Dawson doesn’t obscure his political predispositions, which are quite understood on tracks such as “Civil Servant” & “Fulfilment Centre,” for example. But 2020 is far from a soapbox, despite being clearly inflected by contemporary anxieties. Dawson’s characters speak for themselves through their lived experience.

Finding new ways to speak old truths. I think that’s why we may be here. I think that’s what Phil and Julie find as they wing and waver their voices around the songs of Lost Wisdom pt. 2.

With a less captivating vocalist, this kind of genre-hopping might have felt inconsistent, a potpourri in constant motion, too scattered to register an impact. But Polachek’s range, her penchant for leaving her gasps and deep breaths in her vocal tracks, her carefully thought-over phrasing — these tie Pang together into one very earwormy book of spells.

The 10 selections are less a swirling cacophonous summation of Purgas and Ginzburg’s documents thus far than a series of muted, disorganized footnotes. They step out and freeze like models on a runway at a pace both deliberate and seemingly tentative. ... Most vitally, Blossoms is Emptyset continuing to do uncompromising, restless Emptyset, with no sign of stagnation (even if this very phenomenon continues to be a crucial aspect of their sound).

There is a true communion with the brimmed-over melodies and rhythms, but a desperation that seems to know solemn silence isn’t what’s left over. Often, the listen feels like an impossible reprieve in a crumbling structure, with a rich echo helping to sell you on your own resolve. Not unlike love itself, it is a riveting, wrenching, and absurdly rewarding experience.

It’s a party album, which means it’s utopian. It’s a solo album, which means it’s rebooting. “Next Level Charli” doesn’t sound like a version we’ve never heard before; it sounds like the very same, not even accelerated but integrated, at 100% synchronization rate.

It’s comprised largely of several years of demos and “field recordings” and collected samples and experiments and improvisations. Perhaps that’s why it feels so novel at the precipice of a new decade; after 10(+) years of failed political experiments and improvisations, here’s a new songbook stripped of the arrogance and pretense of capitalist evangelism.

As a propulsive work, fueled by immediacy and intensity, Devour rejects the attempt to escape the body through the gear-consumed noise fetishist.

These songs won’t necessarily get stuck in your head, but the swerving asymmetry to C’est ça has you clinging to these hooks like handles on a speeding train.

Guitarist Cassie Ramone and bassist Katy Goodman haven’t tweaked much of their fast-paced and fuzz-caked formula this time around, but they’ve certainly refined the hell out of it. Never has the band sounded so imposing in a studio setting, reining their once-uncontainable feedback into a beefy wall of sound.

All My Heroes Are Cornballs serves as an electronic manifesto for his fans, guerilla warfare of the auditory kind. Umberto Eco would be proud.

In House of Sugar, Alex Giannascoli relinquishes the ownership in authorship, providing a venue for those voices that regale him to decompress, elongate, saunter. It is roomy in House of Sugar, where possession recedes into usufruct.

The Center Won’t Hold is what most respected musicologists would term a “good album with some great songs.”

Days of the Bagnold Summer plays like a b-sides compilation with a few cuts worth revisiting. Like the Storytelling OST, this one’s strictly for the heads.

There’s little apparent by way of concept, lyrical wit, and aesthetic quirk — qualities that illuminate the work of many of Duterte’s colleagues — but ambience, style, and ingenuity are well at work, making the album a vibe-y classic worth hanging onto.

Overall, Venus in Leo deviates minimally, fearful of letting light shine in, but the moods it creates shimmer with a gorgeous, melancholic atmosphere.

Equivalents is similar to a lot of the post-Coast/Range/Arc material, but decidedly reduced. The faint stuttering high organ sounds that pepper the opener feel curiously threadbare, with none of that contented percussive effervescence swimming up to give it any harmonic sweep.

As dub creates stripped canvases to then be used to host further expressions, so do these versions. They encourage engagement and further remixing by projecting the past and present into an unknown future.

