Another spectacular audio document of an enormously creative period for underground music.

It's an album of longing and disquiet. To call any of the songs wistful seems inadequate; they are engulfed in saudade.

These are candy-coated rhythmic noise pop songs, and they're astounding.

Elaenia is fated to become one of those albums that inspires ritualistic listening parties held by small groups of audiophiles. That shouldn't be held against it.

Ork Records: New York, New York is a superb evocation of a vitally important time and place in American rock & roll, and it's fun, eclectic listening to boot.

Where The Outsiders was designed to dazzle, Mr. Misunderstood is built for the long haul: it settles into the soul, its pleasures immediate but also sustained.

The bulk and repetition of The Complete Matrix Tapes will scare away a few casual observers, but anyone who wants to know how this band sounded on-stage on two good nights will find this to be a revelation; it's the best and best-sounding VU live release to date.

Each of the five discs leads with a full-length in its entirety and is filled to capacity with an assortment of extras. What's missing is negligible, mostly forgotten remixes and redundant 7" edits.

While each disc stands on its own, it's the sum total that makes this a career-defining work.

Suede can still dwell on big issues of love and mortality, but now that the past is in perspective, it all means a little bit more and what lies ahead is a little more precious, and that wide view makes Night Thoughts all the more moving.

Coming in at just over 50 minutes, it's the band's most streamlined collection of music since 2008's career-defining Rook, and their most vital offering to date.

Never has TTB sounded so organic, relaxed, and free. Let Me Get By is the album this group has been striving for since their formation. You need this.

Her quick turns of phrase and penchant for punctuating moments of self-doubt with colorful bits of impressionistic flair and left-field melodic rejoinders invoke names like Kate Bush, Nick Drake, and Sandy Denny, but the truth is, she's been perfecting her particular brand of moody, bucolic baroque pop for over two decades now, and with the marvelous In Search of Harperfield, that work has finally paid off.

Compulsive in more than one sense, Big Black Coat contends with Last Exit as Junior Boys' deepest, most vibrant work.

We Are King is all about plush, impeccable grooves and spine-tingling harmonies. It's without fault.

The arrangements are exquisite, the textures multivalent, and the emotional resonances cavernous, intuitive, and expressive.

Rodriguez has been hinting at the ambition displayed on Lola for some time. What's surprising is how a record of such scope and imagination can be rendered so intimately and elegantly.

The album is a sharp, thrilling experience, and easily one of Funk's most focused works.

It's a resolutely lively and slightly dazed exploration of misshapen pop forms.

This isn't a collection of overlooked compositions, it's a bit of pop archeology, excavating records that feel right. Every one of these 19 cuts certainly does feel right, sounding sun-burned and blissed-out, embodying the hangover of the hippie dream.

[Cuomo's] eccentricities slip out from the cracks in his carefully constructed songs. Sinclair wisely decides to accentuate all these quirks, whether they derive from Cuomo or the band's interplay, so The White Album crackles underneath its tight presentation.

Even when the album drifts toward the traditional--as it does on "Hurtin' (On the Bottle)" or "Four Years of Chances"--Price's sensibility is modern, turning these old-fashioned tales of heartbreak, love, loss, and perseverance into something fresh and affecting.

Azel is essential, not just for Bombino's growing legion of fans or even those of music from the Sahara region. It is a remarkable example of 21st century popular music.

It's ambitious, for sure. That there isn't a single moment that's not compelling is the real victory.

Sorrow is a radical reinterpretation, but it should be accessible to many. Stetson delivers an acute, wider, deeper hearing of Górecki's symphony as a powerful, beautiful, musically diverse meditation on unspeakable loss.

All of the material contained in this set is essential listening, as it chronicles the most groundbreaking period of a group who consistently explored new terrain with each successive release.

Close to the Noise Floor: Formative UK Electronica 1975-1984 collects four discs of the alternately thrilling, grim, silly, and just plain bizarre stuff.

She and Greenspan refract techno-pop in their own way while binding additional forms of electronic post-disco that cross four decades, from boogie to juke.