Oftentimes, Gallarais is resistant to shape, with collages like “Grottovox” and “Beansidhe” balancing the reveberations of airplanes gliding above with earthy drum sounds and even echoes that seem to emerge from within the depths of the tunnel. These sections are balanced out by tracks like “Underlight” and “Mouthtoum” that demonstrate O’Dwyer’s effortlessly sorrowful approach to flute and harp, providing a musical grounding that still feels as improvised and as accidental as any of the less-controlled tones

Like Bosch’s triptych, the album is vivid and dense, clear as a bell but hellacious, and undeniably worth your inscrutable attention.

Ty Segall culls some some of his scene's most appealing aspects and affixes them to unusually-written, melodically appealing songs; in essence, he's an ideal ambassador for his Bay Area milieu.

Out in the Storm hones that truth; it wonders about it. “You ring me up/ I tell the truth,” goes “Fade,” and “You’ll have your truth/ I’ll have mine,” goes “Hear You.” Ten songs divulge it, which don’t have sections so much as well-portioned energies.

As much as Everything In Between transcends what the band has released to date, nothing feels like a true departure, and everything seems like an improvement.

While the first disc winds its way sporadically through the humid alleys and hazy bars of a multi-dimensional shantytown, the second half explodes outward upon the magnificent vista of symphonic discotheque.

Even if The Long Sleep is (deep down or hiding in plain sight) a resigned, muted, end-of-the-line Kool-Aid party, the bug juice is delectable enough to call one back from the great unknown for seconds and so on.

This will be on most of the indie-ish year end tops charts this year, guaranteed.

Polly has always done well to play outside her comfort zone, and in doing so on this album, she crafts a reminder more effective than her return-to-form attempt on "Uh Huh Her."

Bestial Burden, in its immediacy, in its primal, abrasive engagement with the senses, reaches across the division of bodies to speak directly to you.

In contrast to 2014’s colossal Ruins, Grid of Points feels relatively slight, though it remains incredibly spacious.

Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks is a dense album that seems at its best when it sticks to Badalamenti’s template, filling up nostalgia for the show with acoustic intimacy and emotional affect.

It’s a terrifying and hypnotic listen.

This is the least fashionable album I have heard in ages, and all the better for it.

Taking chances within the realm of a three minute pop song takes sheer talent, and on The Slow Wonder, Carl Newman proves that he is one of the brightest songwriters working in music these days.

There's a sort of imposed solipsism here, when tones sometimes seem to have different throb rates depending on the listener's caffeine intake. But Morgan himself is absolutely aware of, and screwing around with, conventions, assumptions, and expectations.

Rock music is ultimately about a wild feeling, and Milk Music are delivering it in just the right place.

For an artist who has released as prolifically as Moss, having a “defining solo album” is a hard choice. But this is an excellent primer for Jamal Moss’s singular ideology, and deserves our dual attention.

The Bones of What You Believe is one of the most unabashedly sincere works of indie pop.

Are The Roaring Night brings the Montreal group’s potential down to earth, expanding what were sweeping, almost classical compositions into gut-wrenching, prog-y panoramas. A lot of the same cerebral, chamber-music-meets-guitar-wash elements are still there; they’re just a bit beefier this time.

It is a delicate alchemy of tight metronomic grooves and carefully parsed instrumental interplay, to the point where nothing steals the show.

A journey into their liberated, tie-dyed consciousness and their best project to date.

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.

If this isn't the album you are blaring out of your car all summer long, you aren't having enough fun.

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.

The music is often awesomely original.

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

If you're a fan of the rock and the roll and the denim and the Rolling Rock, then snatch this record up tout de suite.

All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone isn’t the band reinventing themselves. Instead, you’ll have to settle for Explosions in the Sky perfecting their craft, which is nice to hear regardless of genre.

Give The People What They Want is an especially bright new feather in the cap. It’s towering, tempestuous, addictive, and available in a beautiful shade of marbled blue. Maybe we don’t deserve it, but it’s here to own us just the same.

As something along the lines of throwing an old Pink Panther soundtrack in a blender with a copy of Reason 3, every track on Denies The Day is a scene from a different film you can't quite remember seeing.

Overall, a handful of great songs, no clunkers, and one absolute classic is more than should be expected of any album.

DS2 finds a hellish, motivating power by articulating how it’s possible to have the best time of your life during the worst time of your life. And it all sounds so good.

