The problem is that if it’s not very compelling as theatre, the theatrical parts get in the way of enjoying the songs, which are pretty good in a brash, bull-headed, punk-belligerent kind of way.

There’s a minute-to-minute emotional immediacy here that, even if you don’t understand completely, you can feel like the weather, always changing.

Van Etten’s born-loser character could have been a bore were it not for her disciplined musicianship (her early years included classical music and multiple instruments) and her painful but enduring singing. It never stops sounding like real hurt.

If you listen to this album a lot, you may spend the first two or three times through snorting at odd phrases, recoiling from the venom and viscosity in Smith’s vocal delivery, but as you go, you begin to pick up the ferocity of the grooves underneath. No one else balances articulate, convincing hallucination with freight train propulsion like the Fall does, and this album, they take it further towards the edge than before.

Things begin promisingly with “She Never Could Resist a Winding Road” and “Beatnik Walking,” two nimbly played songs on which Thompson and his band get to show off their chops without showing off.... Unfortunately, that fact [a relatively small band playing together on relatively little time] begins to show for the worse on "Patty Don’t You Put Me Down."

Luminiferous burns hard, but it’s searching for an attitude adjustment that could make the flames grow higher.

There are a few hollow trunk rattlers here.... At.Long.Last.A$AP is no fashion accessory, it’s practically a reinvention.

Don’t Weigh Down the Light is a precise, meditative work, and one that can be rewarding with each successive listen.

For the first time in years, Godspeed is both operating at peak strength and not (as far we know) about to go on hiatus.

Holly Herndon is far too conceptual to ever really merit banal classification as a techno or electronic producer, and with a bigger platform (intentional), she shows that her vision opens a multitude of possibilities that go beyond genre. Platform isn’t the album to realize that potential, so obvious since Movement, but it’s a tantalizing taste of the future.

It feels like they’ve found a way to channel attitude into songs that are more powerful and compelling.

The songs feel physical and unpremeditated, without theoretical underpinnings, but executed with such conviction that they carry you almost bodily from one track to another.

It’s easy to forgive Gnod such self-indulgence, however, even if it means Infinity Machines just about fails to maintain interest throughout, because this album sounds like very little out there, at least from a rock perspective.

Sylva might be Snarky Puppy’s most conceptually complicated album, but it’s easily penetrable as a listen. The album could make more demands and it isn’t as stunning in its individual moments as previous recordings, but those ideas would resist League’s compositional intent.

Its 42 minutes are comparatively modest, sure, but there’s no question that the man behind the boards here has his finger on the pulse of what may be missing most in electronic music right now--a central reference point. In Colour is that star, the record to hold everyone else’s narratives together.

It’s lovely, in an effortless, frictionless way that wafts on warm currents and soothes as it passes.

Loyalty can slip into the background if you let it, receding into prettiness until you miss the uncompromising intelligence and honesty. Yet that in itself is a triumph, as the former child star steps back and steps back until all you can hear are the songs.

Even incoherent and excessively long, Frozen Niagara Falls shows that, like John Wiese with his recent--and more rewarding--masterpiece Deviate From Balance, Fernow is pulling apart the clichés of noise and looking at where it goes from here.

Hairball doesn’t redefine its chosen genre, nor does it really refine it. It’s a straightforward album, one meant for windows-open listening on a sunny day.

A chilly, deliberately off-putting, but deeply fascinating record.

They may only be covering a small slice of what they’ve achieved previously here, but they so totally capture their moment that these songs blot out much of the world around them, so that they only exist, with you, blanketing day and night.

Side one of MCIII consists of perfectly enjoyable songs, with similar ingredients--piano, interesting guitar work, a voice reminiscent of ‘60s pop, but that ineffable thing that makes songs stick in your head just doesn’t seem to be here.... The second half of the album is problematic in a different way.

It is clearly intended to connect with people who aren’t allergic to a straight beat or a straightforward tune. But it’s still, in its own way, surprising.

It is crowded with guest artists and jostling with stylistic adventures, but its eccentricities have been mostly sanded down to a glossy finish.

Who Is the Sender? has a gently melancholy, a resigned aura that looks lovingly on this world but also speculates on the next. Both elements, the careful observation of what is and the restless querying about what may be, meld into a wise and spiritually resonant whole.

There’s a sense of stagery in this album, as there is in all JSBX discs....

It’s a fascinating, detailed and absorbing album, and one of the best electronic/dance albums I’ve heard in many months.

There is certainly not much to coax the ladies onto the dance floor here. Still visions are visions, and whether you find them through hedonism or self-denial, worth having. In some cases, it is hard to tell the difference.

The result is still identifiably Benoît Pioulard, but richer, deeper, stranger.

Fantasy Empire’s production values keep some of this internal resistance in check, and the album’s relatively linear songwriting does the rest, with much of the record proceeding at a pretty steady gallop, without too many wrinkles or games of musical tug of war.

The band does what it does best, which is couch surreal oddity in unstoppable catchiness.

