There is something martial, something insistent, to Compassion. True to his aims, Barnes has created something that denies passivity.

Heavy and heartbreaking, teeming with a warm, analog energy, Snow looks backward at each defining element that made the band so memorable to begin with. But like many of the best moments, maybe you just had to be there.

Contact is aggregated purge and celebration past the self, flesh seared back and stomp soldered to somnambulism.

The Thin Black Duke is a concentrated work of beauty and malevolence that will go toe-to-toe with any other rock record released this year, and likely beyond. Oxbow can take twice as many years to make their next record, as long as it results in something this magnificent.

All the tracks here (note that it would be crude to say they were indistinguishable from one another, but keeping your eyes on the tracklisting might be a good idea) sound like they could have been made with an arsenal of sequencers and rippling arpeggiators, but it’s all the sound of one man surfing the crests of a series of pulses.

This is an album of breath and sigh, baby’s gibberish and parent’s confession. It’s also a complex and layered meditation on fatherhood and family, rich in emotion, textured and capacious; it’s a long exhale--stately, calm, joyful.

m b v is good, Slowdive is great.

The M.O. is so resolute, the beat so constant, that even after 17 years it is unimaginable to think that a new GAS album would sound like anything but this. As with the forests of Voigt’s childhood, it’s a comfort and a moment of disquiet to confront something so perpetually, hauntingly still.

The pleasures that Pleasure describes are mundane to the point of tedium, trite beyond cliché. And the music itself is, despite the strength of Feist’s voice, mostly intolerable.

The diversity of the material provides Galás with an opportunity to showcase the full range of her vocal talents.

The more populist material that makes up All the Way is stripped of any comfort such familiarity may provide by Galás’s jarring reinventions.

Climate Change is an album about nothing. It hears nothing, speaks nothing, and sees nothing. It could be about partying, but even that subject is given such perfunctory treatment that what’s left hardly rewards participation.

The songs seemed to absorb the vista, their embers sustained underneath the settling dusk.

Three months in, DAMN. feels like our first Trump-era classic. It’s as bold and as hard and as hopeful as it is bursting with vitriol. It’s as distracting as it is inciting. It’s as cohesive as it is dense.

The result is a mix that is less concept-driven and less unified under a singular identity than previous releases.

Arca suggests a sort of shift that is so well-defined, confident, significant, and grounded in the artist’s own past aesthetics that it capably reconstitutes its onlookers’ iconic definition of the artist.

As a follow-up to the massive, hypnotizing Overseas, Sorcerer is a concise distillation of Tonstartssbandht’s refreshing vision, a crystal ball portraying their intimate friendship, their cosmic noodling echoing deep into the nethersphere.

The Far Field is carried by light catharsis, diffused and mild-tempered fun, virtuosic vocal delivery, and steel-clean production.

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.

While Toxic City Music hints at alienation, it never succumbs to it.

It’s not every day (or month or year) that an album like Rosebudd’s Revenge comes along, one that packs a novel’s worth of imagery, mood, characterization, conflict and theme into practically every line; one that presents scenes so meticulously crafted they inspire us to pick up the narrative threads ourselves, to explore where they came from and try to figure out where they lead, which is always farther than the story tells.

Number 1 Angel is a maybe mixtape, sorta free, but released by a voice that’s constantly solving life’s real problems with the imagined solutions of pop music.

Pile are at their strongest when involved in slippages, designed moments of elasticity and indecision, effects incidental.

Thankfully, More Life is Drizzy’s homecoming, a vocalization of the heart in his heartless world, and a veritable return to form for it. Welcome back to the Firm.

Taken as a whole, World Eater makes a strange kind of jumbled thematic sense.

Phil presents his thoughts here with stunning candor, using just a laptop and a microphone to capture his characteristically amorphous guitar lines and thin yet comforting balm of a voice.

Kozelek spends a lot of time on Common as Light giving us his broadly “common sense” liberal pluralist live-and-let-live shtick, punctuated by grumpy bashings of “hipster” culture and its parades of regenerated tenement buildings and juice bars, music journalists, and Father John Misty, but it’s only on 10-minute opener and standout track “God Bless Ohio” that he really bares his soul.

At its best center, Infinite Worlds gives the song back to the person.