The Flower and the Vessel is etymological in the magical realist sense. It traces language as a memory.

Surprisingly, it’s far more tuneful than her previous release, ALL BITCHES DIE, and yet arguably even less listenable. ... Her voice is an astonishing instrument, moving from operatic fullness to hyperventilating shredded shrieks, but always foregrounding intelligibility.

This is music for that, a form of attention, a voice answering a voice.

Bandana continues a conversation not only between eras and between styles, but also between Freddie Gibbs and Madlib, both of whom continue to carve a path wholly their own — with little regard for what lays outside of it.

Cantu-Ledesma’s ensemble (that’s 11 in total, including greats like Mary Lattimore, JAB, and Roger Tellier Craig) achieve an elegant cascade here that’s more stoicism than stupor and more calm than stagnancy.

With Sarah Davachi’s baroque venture on Pale Bloom into the sensuous folds of light blooming into light, one can hear unfolding this always light and lightness.

black midi aim to dazzle and perform, and with Schlagenheim, their mammoth ideations never cease to thrill, the product of a boundless creative spirit and unwavering techni

Rap is an extrovert’s game, but the dynamism that Megan possesses is nearly unmatched. Her verses are absolutely electrifying, packing the heat she sponged up from her favorites like UGK, Project Pat, and Trina. Sprinkle a little Memphis here, some Miami bass there, and a bit of Houston swagger, and it’s a chemistry experiment gone horribly right.

YG’s songs about women are just clumsy from a basic storytelling standpoint, rehashing the same clichés that you’d find on a Hotep Facebook group. It stunts the flow of 4REAL 4REAL. ... But while he oftentimes plays the role of hyper-masculine rapper, he also defines his anxiety in deeply traumatic and thorough ways. He has a knack for boisterous exuberance, stressing the finer things while being relatable to regular people on every block in every town.

Dedicated isn’t a perfect album--it’s overlong and occasionally concedes too much to chart tastes to be interesting. But by the time Jepsen takes a bow following bonus track “Party For One,” you’re reminded once again of her generosity, of all the space she’s cleared for strength and weakness, for personal epiphanies and communal release.

His arrangements stay wondrous as usual, carrying a gravitas that hasn’t been present in his recent creative (see: non-musical) work.

Here Comes the Cowboy sounds awfully similar to 1973’s Hosono House. But there’s a lack. Maybe it’s the dynamism displayed on Hosono’s debut that makes it so intrinsically enthralling, but on Here Comes the Cowboy, the whole thing feels more like American gaijin vs. Japanese cowboy copypasta.

Titanic Rising is even more accomplished than putting Mering’s state of grace to music; with her 70s-inflected approach to songwriting, she succeeds in nothing less than recalibrating time.

It’s a good album. ... It’s a lusher, synthy, melodramatically gothy version of Tamaryn’s sound. More Soft Cell, less Chapterhouse.

This recording renders music back into its essence, that language that, instead of communicating meanings, is, as Adorno has it, the human attempt, doomed as ever, to name the Name, which has been dispersed.

Like a stew, this album takes energies and flavors from its components, each contribution blending and acquiring the vibrations of everything around it. The songs reverberate, flow into one another, sooth and intrigue.

Marrying the weight of her subject matter and boundless ideas into such a light and airy form can sometimes yield lopsided results. But given enough space, Lafawndah can truly soar.

When I listen to this, when it hits me when I’m living or trying to be with others, or trying to be with myself, or trying, it is all I need.

Plastic Anniversary is unfamiliar, strange, unsettling, and wonderful.

Ultimately, that’s what it all comes down to: not necessarily violence, but feeling. That feeling when a tune hits you right in the chest, connects to you in a visceral way, spreading bubbles across your skin like spilt champagne. That feeling, so brilliantly conveyed by AJ Tracey on this album, of no longer just surviving but actually living.

