In some ways The Waiting Room is remarkable for hitting a number of classic Tindersticks checkmarks without ever feeling like it’s, well, going down a list checking them off.

Mark Sultan breathes fire into genres that, in most hands, only gather dust.

The album isn’t easily chewed or digested, but certainly worth the taste.

While Lenker included a couple of songs on abysskiss that were later reworked as full-band songs on the masterful U.F.O.F. (“Terminal Paradise” and “From”), here the acoustic version sounds like a step backward and doesn’t feel like it belongs, especially given this album’s 45-minute runtime. Nonetheless, there’s plenty of gorgeous material here, offering further evidence of Lenker’s subtle and surprising songwriting.

At 20 songs deep, this is a long program, but there is really no fat to trim. All of the songs are patently fleshed out, and in spite of the laundry list of ideas, it never seems claustrophobic.

To anyone enamored with the effortless elegance of Loma’s debut, some of Don’t Shy Away’s more adventurous and synth-heavy production may feel a little jarring. However, surrender to the album’s luscious sound design, emotive vocal performances and smart narrative arc and it can be just as intoxicating. As far as front-to-back album listening experiences go, it’s among the year’s best.

With Forgotten Days, the band don’t so much extend the sprawling prog-laced epics of the previous album as blend them into tighter, more direct tunes that feel very appropriate for the moods of this long, fractious year: at times ornery, restless and deeply sorrowful.

Brickbat is a worthy addition to the growing canon of bands and performers addressing the powers that be.

A record that’s wonderfully represents Clark as the songwriter he was without turning the focus to Earle and the Dukes.

It’s a fitting near-farewell for this disarmingly tender and enjoyable album.

And in the Darkness Hearts Aglow is already a formidable amalgam. It will be interesting to see where the third volume of the trilogy takes Weyes Blood.

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.

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.

The opening seven tracks on The Sun Awakens are probably the strongest sequence of songs on any Six Organs release so far.

It's just a smart encapsulation of underground dance music's better qualities, but not so showoffy that it can't work as an hourlong immersion tank.

Everything on this oddball album demands your attention, often in unexpected ways.

If you come to this record for the title, expecting rueful literacy and songwriterly self-deprecation, you might be pleasantly surprised by how hard it rocks and what an undemanding good time it can be.

Model of You is neither sparse nor overstuffed, relying on a few, highly polished elements to make up each song and allowing each of them ample space to unfold.

Emanon moves through dimensions and times with a surprising fluidity. That the album includes three discs and a graphic novel gives it unusual heft, but Shorter’s construction of the segments provides insight into his recent era, particularly stemming from 2013’s Without a Net.

African Electronic Music 1975-1982 is a deceptively smart compilation sequenced at least as well as Bebey's own albums.

Pollard’s imagistic lyrics and ragged musicality create a bridge between the mundane and the exceptional.

Her soundscapes are transportive and evocative, but they also contain detail and texture that plays with a sense of natural versus unnatural soundscapes, the real versus the imagined. Left in the between space, this is fascinating stuff.

Despite its music-geek-pleasing period references and psychedelic density, this is ultimately a frothy pop record full of hopeful love songs.

So yes, the combination of energies works as well as it ever did, a remarkable 30 years after it started. The pandemic, far from crushing the joy out, coaxes an unexpected giddiness from two lifers playing as hard as they can for the love of it.

Autobahn makes a very recognizable kind of dark, dramatic post-punk-into-new-wave music, and the easy thing would be to dismiss them as a mid-1980s knock-off. But The Moral Crossing is a very enjoyable record from a band that is already pushing the contours of its sound to find its own center.

It’s bit of a risk for Chasny to polish his sound, but he’s succeeded in bottling the imaginative, audacious overflow of his past efforts into perhaps his most cohesive record yet.

There is something very powerful about these interpretations, as Stewart and his crew cut past the elegant phrasings and the precise constructions of Simone’s songs, and expose their bruised and bleeding vulnerabilities.

I'm more than happy to take this album as it is, blemishes and all.