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

Frantic guitars, hooks that replay in your head, skeptical lust - they're all here.

Occulting Disk is not a record to approach lightly. Often it seems deliberately constructed to hold the listener at arm’s length daring one to submerge oneself in its frozen depths.

On their 21st album, Three, their usual album-length evolution is divided into three 20-minute acts, much like 2006’s excellent Chemist.

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

There is a coherent sound throughout the album––psychedelic electro-hop perhaps––while each song develops fruitfully without ever being dragged out.

Limitations can be freeing, but King Midas seems to tip-toe around a great deal of Martin’s artistic inspiration. The album successfully shows off an under-heralded side of his work, but it’s a shame that the sonic violence was deliberately repressed, rather than skillfully incorporated.

The Money Store is Death Grips's next move, and they sound surprisingly ready to engage a wider audience.

Like most bands, Girl Friday has never been crazy about genre labels, and if you asked them whether they were pop or punk or indie, they’d very likely just say yes. By sliding continually between categories, though, this band creates a very absorbing tension between what they are right now and what they might become in a measure or two. You have to pay attention. You can’t take these songs for granted.

It’s fairly impressive that Stars could make a record that comes this close to replicating its predecessor while still offering discrete pleasures of its own.

Even when Ejstes and his combo stretch out, they do so in a catchy way. Sometimes they do it the old-fashioned way with a big, memorable melody. Other times it is a cool sound framed just so.

Last time, the surprise was that after 20 years of hiatus, the band was just as good as ever. This time, they're even better, more cohesive and confident, louder and funnier, still learning from life and each other, and using that experience to create ever more compelling music.

It’s tempting to spend the whole review quoting Goulden’s best lines, but the songs are solid musically, too.

There's a bit of Starbucks gloss to this record, a too-easy-to-like quality that may at first put off serious listeners and music heads. That evaporates pretty quickly, though, as you recognize that its lucid simplicity, its artful artlessness is not a trick, but achievement.

Situated between his production for Common’s Electric Circus and Champion Sound with Madlib, the record scripts Dilla’s now triumphant escape from the majors and represents the more mercurial facet of his vision.

Everything is sharp and lucid and full of impact.

When there are fewer tracks, Anderson contrasts foreground sharpness with distant background. “House of the Setting Sun” and “Chimes” present fatigued leads pushed along by hazy, distant clouds of tone. What the new climate hasn’t changed is Anderson’s persistent restlessness, wandering off the road to find unusual details. Into the Light heads into the desert, knowing it’s hardly a deserted place.

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.

Certainly, people will inevitably point back to Mogwai's similar peak-and-valley approach, but Mono manage to make both the valleys more subtle and beautiful, and the peaks more powerful.

Virginia Wing pack a lot into their pop songs. Glowing hooks and nagging phrases continually draw you in.

The fact that Untouchable gets in and gets out in a little over a half hour adds to its classic rock ’n’ roll charms--the accomplished playing, engaging production and dizzying variety of mid-tempo reveries, adolescent rushes and inconsolable ballads boosting its overall appeal.

Seems like an uninspired continuation of last year’s Tomorrow Right Now.

Though much of Dilla’s later works were quick jots, Jay Stay Paid sounds too much like the unrevised pages of a journal.

Logos opens a portal through which its artist tells us something about who he is, and though this is not everything, it is enough.

Far from being liabilities, such disparate moments help define If… for the better: as a work that frolics in different directions without losing control or coherence.

Matmos have created a digital manifestation of their own personality, one that would be done more justice through psychoanalysis than musical description.

The roughness, the edgy vocals, the cacophonous guitars won’t be for everyone, but this set is a welcome window back through over 20 years of avant-rock.

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

He doesn’t always push far enough; the album’s best when we feel the tightwire of this experience rather than when we suspect an agnostic at play. Religious language and transcendent experience (secular or sacred, if we divide them) come loaded with danger. The more Morby pushes into that space and the more he asks of the listener, the deeper the experience.

Ethos is a different and a more complex matter. If you put out your own records and sing about leftist issues, does that make you punk? Maybe they’re trying to do something more essential, to find a version of rock that’s conscious of its History at that same time that it grounds us in the Now. Sheer Mag’s songs do that, again and again. And you’ll want to listen to them, again and again.

Out of Range is serene and difficult, trippy and literate, loosely countrified and footnote-ably dense and referential, a zone-out record with a library card. Not many albums simultaneously slow down your pulse rate and rev up your brain, but this one does.

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.

