The Old Fabled River is a moving and inspired collection that followers of both folk and experimental music will find greatly rewarding.

Tracks like "Clash," "War," and "Bomb" all maintain battle imagery, in multiple senses (musical, political, personal), and Fire as a whole is steadfast in its fury and perseverance.

There's a lot of subtlety here and it might take a number of listens to fully appreciate Lost Futures' peculiar spread of dynamics. But, like any grower, its slow revelation is part of its charm.

No longer urgent yet still passionate, the band conjure a sense of operatic melancholy on The Ultra Vivid Lament that feels reassuring, even consoling.

The songs jump from pounding metal excursions to tightly wound modern rock to synthy weirdness, each one ripping cleanly through the speakers with nary a ragged edge or stray shard of feedback. Take any track and let the guitars loose, add some unhinged drumming, do some howling instead of harmonizing, and almost every song would be vintage Segall. Wrapped up tightly in slick modern clothes, they are something new. ... Harmonizer is an exciting and intriguing addition to his bursting-at-the-seams discography.

Feel Flows moves the microscope over to one of the group's more interesting and quietly transformative phases, a curious time when their hopes to remain culturally relevant lived alongside some of their most inspired songwriting moments, and an earnest desire to grow artistically.

The epic Senjutsu is another distended late-career triumph, albeit one that requires multiple spins to set up camp in your Homeric metal-craving cranium.

At under 40 minutes, Liberation Time is relatively brief but free of excess. Despite employing three very different ensembles, McLaughlin delivers a focused album that is as dazzling as it is thought provoking.

Presented as the daring and liberated sibling to a more traditional predecessor, Dawn of Chromatica unlocks an expanded world of potential and reminds her legion of Little Monsters that she still has a finger on the pulse and isn't afraid to take risks once in a while.

It's a colorful, wide-ranging romp of an album -- and an airy liberation for its titular figure.

Side-Eye NYC (V1.IV) offers an astonishing portrait of the many places Metheny has been, and intimates where he may yet go. It's an album that virtually all of his fans can celebrate. It may also lead to another generation discovering him.

It takes her music in a somewhat more accessible direction while retaining the creativity and fervor of the rest of her work. Considerably less noisy than previous Moor Mother releases like her 2016 breakthrough Fetish Bones, the album flows through slippery jazz rhythms, mellow R&B vibes, and meditative ambient textures, with Ayewa's lyrics remaining forceful even as she's delivering them in a softer register.

Surrounded is so overflowing with life that it demands repeated spins to truly take it all in. With songs this strong, however, repeat listening is hardly a problem.

These songs are full of a wobbly confidence that puts a tight focus on the personal and political, lashing out at a world of waste and injustice ("To-Do List," "Money Talks") while Felice wavers between a playful appreciation of his own eccentricity ("Jazz on the Autobahn") and a less charitable observer who has something timely and eloquent to say. The band's ragged but right grooves are in especially good shape this time out.

The Bevis Frond isn't just a band anymore, they are almost a genre of their own making now, and if Nick Saloman keeps cranking out albums as inspired, alive, and joyously gnarly as this, the next few decades should bring many more delights.

Whether Shot of Love warrants deeper appreciation now is debatable, but this box set wonderfully showcases Dylan's lengthy, complex creative journey that only got rockier as the decade wore on.

It's the consistency and quality of his work that continue to impress, and the timeless Local Valley slots easily into his catalog as if it's always been there.

It's fun, mischievous, and wildly enjoyable, Brettin and friends turning straight-laced soul-funk and Weather Channel jazz inside-out and dancing gleefully around the confusing and wonderful results.

It's a rare kind of unobstructed window into a songwriter's world, but the magic of One Hand on the Steering Wheel is how Levy somehow manages to speak volumes without giving too much away.

While certainly one of the most robustly guitar-centric albums Angels & Airwaves have made, there is still plenty of synthy, otherworldly shimmer glowing at the edges of Lifeforms, and cuts like "Rebel Girl," "Euphoria," and "Spellbound" bristle with a vibrant blend of punk and dance-rock energies.

Don't go into this expecting casual listening (a notion Fucked Up's fans got used to years ago), but if you're willing to meet this music on its own terms, it's impossible not to be dazzled by it.

