This album is loud, obnoxious, personal, and a hell of a lot of fun.

The atmosphere is lovely—it refracts the light like the last traces of fog in sunlight—but there are songs here underneath, good ones, and that makes all the difference.

There's a just-right roughness to the recording that has worked for bands as diverse as The Commandos and The Trashmen.

What’s left is distinctly Sunn O))) in scope and scale, as heavy and loud and intense as anything they’ve produced.

Today is the Day ranks as an outstanding album on its own merits, but its timing is also impeccable. Arriving at the end of this year, it will hopefully silence those who have accused Yo La Tengo of sliding into mid-career pleasantness.

There isn’t a singular, clear message of hope on The Great Bailout, but in documenting the rage and despair built into life under such a ugly and evil system, Moor Mother has provided something just as valuable — if not more so— in understanding the struggles of the present day.

His inventive and affective pairing of resonating melodies and noise is impossible to deconstruct--that is to say, narrow down to a specified meaning or reason behind each piece. We, the listener, get to apply each of Hecker's abstractions to whichever feeling we choose. That's definitely an ocean worth diving into.

It's good to hear a group continue to challenge themselves without kicking their strengths to the curb.

An album about finding meaning in the quiet, and even people who will never take psychedelic drugs or visit remote Ecuadorian caves, can get something out of that.

Almost all of II has a first-take rawness, well recorded, but without fuss.

New Rain Duets teems with ideas that float and drift together. It works because McCaughan and Lattimore use their shared vocabulary to tease out the beauty in the murky haze.

m b v is an impressive work, one in which adventurous and nostalgic listeners alike will find something to appreciate.

Its appeal is immediate, rather than slow burning, and you can see it gaining fans who are less transfixed by eccentricity, more interested in tightly constructed songs. Yet at the same time, the words and images in these songs are deeply personal and self-revealing in a way that, I think, the first two albums were not.

The odd acoustic folk songs are somewhat more of an acquired taste, but Damaged Bug does justice to them as well.

The whole midsection of the album is giddily enjoyable.

In short, the observations are sharp and the music cranks. Twenty-first century Brooklyn doesn’t sound like much fun, but Bodega does.

The result is still identifiably Benoît Pioulard, but richer, deeper, stranger.

The Guilty Office feels different; it sounds quite a bit like its predecessor (which in turn sounded quite similar to early ’90s efforts like Fear of God and Silverbeet), but like a new eyeglass prescription, it renders the familiar in sharper detail.

It’s as classy and unassumingly smart as you’d expect.

It feels like a genuine use of the source material; not even as something conscious, like a person that travels around hoping to find new sounds, but rather as an act of dialectical eruption--the past naturally coming back in a different form.

There's something really interesting about the way these two conflicting styles fit together here, a groove for headbangers with flowers in their hair.

Drone Trailer comes off as one of MV & EE’s richest conciliations of primal rock impulse and agrarian drift – the kind of record that a confused major label would have leaked out into the world in the early 1970s, the last time the underground had any chance of seriously warping the mainstream milieu.

Fans ignore these efforts at their peril, since Chasny’s long-form efforts are often his best.

You may have all the Pentangle you need, and all the Fairport Convention you could ever want to listen to. The Making of You won’t replace any of these favorites, but it can definitely carve a space out on the shelf next to them. Make some room. This stuff is good.

As good as its individual songs and moments are, Summer at Land’s End is even better experienced as a whole, where it takes on a world-of-its-own feel, thanks, in part, to a pair of hypnotic instrumentals.

Both on Why Choose and in the live setting, Shopping’s music elucidates the urgency and modularity of postpunk and delivers a host of compelling songs along the way.

For all the grunting and studio manipulation (the way the levels shift around, it's like there's a cat loose on the mixing board), this is as playful as the Fall has ever been, with long stretches of taking the piss.

Phair mobilized and rearranged some tunes from her Girly-Sound tapes. Almost all of them improve with Guyville’s studio polish, but a couple are better in their original form ... Exile in Guyville remains her most visible and memorable record, but it’s more than a time capsule of early-nineties indie rock. Its most compelling songs (and there are a bunch of them) still generate tensions, among a voice and its bodily contours and the public’s articulations of femininity.

The players never lose touch with the paradox of these songs, which have long endured through their strength and frequent expressions of anger, but which also have much still to tell us about human weakness and vulnerability. By tuning into that paradox, the players have made a terrific, surprising and emotionally dramatic record.

I think one can get a much better grasp on the band’s music by seeing the songs as long, somewhat-complex pop songs--ones derived from much different circumstances than The Decemberists’ boring narratives--rather than grand, theatrical gospels

Chasny has souped up his production values, and they’ve never been sharper than they are on Luminous Night, checking everything Chasny has ever done well with unprecedented clarity.

More than nihilism, the songs on Death Magic ultimately resolve that what’s important is loving and understanding each other because there’s nothing else. Going in that direction at the same time as their songs go in a much more immediately ingratiating one is a bold move for HEALTH, and here it pays off.

