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.

This is an album less about immediacy and more about subtlety. It’s not rocking in any traditional sense, but it reveals itself gradually, building in complexity with each turn.

A middle-of-the-road release that, because of the context of the band's end, is the most heartbreaking release of the year so far.

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.

The bad news is that Tears isn’t as gripping as Kingdom’s earlier work (notably 2013’s Vertical XL). Tears sacrifices the ping-pong polyrhythmic beats that made his earlier material so compelling and replaces it with something simpler.

At its best, ISAM enters the realm of pure abstraction without losing its sense of purpose.

Using a combination of brilliant textures and powerful, atypical chord progressions, Mogwai paint a picture equivalent to an auto-stereogram, popularized in those Magic Eye books 15 years ago. You almost need to loose your focus to let the music really sink in.

It’s a trippy album, but it doesn’t trip into too many psych clichés, or perhaps it has fooled me simply by tumbling into all of them.

Rosie Thomas is just a little too ordinary.

Stridulum was just a warm-up for Conatus, giving Zola Jesus the opportunity to gain confidence in traditional song forms so that she could burst out with a compositionally and emotionally varied set next time out.

Talbot Tagora are the latest Left Coast noisemakers to keep your eye on.

For this record, the Brewises again borrow generously from late-60s and early-70s psychedelic rock (not to mention the first British Invasion), all pervasive vocal harmonies, whining guitar tones, bouncing bass, and crisp, dampened drumming.

More or less adapting his own approach to sound with the sonic atmosphere and materials provided to him by the filmmakers, he managed to create a work that, guided by their vision, ties a satisfying knot between the two disparate ends of his catalog. Lacking the singularly textual and conceptual punch of his recent work, it’s both a practice in versatility and a sign that there’s still something of an enigma to Oneohtrix Point Never after all these years.

All this studious box-ticking and attention-to-detail comes at a price, which is that II becomes more of a tribute to the music of yesteryear than, say, a work of art that’s relevant to the world surrounding it.

Life is Sweet! depicts a gifted artist taking a very solid step on the road to self-discovery. He's just wrestling with the palpable anxiety of influence at the moment.

The result is an experimental pop album that's easy to appreciate, but difficult to fully connect with.

The shift in styles more readily exposes the band's strengths and weaknesses.

Every strong point is matched by a weaker one, but there is never an extremity of either.

It's a solid reminder that it's tough to grow your rock up, but worth working toward, and Fantastic Explanations is a solid record demonstrating the results.

All these flowery production choices can at times be quite seductive, despite the glaring mishandling of the vocals astride them.

The album may sprawl too widely, but its second disc makes a strong argument for the continuity and self-awareness of the whole package.

You can hear him trying to figure things out, and that’s the most lasting and vital aspect of New Moon.

Cowboy Worship isn’t a cohesive work the way Love was, despite its material actually being a bit more polished in places. But hey, for an EP, this is almost 30 minutes of good-to-great music, and that’s more than you get from a lot of LPs these day.

A little more feeling would have gone a long way towards elevating The Camel’s Back into memorable territory. As it stands, whatever magic the album might have mustered has been smothered in the womb.

There's nothing here that so sheerly encompasses the tragi-gorgeous indie nexus as earlier tunes "Already Over" or "Spectator and Pupil," though "When To Let Go" comes close.

You could diagnose I, Gemini as a frustrating text, a scattershot indulgence that only occasionally succeeds as a collection of songs: it is.

The result is a piece of art that had too much pressure ascribed to it, that found its creators trying too hard to make a masterpiece when they could have followed a more natural progression.

Yet if “Shattered” and follow-up “Guaranteed Struggle” are Dälek at their cacophonous and incensed best, subsequent tracks like “Masked Laughter (Nothing’s Left)” and “6dB” reveal a band cultivating a lighter, more introspective side.