Once Nao enters on the finale "Amazing Grace," an ethereal original that shares some lyrics with the popular hymn and delivers another message of salvation, it becomes more clear why the title song, an ideal closer in just about any other context, starts the album.

The Sound of Yourself is another heart-breaking, spirit-lifting highlight in McCaughan's long and captivating career and shouldn't be missed by long-time fans or new converts.

More of an immersive mood piece than a history lesson, Bright Magic is a bold new chapter for the group.

From start to finish, lolling hooks flood Cara's mind as much as indecision, skepticism, and other negative thoughts. They make all the bad stuff go down easy, enabling the listener to have a proper sulk that soothes.

Let Me Do One More makes the leap from "very good" to "great," and this is pleasurable and full of grand surprises in the way that great pop music connects with the listener. You need to hear this.

Colourgrade is a strikingly honest audio portrait of love and creativity. It was a bold choice to make an album that's this much of a grower when attention spans are shrinking rapidly, but like the relationships Mastin and her friends allude to, it's well worth investing the time in Colourgrade.

Any Young completist will need Carnegie Hall 1970, but it's a special performance that can be appreciated by more casual listeners as well. Alone at the microphone, the purity, simplicity, and one-of-a-kind magic of some of Neil Young's best songs come into view in a way that's undeniable.

A bit less club-ready than Livanskiy's other releases, Liminal Soul is a stirring set of late-night reflections.

Throughout the album, BadBadNotGood and their guest collaborators flesh out the sonic canvas without taking away from the raw energy of the performances.

The band injects their own perspectives -- both lyrical and compositional -- into Modern Fiction, giving the songs personal angles and emotional color that place them very much in the now.

A 25-minute blast of brief, confused, oversaturated synth rock tunes, All Day Gentle Hold! is over before you know it but won't soon fade from memory.

The quartet sound more cohesive than they've been in years, benefitting from a single producer's vision in a similar fashion to what Brian Eno pulled off with Viva La Vida.

That Magdalena Bay also augment their capital "P" pop melodies with industrial textures, shoegaze flourishes, and plenty of funked-out bass grooves means that Mercurial World offers both sugary melodic highs and deeper sonic layers to explore.

A pair of mellower tracks near the end, the dembow-inspired "All My Friends Know" and the lush, string-laden "Nineteen," are more restrained yet just as considered and affectionate, pointing to a potential direction for an artist whose emergence was one of the most welcome left-field surprises of 2021.

The moments of uncertainty and incompleteness that sometimes surface only get closer to the unvarnished core of what Morby was aiming for with these songs: a state of emotional suspension that's not quite the end of the day, but not nightfall just yet.

The love and fire on display here confirm what his best work has always shown -- he's not just a fine songwriter, he's a top-shelf musician who lives for this stuff, and it's a pleasure to hear him dig into this material.

Instead of party-starting excitement, the band refracts echoes of Can, Bowie, and the Talking Heads at their most abstract for an album that feels tense and bleary, like a party that's still fun but has burned on for so long that the sun is coming up and things are starting to get weird.

My Morning Jacket is MMJ's most satisfying work since 2008's Evil Urges, and a splendid example of what can happen when their group mind is in sync.

Mod Prog Sic finds Black Dice pushing themselves even further into a place of singularity, making music that's gross, funny, captivating, scary, and beguiling at once, and finding new details in the extremes they've been exploring for decades.

Chaotic yet tightly controlled, Eternal Home is boundlessly creative, and up there with Skinless X-1 as Marcloid's best work.

Perfect listening for solitude, Ookii Gekkou discovers strange beauty within the mundane -- and once again demonstrates that Vanishing Twin's imagination is boundless, even when the world only extends as far as the walls around them.

It's a startling performance. The package design is simply stellar and the liner essays by critic/historian Ashley Kahn and Coltrane biographer Lewis Porter are educational, authoritative, and indispensable.

While technically a companion work to 2020's A Celebration of Endings, Biffy Clyro's ninth studio album, the emotionally sanguine The Myth of Happily Ever After, stands on its own.

With its balance of eras, sounds, and short and extended songs, Shade has the depth of a career retrospective and the freshness of a new album, both of which make it especially appealing to new and longtime Grouper fans alike.

A manifesto that only Deerhoof could create, Actually, You Can is a perfect example of how they achieve what seems like the impossible time and time again -- and with its heroic doses of fun and optimism, it reminds listeners that actually, they can too.