Wolf People is working out the difficulties of splicing hard rock guitars and post-rock rhythms with diffident folk melodies as if for the first time, and their full-bore concentration makes it sound fresh and unexpected and interesting.

There’s something that lifts the music of Laika above its essentials: A balance of melancholy and sobriety.

Simultaneously complex and unassuming, You Forgot It In People has punch that will stimulate even the cagiest listener, curious quirks and all.

Ultimately, Williams never made a record as intense and as beautiful as Our Blood.

The aesthetic is head-scratching; ideas are stunted and unreadable as themes unless you look at the music as an arc. But the duo is clever enough to generate an initial sonic mystique that makes you long to figure out exactly what you’re listening to. And that’s the mark of a lasting record.

The mix's most pleasing moments and its most successful don't usually overlap: some of the beats are fresh, some of the basslines impeccable, but it's the extramusical sensations, those slithering intimations of robotic insects rooting through the garbage for your financial information, that make this worth engaging with on his terms, not your own.

Jurado and Swift are onto something in the conjunction of rough-hewn folk and atmospheric electronics, and if anything, they have gotten better at integrating the two elements into a whole.

The ghosts in Monolake's latest creation are more subtle -- bubbling, evasive presences that unsettle the equilibrium of each track without derailing it.

Perlas is a lovely, understated album, sure in its stride but happy to wander, and somehow peaceable and playful, even as the songs hymn broken hearts.

Horses... is Silver Mount Zion’s most musically satisfying disc to date because, while the well-worn formulae are present, sonic variance and compositional modification has brought a welcome diversity to an increasingly wearisome aesthetic.

Bodega have extended their musical palette and tightened their songwriting to produce an album that bristles with energy and intelligence.

The result is a melding of energies that is both fragilely beautiful and extraordinarily resilient.

While Wakin On A Pretty Daze may not be an anthemic leap forward, it is in many ways even stronger for its existence as example of a craft being so finely honed.

Enemy takes the game Built to Spill has been playing for a while now and hits the right emotions in the right way.

The music is simple, but not easy, adorned with intricate picking that cascades over itself like a waterfall. The lyrics feel like really good haiku, pithy, made of small words, but evoking wonderfully precise natural images. It’s a good album for being alone somewhere calm and beautiful, not engaged with the world but not cut off either and enjoying the quiet.

It carries the manic, youthful energy of Parks’s very best works, plants itself deep inside the listener’s brain as though tapping into some deep American (meaning in this case both North American and West Indian) musical unconscious, and magically holds together as a single, unified and exhilarating listening experience despite its meandering through a dauntingly wide range of material and approaches.

The eleven tracks here are tight, raw, and marked by insistent thumping rhythms and taught chunky riffs, laying the groundwork for one of the band’s most straight-ahead rock albums in years.

It is not as raw as the first LP, not as musically belligerent or emotionally wrenching. Instead, it's got an elegance and symmetry to it, a sense of space and precision that was, if not entirely missing from Hammer of the Gods, at least not fully realized.

As a portrait of a man in a city sharing his thoughts and feelings, it’s strikingly effective, all the more so for being so far-reaching.

Monoliths and Dimensions is a bold step forward and bodes well for Sunn 0)))’s future relevance as not just musicians, but honest-to-god composers.

As distinctive as it is complex, is as much about the journey as its component pieces, commanding all the familiar electronic music components with ease, but infused with the warmth of soul and a kind of cross-continental sophistication.

This is a great album, and you’re probably going to want to hear it again and again.

Dream logic rules this world, with periods of calm beauty, eruptions of noise and the sense that for every step forward there are delays, disruptions and detours that must be dealt with in order to proceed to a distant destination. If abstraction is the rule, the emotional resonance is real and deeply felt.

Pyramid is well worth scaling.

It takes an incredibly steady hand and a reservoir of patience to pull off this tone, but delightfully, still below the surface is that tension. There are these competing moments in her music then, and it is the way they compete that makes her aesthetic unique and beautiful.

If you listen to this album a lot, you may spend the first two or three times through snorting at odd phrases, recoiling from the venom and viscosity in Smith’s vocal delivery, but as you go, you begin to pick up the ferocity of the grooves underneath. No one else balances articulate, convincing hallucination with freight train propulsion like the Fall does, and this album, they take it further towards the edge than before.

This is a relatively brief album but one so rich and with such a definite sense of itself that it’s hard to feel shortchanged; Demen gives us a rapturously enchanting world to live in, but one you could imagine becoming too much.

A pleasantly lush album that may be his finest work yet.

Kinski’s boldest statement to date.

In Black Duck, they draw on many different aspects of their respective, eclectic backgrounds, flitting freely from sun-drenched cosmic country, to driving kraut rock, to radiant, enveloping ambiences, all played so expertly that it seems effortless, though it probably isn’t.

This is a remarkable album, lovely but harrowing, meditative but visceral.

