The narrator’s desire for transformation reveals a hopeful, but tenuous ending to an emotionally fraught and musically ironclad journey. One wishes more concept albums were so authentic.

From free jazz to contemporary modern ensemble music, Halvorson has made thoughtful arrangements for Amaryllis. It’s great to hear her rock out too, playing with an abandon that has been simmering all along.

Harm’s Way is sharper and more exhilarating than its predecessor; it’s the same aesthetic but more clearly, exuberantly realized.

While it’s unmistakably a Mascis solo album, What Do We Do Now just stands apart from anything he’s done to date.

The Umbrellas have always offered bashed up, joyriding sweetness, but here they reach at—and intermittently attain—a Spector-esque wall of rock ‘n roll sound. Even better, that larger scale doesn’t undermine the vulnerability of their songs, but instead amplifies and clarifies it.

Compared to its predecessor, Wall of Eyes can’t help but come across as transitional. While there are some undeniably great moments, the overall experience feels a little low-stakes and disappointing.

These tunes are constructed around static, meditational sonic atmospheres that fluctuate in volume and timbre but do not fundamentally change. There’s a sense of the eternal in them, even when as in “Scarper” they twitch into propulsion with percolating electronic rhythms.

It’s a very good set of songs, sleek and wrenching at the same time.

Bertucci’s work continues to develop. Of Shadow and Substance presents two facets of “drone, dissonance, and dynamics” that speak with eloquence, treading lightly but palpably on extra-musical concerns.

I DES is an ambitious, moving work.

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

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.

It’s not an indulgent album. There’s a discipline to every song. No note sounds wasted or out of place. It so perfectly captures the spirit of those gritty 1980’s psychosexual thrillers, at once lush and foreboding.

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.

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

Over the course of Spike Field’s 50 minutes, the songs’ prevalent mood can prove hypnotic if you’re receptive to its atmosphere. MBC is certainly adept at conjuring and sustaining a melancholy, nocturnal scene.

We worship “cool” in rock and punk. We love the bands that stay unaffected behind their dark shades, from the Velvets on down. But what’s so great about this second Bar Italia album is that it shows how hard that is, and what a cost it exacts.

The Comeback Kid, is full of shimmering, ultra fanciful castles of guitar-based sound, but it’s also kind of an experimental pop gem, like Deerhoof after a month of Guitar Hero or like OOIOO any time, really.

While Jenny from Thebes is a self-proclaimed rock opera, it defies the expectations of that genre inasmuch as it’s not a sprawling, self-indulgent double album. Moreover, it stands on its own.

It is way over the top in the way that Roxy Music was, all sheen and sigh and gorgeous inertia. Romantic Music, yes, no irony there.

What makes Nothing Lasts Forever especially rewarding for fans is the emotional throughline that connects their work, album to album.

She swoops and swoons and growls like Kristin Hersh but more country, and it’s worth a listen just to hear what she’ll do next.

Irreversible Entanglements are looking forward, stepping up from the shoulders of the giants to shape a body of work that demands attention.

An album that, without lyrics, tells its stories with many voices and in a poetry that feels tangible, even as it transforms in front of us, catching more light in its sound as it blooms.

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

On first listen Halo’s compositions tend to merge into one another, a blur of impressions like looking down on a cloud dappled landscape or passing buildings through a rain smeared train window. The atmospheres are foggy, drenched but rich, infused with the apparent illogic of dreams whose significance must be pieced together with hindsight from clues obvious and obscure.

The album as a whole is more often prone to meander, as if the band gets a little lost in their new terrain, unable, at times, to bring their thought full circle.

For Mahalia, with Love, like Jesup Wagon and Lewis’s “Molecular” releases, is fairly high-concept, but the music is spunky and easy to enjoy, with plenty of groove and intensity.