Intriguing from beginning to end, Cocker's lush, emphatic takes should delight fans of vintage French and Baroque pop.

Duran Duran are taking some calculated risks here which sometimes means they stumble -- occasionally, the ballads feel a shade strident -- but the restlessness makes for a kinetic, exciting album.

Radical has all of the mathy riffage, radiant melodies, and neck-snapping energy of a group fresh out of the basement. It also has the emotional maturity and brinksmanship of a seasoned crew who know which buttons to push and for how long, and it's in between those two persuasions that the album achieves greatness.

It's Not Them. It Couldn't Be Them. It Is Them! is superior work from a great rock band. If this is going to be typical from this point on, we're all pretty fortunate.

The band's grandiose hellscapes can sometimes feel like horror-fiction cosplay, but in trading some of the myth and magic for the genuine torment of existential dread, they've managed to produce their most humanistic work to date.

On top of the more accessible production, this record also boasts some of Granduciel's most immediate songs, making it some of the best work from a band with a near-spotless track record.

Projector is an impressive debut and all-around solid effort from a band at the start of a promising career.

Like Native Invader before it, Ocean to Ocean is a late-era standout for Amos, who reaches through the dark cloud of collective grief to be that supportive presence for listeners, healing with familiar touches and a timely message.

Whereas Fyah relied on jazz and funk as twin lines of harmonic and rhythmic inquiry, Intra-I multiplies their import by strategically locating them inside a far deeper, wider mix to create an original music that looks squarely at the future.

Lone always manages to go back in time and see things as they never truly were, and Always Inside Your Head is an immersive venture into the realm of fantasy and magic.

Confident, inward-looking, forgiving, yet bruising in all the right places, it's not just a great album by Cantrell's standards; it's a great record, period.

Titling her second album Water, she acknowledges that she's in her element, and more assured of her work than ever. Post-transition, her voice has developed into a more delicate yet deeply expressive instrument, and her soaring vocals magnificently blend with her rumbling beats and atmospheric, neo-classical arrangements.

It's never sappy but offers a message of spiritual succor to those who need it, and it's a great, rewarding listening.

They're still blazingly idiosyncratic, but in taming the sprawling improvisations of the past, they've discovered their pop acumen.

By the time they close with the fiery Motown vamp "Love Don't," Rateliff and his band have covered a nice range of moods on what is their most diverse release yet.

Outperforming what was an impressive debut, Which Way to Happy takes its immersive qualities to another level.

The combination of the airiness of the arrangements and the warmth of Mann's performance is wistfully hopeful, turning Queens of the Summer Hotel into a record that soothes and consoles during moments of uncertainty.

You Get It All does practically everything a Hayes Carll album should do just right, and its unpretentious excellence makes it one of the best and most satisfying albums he's released to date.

Everyone involved shines, but for Wasser, it's a feather in her cap and an excellent way to kick off the next phase in what continues to be an exciting career.

Somewhere in the second half of this hour-plus album, the mostly sedate sequence of productions -- some without beats, others with dragging trap-styled percussion -- make for laborious listening. The trade-off is Walker's vivid and biting lyrics and knack for singing them with such grace that they please the ear as much as they raise eyebrows.

Unhurried and stark without being austere, The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows seems suspended from time but not place: as misty and evocative as it is, the music is grounded in a specific location, which gives this elegiac, enveloping album an emotional weight.

Whilst it doesn't always stick the landing, the new spaces it does explore are well worth the journey.

Heavy Load Blues is raw, heavy, and immediate, the sound of a band unfettered while pursuing a deep blue groove that never quits.

Both a reflective sound bath and an ecstatic celebration of creative freedom, Space 1.8 is a singular, eye-opening debut.

It often feels like they're delighted that they're making an album that lives up to their debut, and it's hard not to share their thrill.

Thanks to their renewed focus, their willingness to embrace new ideas, Cleveland's songs, and the symbiotic relationship between the group and Younge, this feels like a fresh start for the band and some of the best psychedelic rock around in the early 2020s.

It might take some time for Flying Dream 1 to fully grab you, but when it does, the album's measured, artful introspection is hard to shake.

Consistently entertaining with a few flashes of brilliance, Book kicks off the band's fifth decade of music-making with substance and style.

