Still Life seems mostly solid, presenting evidence of talent, taste and potential, but not quite pushing things over the top.

A surrealist song cycle that is both oblique and engaging.

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

Overall, its more up-tempo songs aside, Lucifer on the Sofa is a disappointment, offering regrettable evidence that Britt Daniel’s laudable song writing mojo may have gone off the boil.

The songs’ stoner shoegaze impact can be appreciated even if you miss the line that tells you our narrator is an asteroid miner. But if you do lean into meditating on its themes, the phantasmagorical desolation that is Dissolution Wave’s intended setting makes the songs hit even harder.

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.

The most surprising aspect of DNWMIBIY is that for a double album, the quality control is high and the sequencing is especially effective. ... In the meantime, DNWMIBIY is the first album to join my best of 2022 list.

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 longest track on the recording, at 7’21”, is “Sadder than Water,” where the stasis of basslines found elsewhere are broken into an angular melody overlaid with oscillating chordal material. This, along with the outer two tracks, points to a promising way forward for Shenfeld, in which her skill at creating textures is matched by her ability to develop them.

Most of the record is engaging stuff, noisier than pretty, stranger than it is studied.

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.

Callahan’s honeyed, slightly gravelly bass-baritone, which comes across as dispassionate to the point of being noncommittal on Blind Date Party at times, and Bonnie Prince’s tenor, consistently vulnerable, raw, wide open, complement each other in a compelling way, establishing dramatic tension and unearthing emotionally resonant inner dialogues within the album’s songs.

The hooks are strong, and the harmonies sweetly hypnotic, but in between the choruses, you can still catch a firehose blast of pure guitar that will knock you back flat if you’re not braced properly.

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.

A monolith and a kaleidoscope of detail, Der Lange Marsch is a hypnotic adventure in which to lose oneself.

Years of careful post-production honed this impressive exercise in large group improvisation into a multi-hued vista replete with crepuscular silhouettes and flecks of effervescence.

They weave their instruments around each other deftly, with nobody stomping on toes. ... The anger and the grief are broken up by moments of beauty. ... These moments of respite from the darkness, where Springtime lets the sunshine part the clouds, are where they are the most powerful.

Though there’s less of Chasny’s questing idiosyncrasies at play, it’s hard to pick fault with music that taps into such a universal sound, like stepping out of the way of the self to see things anew. It’s beautiful yet strangely daunting; like waking up somewhere familiar and having to reacquaint yourself all over again.

Admonitions is a weighty work, long and heavy and inscrutable, but full of contradictions. It’s an impressive studio document of a band that has always seemed to be largely a live enterprise.

Though he’s not in any hurry, he’s also showing no signs of slowing down. There are 11 songs on The Time of the Foxgloves, some jokily lighthearted (“Blondes and Redheads”), others hauntingly spare and beautiful (“Se Fue En Noche,” “Jacob’s Ladder”).

In the end, Switched on Ra is the best kind of tribute, demonstrating a fundamental grasp of the original material but taking it in an entirely different direction.

Henki is an extremely entertaining tightrope walk between restraint and free rein, its well-earned moments of excess and exuberance genuinely joyful. It’s a ridiculous and brilliant record and makes an extravagant last-minute bid to sit among the best albums of the year.

She makes her latest album with a full rock band and a headlong sense of joy.

On the flip side, identifiable guitar sounds emerge, with tones sufficiently intact that a sharp-eared listener might be able to tell that Gordon and Nace played them.

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.

If you can get past the unintentionally risible title, this new collection of songs from the Austin-based dark hardcore band is quite good. The music is convincingly pissed.

There’s no question that Y is an essential, classic album, but it’s also a unique one in that it is both chaotic and robust enough to be very open to reinterpretation in the right hands. Bovell clearly qualifies, and the result is a companion album that can serve as a through-the-looking-glass partner to the original, easily able to stand on its own.

While there are no lyrical revelations to be found, the non-specific words suit the “What Has Happened” may be the perfect gateway into Petunia’s intoxicating sound world, but it’s far from the only magic trick the White brothers pull off.

There is a lot to like on Sympathy For Life despite its unevenness. Savage A and Brown are acute observers, Savage M and Yeaton a really excellent and versatile rhythm section, the band’s willingness to swing outweighs its misses and when they hit Parquet Courts drop into those dive-y, sweaty clubs we’ve all missed.

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

If not for the wisdom, lend an ear to these marginal spaces for the sounds within are their own reward.

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.

Nothing on Fantasy Island is as sharp or cataclysmic as that ["Voodoo Wop"] (the title track comes closest), but the unease is palpable. ... It’s very hard to tell whether Clinic is enjoying the hedonism of their hand-clapping, synth-bopping, drum thumping songs, or just trying to forestall the apocalypse. Perhaps a little of both.

Decidedly not for the faint-hearted, -io couches existential terror within ritualistic performance and orchestral musicality, and is often a challenging listen. With that in mind, approach -io with a brave heart and you’re in for a thrilling ride.