No question, This Is How You Smile is a love album, a happy album in spite of everything and anything else. It’s there in the title. Instructions for sanity and joy can be simple to follow. Roberto Carlos Lange seems to have it figured out.

The handful of atmospheric pieces on Careful don’t necessarily contribute but do nod to the filmic quality of Boy Harsher’s work. But where the adjective “cinematic” is usually an upsell these days of “boring,” Boy Harsher have a gift at conjuring visceral emotions with subtlety.

This is digital automation entering the flow of the socio-linguistic, or stark outlooks amidst techno-financial mind-control. This is the sound of a colorless decline.

Despite the flying dog daydream that inspired the record, Cabral often underlines the more fantastical elements of her work with a deep sense of melancholy.

Despite its prickly sonics and inaccessible veneer, Isa takes recourse to a privilege of gratuitous futurity, a privilege its cold sheen blinds itself from registering.

thank u, next builds on Sweetener by switching modes of scale. It’s less about looking at the world than being by yourself, more focused on the textures of memory than our actions stemming from it. ... thank u, next is also Ariana’s most stunning vocal album.

The melodies don’t propel; they put buffers and stopgaps between other moments of intense sound design. Like a luxury car at a car show, they exude and ooze sleekness and velocity. But hidden within that is a terror: the terror of being surveilled, minute by minute, devoid of ontological access to the eternal or the metaphysical.

For going on 20 years, when Xiu Xiu have put out an album, it’s one of that year’s best. It’s no small thrill to see this trend continue.

The elusive details in the songs here are what bring me back, haunted.

What Chaos Is Imaginary serves as an important document of the Girlpool narrative: a juncture in the band’s career that highlights the emotional (and in Tucker’s case, physical) changes its artists are reckoning with as their success grows in the indie community.

Assume Form, at its center, feels like genre gloop spread over toast: good but too-easily digested. Sometimes it cloys. Sometimes it gets you through the day.

He might not be making sounds for fighting the many injustices of our current place and time, but Unseen in Between is nonetheless a solid compatriot against the confounding effect of going forward among them.

Like ghosts that don’t know they’re dead, the songs on Deerhunter’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? wander about in a well-produced limbo almost in mourning for the death they can’t die. But they don’t know it, so--and this is the saddest part about it--they become what they deplore, all loss glossed over.

For all its signs of progression, the record is never heavy-handed with its ambition. Its unforced attempt at making sense of the fraught present, at finding shelter without resorting to convenient escape, is a rare and, dare I say, sincere feat.

It is a strange softness that contains all in a luminescence that exceeds it.

Eden’s greatest asset is cupcakKe’s domineering voice; she wields hooks that effectively complement her verses and maintains a flow that not only justifies but also elevates her puerile sense of humor.

Ultimately, despite Gainsborough’s troubling of dance, of the physical, of expectations, the most successful (and most fascinating) tracks are those that engage with the dancefloor, or at least with rhythm, rather than do away with it completely.

Even if it frontloads the strongest and newest material, Black Velvet provides a largely engaging second side. The one exception being his cover of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” originally released as a single in 2011, which feels somehow more gimmicky than the (solid, even if it highlights how cloying Cobain’s lyrics could be) Nirvana cover preceding it.

Stadium here is an exposition of time, in this stadion, this measureless measure, or rather, time is here exposed.

Allways, then, is simply a welcome return from one of Chicago’s most consistent artists, reaffirming their primacy among contemporary exploratory rock bands.

It represents an astounding step forward in its scope and ambition. The claustrophobia of Loud City Song and the self-imposed aesthetic limitations of Have You in My Wilderness have given way to wide-screen, exploratory, celebratory triumph.

As gorgeous and misstep-free as it is, the soundtrack risks a bit of that souvenir, collector’s item feel native to score-based soundtracks. That being said, it’s nowhere near as padded-out as those typically are. While melodies and tones recur, track to track, it plays out with an ear toward immersion.

