A New Way... didn't need reinforcements, and taking in all 14 tracks in succession can be tough going, but a little bit of overkill doesn't dull the bracing energy of Orcutt's kinetic, four-string idioglossia.

While the bossa nova drum machine on “All the Things You Do” and the scratchy funk guitars on “Pyramid Schemes” introduce a bit of welcome variety, both songs wear out their welcome over the course of their combined 10-minute runtime. Thankfully, “Solarised” takes the album out on a high with its swooshing synth pads underpinned by a hard-grooving bassline and soaring vocal melody. It’s a fitting close to a vibrant collection of tunes.

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.

Hey Panda is a rich, meaty stew combining all of O’Hagan’s influences and several sides of his persona: it’s witty, wise, humorous, quirky and adventurous. Often, it’s all these things at the same time.

He sacrifices none of his newfound momentum on the fantastic Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, his sharpest, wittiest, most resolute album in over a decade.

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.

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.

If you don’t already have this material and you have any interest in either Miles or Coltrane, you will not be bummed if you unwrap this set at your next birthday. But that first if is a big one. Between outright bootlegs and Scandinavian labels that have had no problems getting their wares into American record stores during decades where there were a lot more of them around, the bulk of this set has been heard before.

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.

The looping phrases of Reward are carefully considered and joined with the precision of mortise and tenon. Her songs have always been like small rooms, though they are no longer drafty and rustic. This is a record of tidy natural sounds. They are not immediately inviting, yet spending time in these well-mannered spaces becomes a pleasure.

These songs are like aloe vera and St. John’s wort, all natural and healing. Though none of them are exactly happy, you find yourself relaxing into them, letting things go, breathing deeper and feeling measurably more able to go on with whatever’s next. ... It’s going to be one of the best records of 2021.

As with many works that get tagged as major breaks from an artist’s established work, truthfully much of Too Bright still feels very much like the work of the Perfume Genius, and anyone looking for more of what they got from past albums will be very satisfied.

Fans will consider the show essential for its historical significance and the quality of the setlist, but the album’s energy pushes it beyond a completist live album, making Live in Brooklyn 2011 a wonderful cap to one of experimental rock’s greatest discographies.

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.

If he's not making his most important works of his career, it may well be his best.

The mix of autobiographical honesty and imaginative construction elevates Purple Mountains to something more than just Berman’s breakup album or musical therapy session. It relieves the emotions it develops, making the album a stunning achievement even more than a welcome return for Berman.

Despite a 100% turnover in accompanists and recording locations from his William Tyler-produced debut, he doesn’t sound terribly different here. His big, distinctive voice can hold you via sheer volume and timbre even if you don’t listen to a word he says, and his robustly picked electric guitar is a band by itself.

Even the wordless tracks on Arca are among the producer’s most powerful vignettes.

A pleasantly lush album that may be his finest work yet.

Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline is a return to the same blissful twilight as before, virtually unpaused.

However great the merits of their debut might be, one can’t help but feel that there’s something just a little too perfect about Franz Ferdinand, as though they had planned out hipster world-domination around a scientifically constructed chart of "what’s hot and what’s not."

Her performance reinforces the thrust towards freedom that shows up in the other songs. She isn’t just playing with the women and men in the band; she’s rising above them, flying high and alone in the blue.

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.

It's a gorgeous and dreamy feeling, and one that's easy to spend a lot of time in.

At just 37 minutes, World Music is wisely edited--most of the songs hover around the 3-minute mark, so they speak their piece and move on before you get tempted to start peeling apart the layers to see what they're really made of.

Neon Bible is so successful because it showcases big ambition without ignoring the small things.

Almost classically psychedelic at times, with the overdriven saturation of too much light, motion and volume applied to every aspect of the music, this ensemble... represents the best of gritty, pre-funk groove music, Day-Glo popcorn cooking in gasoline, rattling like a machine gun.

She hasn’t lost anything, just slipped her message into an unusually sleek, attractive covering where we might not have been looking for it.