If you’re seeking a dose of danceable, retro futurist fun, Vanishing Twin are a good bet. Though far from original, Ookii Gekkou offers plenty of upbeat, colorful and likeable tunes.

The difficult thing about Fun House, which by this point becomes apparent, is that musically it primes you for a very different experience than the one it delivers. The middle section’s prolonged, sedate atmosphere feels like a slog following the album’s energetic opening. Not that the material doesn’t reveal its own strengths over repeated listens when given the chance.

Moondust For My Diamond does end up feeling like it’s a few songs too long, especially compared to Diviner’s succinct, 10 song track list. Nevertheless, it’s a predominantly radiant synth-pop record that offers receptive souls some much-needed uplift.

Everything glows with a wonderfully forgiving warmth and subtle fortitude, generating the kind of intimate, reassuring atmosphere that feels unique to well-executed folk music.

While he has first and foremost created a dance record, it is one that rewards the two left-footed listener with its intricate sleights, redirections and deconstructions. It is also a reminder of the joy of unfettered movement and the art behind craft of producers who provide music that encourages it.

Striking, tenderly bruising. ... The six songs here certainly constitute some kind of hybrid, an illuminating substance that sometimes seems to float in the air, sometimes leaving you gasping.

Yes, you’ll hear echoes of influence but McGreevy and Lewis have forged their own path based on really good songwriting and musical chops.

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.

Damon and Naomi and Kurihara have made art out of what was in front of them, and it’s a gorgeous, emotionally resonant reminder of the times.

Perhaps the most obvious way that this album reflects the COVID lockdown, however, is in its weirder, more idiosyncratic second half, which is, incidentally, the best part of the record.

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.

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.

There’s a lot to enjoy on Year of the Horse.

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.

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.

Little Eden pulls off one of Saloman’s best tricks: the record is unerringly faithful to the Bevis Frond aesthetic, a stable sonic construct for some 35 years, and it’s also cleverly responsive to our collective cultural moment.

You get a very empowered, very confident album. Super fun, too.

The Witness is definitely a grower, an elusive listen whose understated charms define its mystique — and also its flaws.

It’s a nice rest, listening to Other You. It’s hard to remember what you heard, but very, very pleasant while it’s happening.

Clara demonstrates Morgan’s ability to make practically whatever he gets his hands on into loscil music. But when loscil music is this deeply immersive, richly textured, carefully calibrated, and ultimately viscerally satisfying (however one feels about the process), you just hope he keeps on doing it.

With Harmonizer, Segall moves further out into his own personal weirdness, without compromising the red meat appeal of his rock aesthetic. It’s a neat trick, using different tools to make different sounds that, nonetheless, fit very squarely into his catalogue so far.

Their joint compositions are undeniably atmospheric, evoking south of the border drama on “Pray For Rain” and surging apprehension on “Something Will Come.” But they’re also as rigorously structured as any popular entry in a hymnal or hit parade. If you like for your tunes to tell you what they’re going to say, say it, and then tell you what they said, the soothing “Life And Casualty” and the white-knuckled “Hurricane Light” are equally at your service, and they’re not alone.

What’s more effective is that the band have become more skilled at writing for chord changes rather than just riffs. They don’t exactly back down from the effect of the latter when they go there, but the attention to harmony gives the whole much more heft than it otherwise might have. The heft is certainly in the physicality the music achieves in its peak moments. But it’s also in the fractured beauty of this music, its emotional catharsis, the beauty of something lost perhaps.

Whether it’s the soaring psychedelia of “Paper Fog” and “Pigs,” the more straightforwardly folky “Bird of Paradise” and “Vegas Knights,” or even the delayed fuzz-guitar squall of “Another Story From the Center of the Earth,” the pedal steel is there, and so is a songwriting sensibility that does feel very personal and emotionally powerful even though there’s not a lot of comprehensible narrative.

Hayter’s voice admirably performs that complexity on Sinner Get Ready; it’s a beautiful instrument that will fill you with terrible woe, and then terrible wonder.

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 momentum picks up a notch on “Whitewaterside,” in which O’Connell recounts standing in cold water, watching the ripples and admiring the quiet stillness of night. The stage is immediately set for a stark, reflective listening experience, with nature as a focus, rendered with zen-like clarity.

Overall, this new chapter in Liars’ fascinating story is perhaps their most easily digestible for years, synthesizing many laudable qualities of different chapters of the band’s career.

This is a memory album that is touched with love but almost entirely free of cheap nostalgia. It comes from a long way away, using everything Dacus has learned since to capture her experiences clearly, with art but without too much ornamentation.

One of the most beguiling and rewarding Six Organ of Admittance albums — 39-minutes of synth ballads, cracked space-glam and 1980s-glossed guitar overload.

Frustratingly uneven album: hang in there, ride out the bumpy passages, and something lovely is likely to happen; until those moments pop up, expect to have your patience tested.

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.

I Know I’m Funny Haha is not so very different from this last album from Webster, but it feels more assured and confident, and the subject matter is more upbeat.