Maybe Warzone is better understood as a deep-cut career retrospective than a singular album. Despite its stylistic consistency, the record is uneven and only its closing track, a reworking of “Imagine,” will ring any bells to those casually familiar with Ono’s work.

An architecture of mediated sound is being built here, flecked with the indelible traces of the locations, communities, and forms of feeling contained in the music. And, importantly, the process of this construction is suffused with joy, with the afterglow of countless nights remembered and forgotten.

The album’s second half becomes noticeably more lo-fi as it draws to a close, with the band laying down instrumental nebulas into which Vile allows his voice to languidly recline. It’s a hazy ending to a bear of an album, but one that rewards those who stuck with it through the 80 or so minutes.

This is remarkable music that proves the expansive possibilities present in one note. It feels symmetrical, but it’s not; it feels additive, but it’s not. Instead, Barbieri coaxes provocative, varied textures and melodies out of the continuous electric field generated by her synthesizer, and in doing so, she has made a drone record that feels very much alive.

Mother of My Children is, generously and radically, an attempt to reconcile an identity with a universe.

It is an album of specks dancing in the dust in an amorphous bubble of babble and bawling thoughts, yearning to be unthought.

Another Life, chameleonic as it is demonic, aggregates its influences and kaleidoscopes them into earworming shards of electronic puncta, a diabolical mimesis whose loathsome grin belies its functionality as dance music.

At 35 minutes, Room 25 is more of a mission statement than a treatise on Noname’s self-examination. Its 11 songs leave us wanting more.

They’ve left the cutting edge musically, which can have valuable results, but here it feels ambivalent and a little tidy.

It sits in the top tier with other indie folk/rock live albums, like Bill Callahan’s Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, Ryan Adams’s Live at Carnegie Hall (the full version), the Elliott Smith bootleg Live at Studion, and, of course, Kozelek’s Live at Biko. But there’s something worthwhile about these albums that goes beyond their technical mastery and the songs they contain.

Serenity and temperance are peculiar words to use in praise of popular music, yet these are In Another Life’s most appealing features. Its greatest achievement entails the mindset it creates and invites the listener into, as the LP humbly ventures into well-tread musical territories.

With Moon 2, Ava Luna modestly succeed along the same rubric that we apply when we listen to Steely Dan or Daft Punk: the result is impressive, pleasant, and inventive, but ultimately feels too insubstantial for us to garner much from it.

Since half of experiencing Tangerine Reef comes from experiencing the visuals it accompanies, it’s hard for me to really vibe with this album as a complete thing. Really it feels less than that, like a side table, a bed frame, or a pierced hole in an ear with no earring in it.

Bowie’s only consistent trajectory has been one of tearing down his mythos even as his builds it, and his latest manages to knock down yet another wall as he steps more fully into the light than he’s ever dared tread before. On Safe in the Hands of Love, Yves Tumor isn’t concerned with being “experimental;” he’s simply concerned with being.

Perhaps Negro Swan is merely a step along the way, as Blood Orange continues to contend with monolithic, difficult ideas, but for now, this patchwork of sweltering grooves, amicable conversations, and urban ambience remains limited in its vision.

While James is here less austere than on Cheetah EP and less eccentric than on landmark release Richard D. James Album, Collapse nevertheless proves to be a serviceable Aphex Twin release at this point in his career. His knack for finding interesting textures and layers hasn’t been compromised nor has his willingness to build off of previous styles in his oeuvre.

That Body ends so softly is itself a brilliant resolution, even though its obvious contrast with its first notes is more clever than I care.

One of the most masterful things about the album is the way it flows, highlighting fugitive detail the way clothing highlights body parts, abandoning the traditional ups and downs of verse/chorus structure. Double Negative owes this poise to its intentional construction--a collaboration and a transferring of creative heft

A big album, grandly ambitious and sonically expansive.