It's like an audiobook with the best music ever featured in the medium.

With 16 thoroughly-developed tracks, clocking in at a little under an hour, Infiniheart is a tedious listen. Though its moments of faltering are few, it's a lot to digest.

Dee's lyrics consistently reveal a formidable intelligence and a deep and deeply-felt cultural repertoire.

Beyond Belief is at its best when exploring the conflict beneath.

Like an imagined conversation set before the waves, Still Trippin’ folds and unfolds. It is still unsettled, in me and out.

The greatest aspect of Tournament of Hearts is Bry Webb's singing. His voice convinces you of the truth of the emotion and power of his songs.

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.

This music on this self-titled release is perfectly and tightly composed and arranged.

In 2016, “long live rock” is way too sweeping, among other things. So long live this. It’s just about right.

It's fitting that Mason reserved his first official solo album for his best work since The Beta Band. The results prove well worth the wait.

Miss Machine simply crackles with stress; not stress over homework or girlfriends, but the kind of stress a bunch of semis put on a bridge.

A great hip-hop album, an accomplishment that whipper-snappers in both hip-hop and the pop-music world at large would benefit from attempting to emulate.

As an exercise in artfully executed pop maximalism, {Awayland} is unquestionably a treat.... All he needs now is something worth saying.

Here, he’s stripped aside much of the theoretical sprawl, resulting in a work that feels both minor, even by his standards, and gargantuan, even by his standards.

It's thrilling to feel all the hooks in this thing; one gets to feeling all Hellraisery, exploding with joy everywhichway.

Even if Album doesn’t turn out to be all it’s been made out to be by the reams of hype already bestowed upon it, it’s certainly working at the moment.

Within Radiohead's oeuvre, TKOL most closely resembles Kid A and Amnesiac, the double-headed phoenix that rose out the ashes of the band's turn-of-the-century identity crisis. The only thing missing this time around is, well, the identity crisis.

Riveting from beginning to end, Now Here Is Nowhere is a delightful record filled with memorable and often astonishing songs, showcasing a young band that has set the foundation for one exciting future.

Is it possible that Gab and Xcel could have improved and surpassed Blazing Arrow's success? The Craft simply says yes.

It's still better than most of the records that have come out this year; it's just that the Sparks family has set such a high precedent that even slight missteps are bound to disappoint.

Twins shows Segall in greater command of his craft. Whereas the songs on Goodbye Bread and the previous (and spectacular) Slaughterhouse would gradually fall out of control, here the dissipation feels deliberate, as if Segall were trying to drive the songs to their deaths.

In other words, without being a mere sonic record of actual Is-ness (a field recording), A flame my love, a frequency relays an Is-ness. This is both mono no aware, the sadness of things, but also their joy, and beyond either, the experience of Being.

Breaks In the Armor ranks among the best Crooked Fingers albums.

With Ruins, Harris opens up a portal to one of those clearings, and I don’t feel quite as bombarded affectively and aesthetically (by problems, timelines, insecurities, noise, and other people) when I hear its call and disappear there.

After repeat listens, the content of El-P’s more afflictive lyrics begins to fall away so that only the rhythm and timbre of his smoky growl remain to complement the record’s malevolent chorus of synth effects and samples. A beautiful use of negative space, indeed.

By the artist's own admission, Hallelujah! is an album that comes with an "expiration date," but the themes of civil disunity and political gamesmanship are likely to resonate with us long after the election results are settled, and Lucas' mixture of mordant wit and in-your-face rock will make this a record worth revisiting.

Tonight’s Music celebrates the space between the excessive and the unfinished, refusing us resolution, promising us a little everything.

There’s an extemporaneous feeling to A Ways Away that persists amid its clear recording quality and allows O’Neil to sing quietly as though she’s unsure of herself, while still underscoring a natural sort of confidence--she doesn’t have to sing loudly.

Consistently unique and fascinating.

Now, on On the Water, they've paced themselves, slowed down the tempos, and left room for ambience, such that the album's fevered points hit much more poignantly.

This is a solid set of space rock that will melt plenty of faces, even though it doesn't seek nirvana in Six Organs of Admittance's usual ways.

Throughout Emerald City, Vanderslice uses his celebrated producing talent to control feedback and mold it into an instrument as vital as the guitar and piano that are so central to his music.