Like Endless Boogie, Birds of Maya knows how to wring every sweaty drop out of a heavy groove. The basic foundation, thunderous drums, a gut-checking oscillation of bass notes, picks up various other elements as it goes on — mumbled spoken word, eruptive guitar solos, flailing drum fills. It is always the same but always changing, and you can get lost in it.

Mirror II finds The Goon Sax deep in the lovely, perplexing mess of life, embracing the pain and pleasure, savoring the taste of change, finding inner strength and the consolations of a collective that allows individuality to flourish and supports it with an empathy which seems so sorely lacking in our world.

The album is beautifully sequenced overall. Sometimes the transitions purposefully jar and provoke—elsewhere they’re seamless, prolonging, elongating a motif.

Layers of clever reference resolve into songs that resonate emotionally. They’re smarter than most songs and better played, but they also have that elusive way of landing, so that they seem to tell you more about life and persistence and suffering than what’s in the words.

The whole thing took shape with hardly any notice and minimal rehearsal, across language and cultural barriers and in front of an audience, but nonetheless catches a wave and holds onto it in a very intuitive way. Probably if the players thought too hard about what they were doing, they’d lose the thread, but they don’t. It’s a fast ride and a jam and well worth experiencing.

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

There are moments here that feel like being carried aloft by a parade, and moments that feel like the jail doors shutting. There are pools of calm and surges of impossible triumph.

Though they are spare and though there are a lot of these songs (17), the album doesn’t sag. A restless energy courses through them. Spike-y, unsentimental observations keep them engaging.

Penelope Three spends its 35-minute runtime exploring this fertile intersection between haunting folk and anxious electronica, creating a deep, resonant space that’s beautiful, eerie and unsettling.

Scatterbrain is a record of stocktaking but also of hope, at 32 minutes perhaps a lesser entry in The Chills’ canon, it is reminder that one of the great shapers and survivors of the antipodean sound still has much to offer.

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.

There are two distinct types of songs on The Power of Rocks: the herky-jerky, dada-ist contraptions described in the first two paragraphs and a sort of luminous dream pop that might remind you of the Green Child.

The band is very good, good enough to pull off this edge-of-your-seat flirtation with breakdown.

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.

The Danish four-piece tapped Spaceman 3’s Sonic Boom for production on this uncharacteristically uplifting endeavor, and you can see the uneasy alliance of the bright colors of Peter Kember’s recent work mixing into the half melted, slushy desolation of Iceage’s aesthetic.

The recording shows little evidence of how acoustically challenging the glass-walled structure can be; every element registers clearly so that the music yields where it needs to and slams where it must. And slam it does, with big beats and massed choruses that bring the messages down hard and certain.

Hayashi’s eclecticism gives the album the feel of an anthology and although his beat making is terrific and provides a thematic backbone, the real interest here is what’s going on around, beneath and between. If his wish were to destabilize and upend expectations, then full marks, but too often he seems to retire behind his tools and allow his technical skill to overshadow his considerable artistry.

Endless Arcade will do nothing for the people who wish they would let it rip again one more time—but it’s fine, well-crafted, intricately plotted mid-tempo rock. The edges, if they were ever there to begin with, have been sanded off, and it’s all rather noddingly pleasant.

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.

Their attempt to weld the cerebral and physical is not always smooth but part of the attraction is to sit in on a work in progress, to hear the musicians grasping at handholds and swinging for the next ledge, fearless in the vulnerability of thought and action.

Keys isn’t a flashy album. Its songs tend towards the quiet end of things, and they make their impact in an unassuming way that never shakes you by the shoulder. It’s just two people playing two instruments, alike but different, listening to the way they align and contrast with one another and taking the tune to another place.

The second disc, the one with the covers, is a revelation of sorts. ... Not all of the covers add as much to the material, but there’s lots to admire in Courtney Barnett and Vagabond’s raw-boned “Don’t Do It,” and Big Red Machine’s rushing, blues-twanging, falsetto’d version of “A Crime.” One of the best, though, for its sheer audacity and difference from the source, is IDLES’ take on “Peace Signs.”

They’ve never interacted quite like this, and the results are correspondingly different from anything else they’ve done. ... Clocking in at just half an hour, Made Out Of Sound makes its points and moves on.

Whereas [Michael] Hurley tends toward the absurd, often pushing the limits of song structure in the process, Rose always has one foot planted in tradition. Although not always the same one.

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.

Dry Cleaning gave us a taste in 2019; New Long Leg is a banquet upon which to feast.

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

A juicy amalgam of West African rhythms and soothing electronic sounds.

An album of subtle yet emotionally resonant songs.

Both weird and wonderful, Pick a Day to Die manages to boil down the immensity of Sunburned’s oeuvre into a manageable morsel that is digestible by both neophytes and long haulers alike.

There are plenty of moments among these 15 songs that are devastating in a way that’s unique to Xiu Xiu, but also moments that leave me frustrated and baffled. Essentially it’s business as usual for this brilliant yet confounding band. They challenge you to turn away, yet reward the brave and patient listener with flashes of startling beauty.