The Morning Star is both an Exaltation of the Guitar and a magician’s vanishing act: Bachman himself, noise-man under the role of hypnotist, embracing chance and slippages and sloppiness and draperies.

However, palpable in the sound of hej! is the plastic production that in most PC Music releases obscures what severs real from virtual, superficial from sincere, instead exposing that the uncanny excess of the latter grounds the former’s dominion in our minds.

On the whole, Imitation is self-consciously danceable and overconfidently messy. It’s restless music for restless people, and while it entertains plenty for stretches, it doesn’t quite hold the focus that a 40-minute collection of songs demands.

EPHEM:ERA cheats our trained cognition and creates a space for itself, playing with our restless thirst for difference, working itself into the gaps in our memory.

Death Lust expands post-hardcore and its asphyxiating spatializations, giving the genre and the sweaty people in it room to breathe. Reinvigorated by this pneumatic procedure, respiration transpires: Chastity’s pulmonary labor sets the stifling structures of headphone listening alight, giving us light and letting us (mired in the heavy) feel light.

A Broke Moon Rises isn’t pastoral like Bon Iver, and it doesn’t trade in the woe, guts, and glory of an Explosions in the Sky. It’s folk rock as an aging human in all its requisite fallibility and disgrace, pushing through torrents of doubt and disillusionment to a place where their essential spirit can take wing.

The sound of loving is consistent, even as it appears in radically different instances. The mechanism of love song fits all bodies, all modes. It lands on ears, it laps and licks and it does no harm.

Be the Cowboy is about capriciousness, denying the contrivances of beauty in some ways while bending to its standards in others. She’s walking the divide between love and heartache, between dejection and fury. But Miyawaki has the talent to straddle that line with poise and aplomb; she’s the geyser and also the slow dancer. She’s singing for herself, but also for her audience. There’s a little Mitski in us all, pilgrim.

This is the sound of a thin stench of burning bone coming from a kebab shop’s dumpster.

Eight of the twelve tracks here surpass a four-minute run time and few would sound as good on a dancefloor as they do on a laptop. So to ask the audience to remain patient for the record’s 55 minutes proves a tall order, especially for music as subdued as this. Still, Weatherall demonstrates an indisputable talent for compiling and arranging a diverse array of sounds into one cohesive song on Family Portrait.

Gate of Grief puts the band back on the map, and while it sometimes stumbles, it nevertheless continues to slink around in the shadows, cackling.

Love is Dead is formally earnest and it succumbs as a product of its (unearnest) production, an art of sincerity lost underneath. Love is Dead, damnably, is sincerity in place of irony, which is to say sincerity outside irony. It has no world to tease of tense.

A bit more laidback than its predecessors and encapsulated by exotic shades, Across the Meridian sits somewhere between Les Baxter’s lovable cheese, the playful ingenuity of Pierre Bastien, and the more twisted corners of a 1970s European TV station library music.

Soil is a crucial psalm; crucial for its queerness, crucial for its catholicism, its pagan roots protruding into sidewalks, crucial for its purity of heart, crucial for how it avoids imperative, softly chiming.

Rausch is a portrait of nature as the birthplace of modernity, and the birthplace of modernity is here.

Semblance’s rigorous and inventive improvisations attempt to bring synth music up to date, despite the unavoidable cultural allusions that threaten to render it an ironic pastiche.

Although disintegration’s reach is far, infinite abandonment, even imagined, can’t be contained, but it can be uttered in a cry. All vibrantly tactile, this realization that it took self to cry for a self with which you’re now commingled in song.

The live shows Body/Head have done in the interim, where much of the material comprising The Switch sprang from, seems to’ve helped them nail down a more cohesive approach. It’s still wide open, drifting music, but with a relative brevity that helps it lodge more with the listener as an album.

Lamp Lit Prose is a quiet retreat into the confines of basic rock and pop trappings--perhaps not an unpredictable stepping stone in the group’s career, but certainly not unwelcome either.