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 work is too much for casual listening, and it refuses to be background music. And so, perhaps live performance is the most appropriate setting. This double disc captures both the awkwardness of performing such inward-looking material and the communion this sort of sharing carves out. Elverum’s lyrics are searing in their specificity.

Their exploration of the genre's boundaries is so lithe and confident, and their studied aloofness here so convincing, that the familiarity comes across as authenticity and the restless impulse for expansion feels, at times, transcendent.

Forster produces some of the most direct and affecting songs of his singular career. ... Forster’s observational directness and simple language are always in service to the deep feeling in his songs and few better imbue the quotidian joys of domestic life and the power of memory with such poetry.

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.

A chilly, deliberately off-putting, but deeply fascinating record.

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.

Perhaps the best thing about The Lemon of Pink is that it possesses a cohesion that its predecessor, even at its frequent best, still somehow lacked.

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.

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.

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

David ain't the kind of thing you want to hear every day, but it's the kind of thing someone is going to play every day for a month. Or months. Whatever it takes to come back to life.

Lost in the Dream continues Slave Ambient’s trajectory, threading wispy, half-spoken melodies through emerald forests of tone, ducking conventions like riff and hook in favor of edgeless, shapeless sensuality. These are songs that drive off into dune-like landscapes, always in motion, never arriving.

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

The Underside of Power is even more powerful than Algiers’ debut, starker, more violent and yet leavened with an uplifting surge of gospel.

Gold Record is honest in its own fanciful way, proving that not everything has to be literal fact to be true, and not everything needs to have a physical presence to be real.

The breadth of imagination, experimentation and diversity on display across these four sides of vinyl is nearly unparalleled in modern non-compositional music... With this record, Dilloway secures his place as one of the great solo figures of modern noise.

The record is energetic and often rollicking. Paternoster’s singing and intense guitar antics are center stage, but her longtime bandmates King Mike (bass) and Jarrett Dougherty (drums) are essential to the band’s potent combination of groove and snarl.

Haw is, likewise, bristly, indelicate, often beautiful but never precious. It bursts with life.

Sometimes it seems almost sleight-of-hand that any music could have so much going on and yet be so spacious.

It’s the kind of album you can listen to many times without wearing it out, without even getting much of a grip on why you like it.

Akinmusire easily trumps Truffaz in the area of technical skill. His agile delivery and rounded, even-tempered tone recall facets of Kenny Dorham and Dennis Gonzalez in terms of burnished beauty and melodic alacrity.

Shaking The Habitual is quite simply a triumph, a bold and experimental statement.

Bootleggers will tell you that there are better versions of almost anything Neil Young puts out, and maybe they’re right, but that doesn’t matter much when this record’s playing. Because nude, even if you see some flaws, you’re not going to care because they’re dressed just right for love. You might love them even more for imperfections like the disarmingly stoned giggle at the start of “Hawaii.”

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.

Though short, The Window Is the Dream is a perfectly formed and bewitching album that offers both immediate gratification through its measured performances, plus plenty of depths to explore as its themes gradually reveal themselves. This one will be sure to feature highly come the end of the year.

Rather than back down from the precipice of decline and confusion, Protomartyr has reported the situation as they see it in The Agent Intellect, an uncomfortable, honest and ultimately excellent record.

If Rook is as ambitious as they feel they can be without adding excess, then that's a good tradeoff, but their sound right now fits them like a pair of shoes that are a size too small.