It isn’t always as loud or as exultant as her band’s output, but it is rivetingly intense, whether at full rock strength, in dance-ish, trance-ish electronic mode or at a whisper backed by a small orchestra. ... The album is simply what it is, take it or leave it, but take it. It’s magnificent.

The soundtrack is a continual blurring of boundaries. It is semi-static throughout, like much of Faure’s Requiem, severely troubled even beneath seemingly placid surfaces. This renders those points of eruption and cataclysm exponentially more powerful.

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.”

With Be Still Please... McCaughan weaves threads from all past Portastatic incarnations into one happy-sad tapestry.

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

Snaith rips the rarefied sounds of modern pop from their established context and forms nonlinear compositions constantly in flux.

Fortunately, the huge elemental diversity on G&G is more spread out than on previous efforts, leaving breathing room and allowing each well-crafted sound to sink in.

On Dragonslayer, perhaps more so than any of their previous albums, Sunset Rubdown is able to create memorable, multi-part songs that stay engaging throughout and that don’t meander aimlessly.

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.

The layers of rhythm, voice and electronics here possess the ability to tell stories, just like the novel after which they're named, and out of their conjurings emerge atmospheres and melodies that will remain in your head.

The sections of ORO are turns utilitarian and incongruously beautiful.

At nearly two hours, these two discs are an embarrassment of riches for the 65daysofstatic devotee and most likely sufficient for anyone casually interested in the band behind No Man’s Sky.

The whole album feels like catharsis, as slow dirge-y openings give way to extended instrumental crescendo, as Zedek views from a position of calm, weathered experience, distance, the roil and mess and hurt of human existence.

His creative arc reaches its most carefully detailed and elegantly pastoral on this new album.

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

The music, befitting the subject matter, is at turns somber and hopeful, developing slowly and deliberately and captivating from start to finish.

What unites the songs, if anything, is a breezy insouciance that belies careful construction. You get the sense that, like Yeats’ women, this is an album that must “labor to be beautiful.” It hides the work very well behind a sunny façade, but you don’t get movie-perfect string swells and luminous vintage keyboard lines and cheerful blurts of all-hands brass without a certain amount of forethought. Consider Collins the impresario, taking what his collaborators give him and polishing it to a high gloss.

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

His complexity comes through more clearly than ever on Alasdair Roberts, his most stripped-down solo side in years.

If another band were to serve up the fiddling strings and lollygagging vocal harmonies of “Animal Shapes,” the wanky guitar breakdowns of “The Poor, The Fair, and the Good,” perhaps Tanglewood Numbers wouldn’t feel like such a disappointment. But Berman’s a brilliant lyricist with 30 or 40 minutes to spare every couple of years, and his voice seems oddly absent from this record.

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.

To See More Light is another strong effort from Colin Stetson, and a familiar one. Should there be another entry in the New History Warfare series, Stetson would benefit from a broadening of his tactical approach.

The simplistic, drone like beats of Borders numb the mind while freeing the body, so that each track is danceable and sedating. Furthermore, the brooding, deep tone of the beats, paired with an added static charge, are sonically rich and beautiful and draw the ear in.

It may fall short a few instances, but it’s a record with genuine ingenuity.

It's dark, lovely and slow to blossom, but leaves an impression once it does.

These are not reproductions, but rather meditations that breathe and exist on their own terms.

Overall, Almanac Behind is perhaps the most successful of Bachman’s “noise records”.

The Horizon Just Laughed is less showy than the Maraqopa trilogy, but in its quiet way just as visionary and odd.

Modest reservations aside, this is more top-drawer stuff from Shauf, as we’ve come to expect. Drink deep.

Drahla clearly knows their progenitors, but one needn’t focus on this legacy when listening to angeltape. It is a singular document by a distinctive and up-and-coming group.

This is a significant step up for an already promising band. Speedy Ortiz may not be major yet, but they won’t be arcana for long.

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.

There’s actually a groove there, however, and Author & Punisher’s lot is to never give in to the base aesthetics of speed or pummel. Instead, Melk En Honing explores every corner of sub-doom tempo, with occasional detours into extreme melody and harmony buried deep enough to avoid comparison to Alice In Chains and neo-doom sweethearts Pallbearer.

The point is that new stuff is added without compromise or dilution. And listening here, you realize that change is good and maybe even necessary, no matter how much you like how Protomartyr has always sounded.

He easily sidesteps the drama that dogged he and his band throughout 2007 (and ultimately led to their declaration of hiatus towards the end of the year), turning Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel into a beautifully melancholic slice of shimmering, ambient pop.

