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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bringing bouts of surf twang, no-wave tangles, and chopped-up power chords, the record blurs boundaries of genre, its eighth notes alternately swung and then made straight again. The band (Todd May, Ben Lamb, Jay Gasper, George Hondroulis, Andy Harrison) shines across the changes in support of Loveless’s powerful voice.

This is one of those genre puzzles that are rewarding to anyone with an adventurous appetite, even if your bright eyes’ve never gazed anywhere but ahead.

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

In bringing to light these stillborn-again pleasures, The Caretaker reveals himself to be nothing less than formidably eponymous.

True Love Will Cast Out All Evil is a rare example of a man finding peace on record, of a long journey being rewarded with a slight glimpse of salvation.

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

It is big, but without feeling grandiose. While Everything Ecstatic was bursting at the seams, bright and flashing with cacophony, Hebden doesn't try to dazzle us with any sudden moves this time around. And the album is a joy.

Brothers is the least stuffy record The Black Keys has put out, and it's by far their strongest.

Post-Nothing is convincing in its candor to the point of exhaustion.

Chelsea Wolfe’s songs don’t often sound like they’re supposed to, and therefore they always sound exactly like Chelsea Wolfe.

There may be less surprises over its 45 minutes than over the course of earlier efforts, but Rutili’s hand for slanted folk songs that possess their own select personality is as strong as ever, and for this reason, we have at least one thing whose reality is equal to its unreal paradigm.

Kaito could be the best band in the world, but Band Red isn't the best album in the world. What it is, though, is a record that shows just how good this band can be when they get it right, even if that isn't all the time.

The fact that Venice takes a few missteps before getting into full strut inevitably takes its toll on the overall body of work.

With Christs, Redeemers, they ignite a range of complex reactions designed to inspire and to petrify, the consequences of which reveal a wholly unsettling listen.

Le Kov is not as cold as Y Dydd Olaf (which was based on a decades-old Welsh sci fi novel)--it’s less machinic and more organic, less 80s and more 70s. As such, it wavers a little, particularly in its second half, where the feel is a little too warmly indistinct, too hazy.

Although there is no absence of noise on this record, what is quieter about it gives space to hear what was always there: a fully embodied voice that, through pain as through love, ceaselessly gives only herself, an angel whose message becomes indistinguishable in grace from the messenger.

If sometimes the grandeur threatens to overwhelm, the album’s subtle gradations just as often leave me struggling to explain why exactly they make me shiver, pause, cry, or, at their most elusive, disappear.

By forging a path from hardcore punk through sludge and doom metal and influencing many others along the way, Neurosis have worn their influences on their sleeves, yet have still managed to evolve by sounding more intensely like themselves.

Nevertheless, this unsettled eclecticism notwithstanding, Fading Frontier does in fact sport some of Deerhunter’s most conventional and poppy material.

How to Dress Well has most often been described as a distorted take on R&B, and I suppose that's most accurate, too. Love Remains substantiates the hearsay with slow, soulful requiems that begin to feel like lovingly sculpted effigies of some of the genre's more immortal catalysts.

Musically, the album’s apparent incompleteness--the always dissolving lack of coherence, the mosaic of multiple voices, the chance and chaos by which the songs were arranged--abides by the peripheral pull of curiosity. ... Curiosity perforates the veil and returns, yet remains ephemeral.

Although Slime Season 2 bears a resemblance to its slimy predecessor, in that both have a jumbled track sequence and silly cover art, it does hold the notable distinction of possessing some much-needed confidence.

Together, Stetson and Neufeld have succeeded in not only melding their respective sounds, but also refining them.

Dessner, as studio ringleader, misperceives Van Etten's power as simply a matter of mounting force and so tries to buttress her performance (her personality) with all the layering clichés and atmospheric tricks in his indie rock playbook.

Blank Face is one of the strongest, most consistently enjoyable in years, even if its glossy and misanthropic merits falls just shy of GOAT status.

On his masterful third album, Actress perfects a thrilling sonic aletheia that simultaneously reveals and conceals, opens and closes, remembers and experiences anew, giving some insight into the truth of post-rave electronic music as it has developed over the past 20 years, into both frame and artwork, stage and actress.

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.

When I listen to Waxahatchee, I feel a little less strange. Less washed up.

Tears of the Valedictorian works on so many levels. It adds another hefty, colorful cornea to the Frog Eyes spazz gallery, for one. It also takes a step toward streamlining their sound, which may, in the wrong hands, be considered a faulty premise, but let me assure you, it isn’t; this recording is crystal-clear but far from diamond-decadence.

With only six tracks, Lala Belu shows that being hypnotized is what we secretly want.

Rather than slashing and burning through new territory, Chosen Lords merits attention as a charismatic history chronicling the evolution of James' musical identities.

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.

While imperfect, Now You Are One Of Us is packed with poignant ideas and disturbingly beautiful moments.

Juxtaposing foley noises, drum loops, and auxiliary click-clacking against minimalist, percussive synth lines and enormous swells of energy, the album clearly has a sonic template and a cohesion easily identifiable within the first three tracks.

The songs on Get Behind Me Satan are sturdy.

The Mouse and the Mask's downfall, though, is its excruciatingly narrow scope.

The decaying aural ellipsis felt hanging in the aether marks the dusky road of the album’s fist half. This is dark stuff, darker than our main man Hart is known for.

Those time signature-obsessed math rockers will delight in her phrasings, while those with a taste for the intimate will no doubt grimace at the hyper energy. What both of those groups are missing, however, is that one hand feeds the other. More and more, Stern seems to be getting it, too.

Exercising a more polished sound than heard on their debut Intro Bonito, which felt somewhat dinky by design--it was often centered around decisively hollow chiptune-inspired arrangements--Bonito Generation is its own self-reflective hit parade carrying with it five pre-album singles and the potential for at least a few more.