Pilgrimage of the Soul is at once a sonic portrait of everything Mono has ever been, yet looks toward a future rife with possibilities as increased physical and sonic force are tempered by graceful subtlety, tense drama, and haunted lyricism.

His own hope for Deciphering the Message is to point new listeners toward the originals. As wonderful as that intention is, this album is a phenomenal listening experience in its own right.

Though it's just over 20 minutes long, In Virus Times has plenty of the experimental openness and welcoming warmth of Ranaldo's other solo work for Mute, and artfully approximates the feeling of a live improvisation during a time when concerts were difficult at best.

Mandatory Enjoyment is much more than a dusty museum piece, and while Dummy may be proudly retro, like their heroes Stereolab they make their love of the past sound brand new and exciting.

This slyly crafted collection of big bass and even bigger brags manages to bridge the old school and the new, with Uncle Snoop's encouragement as the host with the most.

Gordon and Nace never followed an obvious path with Body/Head's prior releases, but bringing in Dilloway presents entirely new possibilities that they use with fascinating, often haunting results on Body/Dilloway/Head.

These are wild, protean hard rock songs rooted in psychedelic folk and delivered with Green Man-worthy gusto. What's not to love?

Toy features Bowie revisiting a bunch of songs he wrote in the '60s, most written and recorded prior to "Space Oddity." Hearing Bowie apply Hours aesthetics to swinging, mod-ish material is odd but mildly appealing; it's a slight record but it's nice to have it as part of the official discography. The rest of the box follows a familiar and comforting pattern, confirming that the '90s were a bit of a creative resurgence for Bowie.

The term "triumphant return" might be thrown around too casually, but it certainly applies to I Thought of You.

TRU may have announced to the indie rock world at large that Ovlov had arrived; Buds lets everyone know they are here to stay.

Unity feels richly varied instead of disjointed, and it's a testament to Wood and Day's creativity that they're still finding fresh ways to express themselves this far into their career.

Even though Arca narrows her focus on Kick ii, it's still the product of an artist who can't help but break boundaries as she creates the space she needs to innovate.

On its own, KicK iii may have the smallest range of any of the project's volumes, but its relentlessness is a key part of the anthology that provides lots of fascinating moments for those who love Arca at her most outlandish.

Though combining contrasting elements in her music is usually one of her greatest strengths, hearing Arca concentrate on kick iiii's hyperreal sensuality and vulnerability makes it a crucial part of the Kick anthology.

It's a bittersweet and ultimately satisfying end to a hugely ambitious project that always remains true to the emotions driving it -- but Arca fans would expect nothing less.

Happily, the loose performances more than suit these ragged compositions, turning Barn into a snapshot of this moment in time: a bunch of old friends in isolation, finding solace and comfort in the noise they can still make.

If the first volume of the Joni Mitchell Archives tracked the development of an artist finding her voice, Volume 2 illuminates the creative process from a time when that voice was reaching its zenith.

The fascinating continuous dialogue between her interests and own music is further demonstrated to ecstatic effect here.

The BBC Sessions emphasizes both the connective threads and creative evolution of Green Day during the first act of their career, which makes it a worthy historical document in addition to a first-rate live album.

Formula of Love surpasses expectations, infusing the group's love-centric lyricism with newfound confidence and creative flair. This is one of Twice's most assertive and varied releases to date -- and with a more concise track listing, perhaps their best.

Ayewa's poetry soars above the band, whose attack offers ancient-to-the-future sound narratives; they cross blues, free jazz, Caribbean grooves, and Afro-Latin folk with a universe of African rhythms. Open the Gates is a statement. It authoritatively signifies militant creativity as the only real language for expressing liberation and wisdom.

At 70 minutes, Renewal runs a bit long but its momentum never ceases and the extra space allows for Strings and his supple, intuitive band to push at the boundaries of where traditional and progressive bluegrass meet.

Like all of Dwyer's improv collaborations, Gong Splat has the anything-goes feel one would expect from an impromptu jam session, but there's something in this one's combination of cosmic glide and shocked-out panic that elevates it beyond the previous releases.

Haunting and gripping, New Decade is one of Mute's most striking releases in some time, and gives Phew a bigger platform to prove what her die-hard fans already know: she's at the peak of her powers.