to get lost in, every time you listen to it.

This isn’t Black Eyes, or Public Image Ltd., or even the Mi Ami you knew, and it sure as hell ain’t Bob Marley. This is just a band at their very best pointing a fresh way forward for anyone lucky enough to listen closely.

Fish at first doesn’t come across as the sort of defining, revelatory work that The Resurrection and Revenge of The Clayton Peacock and, to a lesser extent, Pachyderm were, but its pleasures are more subtle, revealing themselves in increments.

The band sound more pleasingly unified than they ever have. By the same token, the album feels less adventurous, at least in terms of stylistic diversity, but the focus on Newman's exuberantly literate power-pop affords it more impact.

Guitar solos are fiery but brief and tethered to the main melodic ideas. Everything has been brightened, amplified and streamlined for immediate appreciation.

Chapman may be tying off a loose end by making this record, but he doesn’t sound like he thinks he’s at the end of the road yet.

Among the remaining eight songs is some of Raposa’s strongest songwriting.

Xe is a refreshing glimpse of a band captured in its most primordial state, and for all their clinical musical intellectualism, the album also offers snippets of Zs’ odd sense of humour, not to mention each player’s unique talents and virtuosity.

The nostalgia of postmodernity, that backward glance, is apparent in every moment of Parallax Error Beheads You. While it can sometimes seem like a quagmire for the less creative, it’s transformative here.

Impeccably tasteful, Kitty Wells Dresses is no mere museum piece. It deserves to rest in an enthusiast's country collection somewhere among, say, Buck Owens Sings Harlan Howard and Del Shannon Sings Hank Williams.

A schizophrenic mess of maypole folk and motorik drive.

It's bold without making a big stink about it. It's personal without being solipsistic. It's a musical proof of Umberto Eco's thesis.

Someday Everything Will Be Fine is a wrecked and wreckless antidote to a world that most definitely is not.

Plastic Eternity is the rare dead serious, head-trippy album that is also a lot of fun. Here’s to Mudhoney for standing on the precipice and laughing.

A delicate, quietly ruminative collection of songs that she herself arranged and recorded on computer. It sounds, one supposes, exactly as Bunyan intended.

If it weren't all so much fun, CSS would be really objectionable. But if it wasn't so objectionable, it certainly wouldn't be this much fun.

Not Even Happiness is a work of intimate loveliness, surely one of the most flat-out beautiful songwriter albums of a year that is just getting going.

What makes the Constantines appealing, then, is not that they do something totally new but rather that they do something familiar very well.

[Fade's songs] blur and fade like old memories, but leave a meaningful impression.

Pile is a challenging band to listen to casually--but its dense, exquisitely crafted bombast pays both immediate and long-term dividends over repeated listens, as the mutated strands of their musical DNA infect and take over.

They’ve created one of the most haunting and terrifying metal albums since the legendary Khanate broke up.

Throughout all of this, Nace’s innate instincts as an improviser couple effectively with Crain’s production mastery resulting in a release that stands apart, while fitting in perfectly with the guitarist’s broad body of work.

Breakers is a gorgeous oddity, one of the year's most arresting albums of any kind, and "252" hints at the potential for even better material ahead.

Honor Found in Decay, the band's 11th or so studio album, is an organic, humanizing refinement of said retooling, one that is very subtle yet undoubtedly informed by guitarist Steve Von Till and bassist Scott Kelly's forays into the fandom and unadorned tribute exercises regarding the late Townes Van Zandt.

The looping phrases of Reward are carefully considered and joined with the precision of mortise and tenon. Her songs have always been like small rooms, though they are no longer drafty and rustic. This is a record of tidy natural sounds. They are not immediately inviting, yet spending time in these well-mannered spaces becomes a pleasure.

Some of beats are a little perfunctory, but the interplay between the grieved and the griever, the subtlety of the writing and beauty of the arrangements on Fall To Pieces haunt long after the needle lifts.

While Breakup Songs is hardly less fractured than Deerhoof's other albums, it's also one of their more coherent efforts.

Having the backstory on Walker’s path to sobriety isn’t necessary to appreciate Course In Fable. There’s enough allure in Walker and guitarist Bill MacKay’s elaborate latticework of glazed melodies and modal chords that call to mind McEntire’s other band The Sea and Cake, and how drummer Ryan Jewell floats through it all with loose, jazzy flourishes.

Success is a fine example of Oneida’s willingness to fly in the face of fashion and once again reinvent themselves.

While Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes could have become an exercise in studio-based formalistic noodling, Adebimpe and Malone’s vocals and lyrics give the songs structure and direction.

If you have a weakness for fat synth sounds and sputtering early drum machines committed to reel-to-reel tape, this stuff could set you swooning.

In short, it’s a one-off that makes accidental magic, bringing disparate talents into temporary alignment without blunting their differences. If it’s a reality show, then it’s one that works and one in which no one should get voted off the island.

This isn’t the flare and fade of passing fancy, but the kind of deep and considered work that comes from a long-term union that has had time to hone in on its strengths.

Fields, the third release and first full-length album from the Swedish trio Junip, both meets and defies expectations.

As often, Dulli brings the devil into lurid though realistic scenarios of decadence. Sex, drugs, damnation and witchcraft, along with ruminations on lust, aging, memory and oblivion, live in disturbing proximity and maybe account for the daunting scale of In Spades. It’s the right amount of too much.