Compared to her two previous releases, Barwick's songs on The Magic Place are much longer and more layered, with a greater diversity of textures and instrumentation.

This album has the power to make you feel uncomfortable enough to look away from yourself, which isn’t easy.

Compton itself is a part of this little something too, because even though it fails to make a clear artistic statement, it houses some of the finest hip-hop production Dre has turned in for years, and proves that the city has much more going for it than just a bad reputation.

Puff doesn’t grab your attention directly. Rather, it occupies your subconscious, leaving vestiges of melodies and lyrics behind that lie dormant for stretches of time, resurfacing intermittently and maddeningly.

Parquet Courts are confessing to their own messiness and, in doing so, have delivered their most fully realized project to date: a disillusioned work whose allure reaches far beyond the instruments being strummed on it.

Simply put and strongly stated, King of Jeans goes beyond charting Pissed Jeans’ position as the Deans of Denim--it places them front and center as one of the best and most ferocious guitar bands out there.

What’s particularly exciting about this disc is the possibility that lies in Gunn’s interleaving of timeless songs and allover “time”--few of his influences and even fewer of his peers have searched in this direction.

Xe is a complete ecstatic experience itself as well as a dynamic text that reflects (on) these structural limitations that we employ in making sense of experience.

The album’s subtlety and abstract tendencies prevent it from becoming solely a work of stock collage or pastiche appropriation.

By focusing on his aesthetic and retaining an interest in the possibilities that exist within slow music while setting himself time limitations, Porter has created a record that is as bold and as breathtaking as we might have ever hoped for, regardless of the projection it is set to generate.

Although you'd be hard pressed, but very pleased, to find a shindig entirely amenable to FlyLo's relentlessly eccentric experiments, Pattern+Grid World is certainly more pillow fight than lounge party.

Define artistic success as you will, but it’s beyond question that Mount Kimbie have here translated, and therefore transmitted, an entire state of being.

With nary an aural step forward from their hitherto records, Painted Ruins ends much in the same way it begins, not with a bang, but with a drone.

For the Ghosts Within provides another oddly-shaped window into the labyrinthine mind of Robert Wyatt, nearly as vital in its own way as Shleep or Rock Bottom.

De-Loused in the Comatorium is a very strong debut album for the Mars Volta.

By making concessions to clarity, Blank Realm have only amplified their inherent weirdness. As such, this thing is a fucking kick in the pants.

On Sauna, Elverum’s attempts to mimic heavy metal rock ballads, Tim Hecker, and certain so-called “holy” and unholy minimalists alike, feel inconsequential and compositionally uninteresting. That’s not to say that every citation falls flat.

Overgrown is a remarkable effort from an artist who continues to do things his own way, regardless of the consequences.

Thee Oh Sees are keen students of both the restrictions and liberations of rock music, and therefore continue to thrive with the glad clutter that is reinforcement over renovation of their sound.

Luckily, for most of its duration, Where You Go I Go Too manages to assimilate the more enjoyable elements of both of these alternate possibilities into a seamless and engaging whole, with only a few moments of awkward uncertainty.

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.

They go out not with a bang or a whimper, but with a wide-eyed and confident work tinged with sadness, knowing they were part of something truly unique and amazing that met an untimely end.

Cut the World may not be essential Antony and the Johnsons, but it's a recapitulant compilation of some of their strongest songs, in some of their strongest iterations, while presenting stimulating ideas for reconsidering their music and our own planet.

Melodies are practically nonexistent, leaving the music almost completely ignorable.

It's business as usual, but there is not a damn thing wrong with that when it comes to this group.

There is a generative sense of the perpetual "to be continued" and "to be announced" in both the projects of Benjamin and Torontonian songwriter Sandro Perri.

What’s impressive about this broadening and deepening of their thematic coverage is that it’s been achieved with only a few subtle adjustments to their sound, making it seem like the product of a very organic and irresistible evolution from the days when they were playing with Mats Gustafsson and Ken Vandermark.

The songs of his that have stood out most are the ones that at least try to meet the listener halfway, the ones that betray the deep-seeded enthusiasm underlying Vile’s laid-back, stoner(-esque — he’s a family guy, now) cool. While such material can still be found on Wakin on a Pretty Daze, locating it is becoming more and more of a chore.