It’s just a solid album that, like the title implies, holds onto its historical surroundings as much as it moves beyond them.

Oneida is traveling further down the path laid out in last year's The Wedding. It's equally pastoral, with luscious production and Bobby's surprisingly beautiful voice taking centerstage.

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.

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

While it’s certain that catastrophe is written all over Locrian’s high-concept Return to Annihilation, the experience is a step removed from the anxiety of early post-rock: here the listener trudges through the burnt-out husk of a world, its structures transfigured, estranged from their original forms.

Transforming such intensity into a product so bewitching is an incredible effort, and the resulting works leave very little doubt that Colonial Patterns is more than some admirable interpretation--it’s a ruthless conquest.

This release feels freer, though--not easier, necessarily, but delivered with a clarity of purpose not quite as muddled, consumption-wise, by sheer weirdness as was their previous LP, Tears Of The Valedictorian, for instance.

Saturn Over Sunset is imperfect and timeless nonetheless.

Beautifully crafted, complex music which intrigues and begs for another listen.

I don’t think garage needs saving. Yet, when Ty Segall shares visions within the freaked-out space of garage, he cracks it open.

The Further Adventures combines the absolute best aspects of well thought-out and researched studio work with the spontaneity and showmanship of live performance.

The borrowing of in-house trap elements is neither crass nor exploitative: it is rather a seeming extension of the communicative nature of patten’s project.

This album is a nice collection of songs for our fans.

This is not the best or most refined Jesu album and for the casual listener perhaps not the best place to start. For the Jesu fans who have not been able to track the debut EP down, however, it is well worth a listen.

On his latest, How the Thing Sings, Orcutt summons from this compromised thing a droning, sputtering blues that is utterly personal, theoretically rigorous, skeptical of tradition, and completely enthralling.

The band’s persistence is what makes this music “challenging,” as opposed to the compositional structures that shape them, but on Piano Nights, those idiosyncrasies are pressed through a grotto of layered instrumentation that reveals an essential addition to the Bohren canon.

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.

Again and again, Antony gestures toward a light: a crying light, a swanlight, a luminous impossibility that beckons, ultimately serving only to illuminate the sadness of this world.

II is gonna get you. It's gonna fold you up, flatten you in its steel press, and make a revolting panini outta ya. Then it's chow time. So long, sucker.

It’s no mistake that the title of this superbly fun album ends with an exclamation point; El Guincho has created an album that’s relentless in its ferocious rhythms and beats until the very last track.

This isn’t their first release, but it’s no doubt their best so far, a fully realized space of shimmering notes and subtle signs toward a masterful production and shared creative mindset of defying expectation.

He’s gently guiding, minding small details as they contribute to the success of the larger mission and never forcing their emergence, Eno’s keen grasp of these two forms of songwriting allowing him to easily walk that line.

As a sophomore set, Lenses Alien is daring and cohesive, layered and challenging.

Juggling potential contradictions with the greatest of ease, In Advance of the Broken Arm ushers in a new voice in rock, one that seems poised to be blazing trails for years to come.

From the get-go, from the very first tremblings of Chris Abrahams’s piano and the hullabaloo of Tony Buck’s drums, the album engineers an atmosphere of beguiling insecurity and enigmatic possibility.

Travels With Myself and Another is the best thing this crew has ever made. It’s got all you could ask for: hooks, riffs, volume, wordplay, razor-sharp absurdity, and Jack Egglestone’s incomparable power drumming.

Both her songs and her subject matter hold back from shocking the listener by virtue of their content, and yet they make a startling impact--creating a headspace that leads to nowhere in the same moment that it paves the way to salvation.

Although it’s undoubtedly consistent and enjoyable, these are the kind of adjectives that restrain this established songwriter from truly challenging or surprising his audience.

Son should stand as one of the most beautiful and inspiring albums of 2006.

Brill Bruisers is an enthusiastic correction in course, as well as a reminder that age doesn’t always equal solemnity or, for that matter, slouching toward self-importance of any kind.

Dangermouse's actions have breathed creative life back into a 35-year-old record while inventing a completely new work of hip-hop art.

The Magic is Deerhoof’s 13th full-length album, and it’s one of their most well-rounded, sweeter offerings, perhaps a companion to Friend Opportunity or Offend Maggie in size and spirit.

In Prism’s genius is to service the newbies and true believers in equal measure.