If the DFA medium/message commands one groove rattling under a nation, Less Than Human is evidence enough that bot-genius Maclean is just the half-man needed to bang up the plumbing so that all faucets drip lightning bolts.

This Is the Kit’s new album, Careful Of Your Keepers, has a wonderfully languid, rolling, fluid quality.

There are a lot of good songs on here, to the point where the band's consistency can border on monotony.

Kill the Lights, his second full-length, follows 2016’s largely acoustic Confront the Truth and 2014’s moderately more abrasive Dissed and Dismissed and amps up the voltage somewhat, especially in the anthemic “Jasper’s Theme,” site of this disc’s best electric guitar licks.

While albums and concerts get to end, the knowledge that real lives carry on scarred by real-life tragedies like the one related make The Glowing Man a fraught record to hear.

Fennesz has produced a maximalist experience with apparently minimal equipment but this is not about the machines rather the human producing the sounds. Agora is another deep exploration of the boundaries of experimental guitar ambience in which to lose oneself.

It's many different things at once, but all of them are confident and powerful.

When it comes to the spiritual, Bad Debt is a worthy addition to a lineage that preaches the complicated records resonate strongest.

Ultimately the album adds another respectable line to The Mountain Goats' discography.

The remarkable thing about Kelley Stoltz up to now has been how seamlessly he absorbs his influences, finds their essences and out of that irreducable core makes songs that are entirely fresh and new.

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

Moor Mother, Michael Stipe, Sharon van Etten, Bon Iver, Rokia Koné, and Jeff Parker lend their talents to Oh Me Oh My, affording its arrangements and production a mutability that supports, never dilutes, Holley’s aesthetic. ... Holley without guest stars is no less compelling.

It returns to the sly humor, the hypnotic barking aggression, the occasional whiffs of wistful tune-ish-ness slipped in between robotic beats of Divide and Exit and maybe does it one better.

This compilation goes for breadth where Konono’s Congotronics went for depth.

The music doesn’t go far enough--it’s too restrained and mellow--but the point of view is crystal clear. This is alternative rock clinically perfected in a perpetual adolescence.

Engravings does find Barnes reaching new peaks, even if he’s not radically adding to his sound.

There's nothing self-consciously modern or calculated about You Are Not Alone, no visible strain from trying to mold Staples' style into something she's not. It's just her, as she is at her best, and Tweedy deserves credit for bringing that out.

In A Wonder Working Stone, Roberts continues to tinker thoughtfully with the shared tradition of the Isles, always somewhat familiar but modern and discordant enough to render pause and consideration.

Someday Everything Will Be Fine is a wrecked and wreckless antidote to a world that most definitely is not.

The album is full of the small noises and cosmic visions that encapsulate life, death, microbe and universe, a tick of time, like a chord, both stark and larger than itself, establishing and destroying its boundaries. This all-in-all unity gives the album astonishing power and a uniquely familiar beauty.

It’s not that these songs are bad, just that they sound a lot alike: elegant, chilled, full of foreboding.

Pile is a challenging band to listen to casually--but its dense, exquisitely crafted bombast pays both immediate and long-term dividends over repeated listens, as the mutated strands of their musical DNA infect and take over.

This uneven album takes time to break in, but each successive spin deepens the relationships among the songs and reveals more details.

Escovedo and Don Antonio play with that search through country, rock, cool jazz, and more, reflecting chaotic but exciting sensory experiences. The Crossing, with its big scope and questionable coherence, can be a bit much, but it’s a welcome and valuable statement from an artist capable of pulling it off.

When MF Doom takes the time to plot and scheme it, no idea is too outlandish, no beat too unorthodox, and much of MMâ?¦Food? is the work of a master chef cooking up some marvelous shit. However, masters get held to a higher standard.

It’s restlessly beautiful stuff.

The songcraft has gotten notably sharper in just two years as well, making this very much a band to enjoy now but also one to keep an eye on for later.

Although non-fans will likely continue to dismiss the band as over-the-top pop marauders, Hissing Fauna proves that there’s plenty of depth to their delirium.

[The production] intrudes on the songwriting, distracts the listener, and interferes with what are otherwise solid and sometimes deeply moving performances.

Stevens inspiration or jumping off point for The Age of Adz was outsider artist Royal Robertson, and, much like Robertson's artwork, the themes in the album vacillate between the mundane and heartfelt and surreal and grandiose.

Trapist isn't experimenting anymore; the trio is using the tools they know best to subvert nostalgia and keep you ill at ease.