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

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.

Hardly a return to form, Researching The Blues (complete with the burp at the end of "One of the Good Ones") is nevertheless a document of a band having a good time doing what they love. When the hooks are this strong, it's hard not to have a good time with them.

It's hard to imagine The Decemberists topping such a fantastic and ambitious record, but as their previous albums show, I'm sure they'll have no problem one-upping themselves again.

Exciting things are still happening amidst routine and constancy, and sometimes submitting isn’t settling or getting saved; it’s letting yourself get moved against all odds. And that may be rock & roll’s only remaining saving grace, one that Spoon continues upholding and confronting with every album.

Abandon’s hammering slow pneumatic-drill beats are not so much an all-out assault as a grueling siege, in which the beleaguered inhabitants of the psyche find themselves starving, barely existing in a rising cesspool of their own shit and vomit, ridden with epidemic disease, turning to cannibalism and to frantic final Decameronesque debaucheries.

Public Strain feels stripped-down, simpler, and lolloping. It's not so eerie.

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

This split album breaks new ground for Akron/Family while continuing to affirm Michael Gira as a reputable singer/songwriter.

The referents on CUT 4 ME are as well-studied as they are obvious.

There is something shimmering, cold, and tender in these songs. There are also moments of rock vigor that are the flip side to folk’s gentleness (never gentility).

At its best, Burst Apart is a delicate, varied work that hints that we've only begun to see what this group is capable of.

If there's anything to lament about Avatar, it's that its moves towards accessibility, narrative, and more diverse pastures probably won't help to broaden Comets' fanbase.

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.

In a way, on Platform too, there’s just too much control on the artist’s side and not enough room for engagement on the listener end. Still, Herndon is just setting to work as a musician, and she’s already pushing her sound well beyond the experiments of the 20th-century avant-garde.

While it doesn't quite hit with the immediacy of 2008's Imperial Wax Solvent, Your Future Our Clutter has already proved to be quite the grower, with complex lyrics (Smith grappling with his recent medical issues and overall mortality) and penetrating aesthetics.

What Lopatin leaves us with is a stunning example in the evolution of an artistic premise and a flawless embodiment of emotive responses to sound, which unite here in their most fractured form: a moving stillness for the digital age.

Even with all of this depth, Push The Sky Away finds Cave doing more with less lyrically.

A hypnosis kicks in and we discover that a massive and dense album has run its hour-plus course in what felt like... two minutes? Four days?

The giant, immense void that swallows sound in Part 1 shows itself in Part 5 to be just another windmill, slain by Ambarchi’s guitar and studio magic.

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.

There are gestures in her music that are so touching, or so beautiful, they leave me dumbstruck.

Barnes and Trost may be back home from their sojourn abroad, but their music is still out on the road somewhere.

The female overcoming time and space in the way that Herndon does with Movement is so frustrating and frightening.

It's a pleasure to be embraced by a record this pretty and soulful.

It may be something of a litmus test for newer listeners due to its uncompromising severity and double-album length (I'd suggest either of the aforementioned full-lengths, which are somewhat more manageable), but longtime advocates will no doubt be pleased.

Monomania will be remembered as the album where Deerhunter veered from their carefully acquired sound as opposed to constructing a more pronounced encapsulation of it.

Although Bird certainly isn’t breaking new ground in terms of his overall sound since his last album, he has still put out another solid record chock-full of witty lyricisms and lilting melodies that do a wonderful job of showing off his oh-so-smooth voice.

By the time it comes to a close, The Books have taken us on a journey through space and time, and it's hard not to feel full, invigorated by a unique sort of listening experience that's perhaps best described by The Way Out's closing words: "And you're becoming the world and everyone in it."

The ultimate judgment of Going Places ought to be that of a great record that should and will be listened to often.

For the few of you who have not already been won over, I Learned The Hard Way will make you a convert. For everyone else, the album excitingly perpetuates Jones' reputation as one of soul's all-time greats.

Fast pacing and fragmentary delivery show how Mutant’s tracks operate as experiments in obsessive dysmorphia, taking flaws and magnifying them to scale drama, affect, and beauty out of digital refuse. Exhilarating moments are found next to tracks that only feature impact tail-ends, panned and swirled around a headspace to suspend spatiality further.

Compared to the discourse and debate surrounding the new album, the music itself is somewhat of a non-event: two epic 20-minute-long LP sides, and a 7-inch of drone tracks.

While it may lack the freshness and shock-of-the-new presented by their previous full-lengths, Key Markets marks the next logical step for the band; the sound of Sleaford Mods’ ultimate rejection.

The group used to flirt more often with jazz and electronica, but when those elements show up here, such as with the groove on “Spy” or the digital glitchy noodling on “Roots and Shooting Stars,” the flirtation falls flat; the thrill is gone. The elements that feel most familiar to the group's past sound are the elements that matter the least.

Maraqopa is a shooting star, an album bursting with presence of mind, a testimony to emotional rebirth buoyed by recurring themes of freedom and transcendence.

The highlights here are subtle, but many.

Evans has created a beguiling work born of an intensely solitary process, inviting sympathetic listeners to resonate with her private mystical revelations.

Apparently revitalized and rejuvenated after a long dead period, Built to Spill pour a glowing display of exploratory zest and energy into the confines of each YIR composition.

Islah is one of the more exciting major label rap debuts in recent years, and one positive to being a Gates fan is that you’ll most certainly never get tired with him.

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

Lacking the hooks and spirit of subversion that framed most of their previous efforts, the songs of Shadows require patience and understanding to reveal oft-hidden strength of voice within.

Bitchin Bajas is a spa resort for the ears, with many comfortable zones under its pleasure dome.