With its shyness, lack of flourish, unvarnished finish and relative dearth of guest appearances, Preparations is, more than any other Pref record, some decidedly this-level-type shit.

It remains delightfully messy and is all the more viscerally resonant.

You’ll never hear the same thing twice in listening to Levon Vincent. Akin to the highlights of his past discography, something in the mixes of these songs jumps out to grab you by the throat, then gradually retreats as other elements subtly work their way to the fore of your consciousness.

Lights’ debut was a strange, beautiful thing, and one of my favorite debuts of last year. Rites is bigger, sharper and in all ways better. Lights just got a good deal brighter.

It’s clearly the best Young Widows record.

Costello stays away from pop hooks here, concentrating instead on a tentative but engaging marriage of words and melody.

The album sounds a little warmer and less rustic than might be expected. The sound’s not inherently better or worse, but it suits Fussell’s movement toward more expansive orchestration and a more contemporary feel.

The words, as always, tap into the subconscious, making different kinds of sense depending on when you hear them, though that meaning may be more a matter of you than the words themselves.

He navigates through colorized thickets of tone on the long songs with the knowing confidence of a veteran wilderness guide.

An album that blooms slowly over time and repeated listening.

Visuals is probably the most ‘simple’ Mew has been since Frengers (albeit without that album’s jet engine roar), but if it never quite reaches the twisty heights of +--it remains endearing nonetheless.

This is an album that seriously repays repeat listening, sounding slight at first, but gaining heft with every play. It’s beautiful stuff, and you won’t miss the vocals at all.

When None Shall Pass drags late in the first act, it's largely due to tracks that seem intended to reprise the contemplative vibe of the Float era. A few Jukie guest spots, brazen as the production, round out the way the album works best.

Ski Mask is almost certainly not Islands’ most accessible or enjoyable work, but it ranks with the band’s most forceful and accomplished.

With I Have Fought Against It, but I Can’t Any Longer, the Body have generated a record of power electronics, descending at times into harsh noise, punctuated at points by mournful passages of ambient beauty.

Allen writes like a painter, renewing familiar material--in this case, poorly behaved men and resourceful hookers with Spanish names--via quirks of perspective and peculiar taste in details.

Wit's End stands to lose a lot by being judged on a song-by-song basis: there are standout moments, courtesy of ingenious arrangements and lovely melodies, but the album's shadowy guiding principle remains in my mind long after listening.

An accomplished release that attests to their enduringly unique sound and vision.

A New Way... didn't need reinforcements, and taking in all 14 tracks in succession can be tough going, but a little bit of overkill doesn't dull the bracing energy of Orcutt's kinetic, four-string idioglossia.

What makes KAPUTT so exciting is its elasticized unpredictability, the sense that these taut, punched-out firestorms could head in any direction. Anarchy has rarely been so tightly coordinated, nor order so slapped bloody and sore as on this debut.

As with many works that get tagged as major breaks from an artist’s established work, truthfully much of Too Bright still feels very much like the work of the Perfume Genius, and anyone looking for more of what they got from past albums will be very satisfied.

I DES is an ambitious, moving work.

They’re simply better songwriters than many others in the field, and their ability to recontextualize these sounds into something so subsequently fresh and familiar is a stunning achievement.

Though the length of each successive Grouper album wastes away, at only 22 minutes Grid of Points provides such compelling sketches that the lost minutes only manifest after the music has stopped. Harris’ sound has always been haunting, but by investigating absence on Grid of Points she haunts herself, capturing a restlessness that has returned to make sense of its ending.

Nadler can’t be pinned down, and all of Strangers is an indication of that new challenge she both creates and meets.

More than anything else, one gets the feeling that Bespoke exists to defy categorization and manifest that essential need to live as a unique being, no matter how inevitable the factory-churning repetition of prescribed lifestyles may seem.

Her most self-assured release yet, instantly inviting and comfortable, brimming with a confidence that breeds fast familiarity.

Dereconstructed poses a challenge and stands defiant, and it works surprisingly well as the unexpected convergence of a number of long-running cultural traditions.

It's music like this, intelligently composed and played, delivered with clarity and purposefully varied, that, finally, makes sense of the Fucking Champs.

The Feelies really are here again, operating in a fashion as insular and purposeful as they did in days of old without denying who they are now. It's good to have them around.

You can hear the absolute precision, yes; but the head and hands have not left the heart and soul behind.

To that end, the most interesting moments are the endings, and the most interesting song on a whole is the title-track that concludes the EP.

However great the merits of their debut might be, one can’t help but feel that there’s something just a little too perfect about Franz Ferdinand, as though they had planned out hipster world-domination around a scientifically constructed chart of "what’s hot and what’s not."

Frozen Orange might as well have simplicity, directness, and melody stamped like a mantra throughout the liner notes.

What might be most appealing about this clear and intimate recording is the way it captures not only a wide variety of textures, moods and voices, but also the musicians' comfortable--and nonetheless passionate--virtuosity and elegance of expression.