An album that can be assertive as it is reflective, and as troubled as it is engaged.

It’s head-nodding, melody-following joy, which maybe shouldn’t work for a bleak album. But it does.

The band strikes a balance between symmetry and expansiveness, which gets at the core of why the krautrockers have endured—disciplined beats allow the free-form wanderings to reach places that more shaggy jamming misses.

The musical backing is radiantly raw, splintering guitars, hard thwacked drums, riffs that saw up from the bottom, break the surface and resubmerge. Barnett’s band — Dan Luscombe on guitar, Bones Sloane on bass and Dave Mudie on drum--is quite good, in a raucous, Replacements-into-Thermals way.

This is the best live album I’ve heard in some time, intense enough to hold your attention through its massive two-hour length, inventive enough to add something to what you think you know about these songs.

The Ark Work is certainly not black metal. The problem is that it’s really not much else, either. Indeed, even after repeated listens, it comes across not so much as an album but as a sort of formless mass, which could be a good thing, in the right hands, but here does little more than baffle and exasperate.

Skullsplitter is ultimately that: comforting, even more so than it is odd.

You’ll never hear the same thing twice in listening to Levon Vincent. Akin to the highlights of his past discography, something in the mixes of these songs jumps out to grab you by the throat, then gradually retreats as other elements subtly work their way to the fore of your consciousness.

This one is as strong as the last one, a shade better for shifting the densities of the drone more. It should be a detriment that they could be shuffled together without notice, yet it isn’t.

Pile is a challenging band to listen to casually--but its dense, exquisitely crafted bombast pays both immediate and long-term dividends over repeated listens, as the mutated strands of their musical DNA infect and take over.

Torche’s strongest effort since 2008’s breakthrough Meanderthal.

They’ve found a way to wedge different sonic elements together, creating an assemblage of oft-quoted elements that feels fresh and vital even when its tone turns elegiac.

Bad News Boys works more as a collection of singles than a continuous listening experience. You’re constantly switching gears as you move through it.

Xe is a refreshing glimpse of a band captured in its most primordial state, and for all their clinical musical intellectualism, the album also offers snippets of Zs’ odd sense of humour, not to mention each player’s unique talents and virtuosity.

Every song on his debut album is sourced from an old record or field recording, but he and producer William Tyler have gone out of their way to ensure that they don’t sound particularly antique. In fact, while they’ll rest pretty easily upon Americana-tuned ears, they don’t slot too easily into any particular scene.

Bishop’s elaborate flights celebrate what his instrument can do, and express by example the notion that having an interesting time along the way matters more than where you’re going.

Volume is fine, fuzz is good, but it shouldn’t obliterate the songs.

As a portrait of a man in a city sharing his thoughts and feelings, it’s strikingly effective, all the more so for being so far-reaching.

A band that glides effortlessly when it might benefit from a bit of friction. A little ugliness might break up these pristine gate-reverbed vistas and make them seem not just stylish and cool but real.

Range Anxiety provides plenty of action and feeling, though not always in the ways you catch on a surface listen.

His complexity comes through more clearly than ever on Alasdair Roberts, his most stripped-down solo side in years.

Fantastic Planet is a world unto itself, just as carefully crafted but breathing its own breath, living its own life.

The best of the songs heard on LP3 are those where the more traditional rock elements compliment Restorations’ more relentless tendencies.

The power of Carpenter’s best soundtrack work, the title themes to Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13, comes from their relentless, single-minded drive. But when this approach is stretched to full, eight minute tracks as it is on Lost Themes, it can wear thin. This being said, there’s still some fun to be had on Lost Themes.

One thing that’s allowed Napalm Death to keep punching through mirrors is that as its sound has sharpened, the band’s ability to capture high-resolution chaos has sharpened, too.

On Your Own Love Again is something else again, at least a personal landmark and maybe a classic. Simple, straightforward, but more than it seems, this is one of the best albums of 2015 so far and marks the emergence of a very distinctive songwriting talent.

Sleater-Kinney is back in all its spiky, brainy, let-a-bunch-of-ideas-fight-it-out glory.

This is not a welcoming album, but it’s as gripping and immersive as a good film about dystopia.

The rehearsal takes are probably the real draw (aside from the customary production corrections and sonic scrub all reissues get) for those already tuned to the album’s contrary wavelength, and they do not disappoint.

Though much of the album is aggressive in its tempos, the mood continues to circle around to the pensive, moving from catharsis to solemnity and back again. Or, to put it another way, it’s a map of a mind that doesn’t feel self-indulgent.

It’s wonderful stuff, a model of restraint and subtlety that also has visceral pleasures.

It’s somewhere between 2011’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill and, say, Peter Jefferies’s Last Great Challenge For a Dull World; there are discernible melodies here, but above them is an overwhelming sense of loss, and the musical chops to channel it.

This latest recording is assured and full of intent, seamlessly integrating acoustic guitar blues with a rushing undercurrent of electronic noise, backdropping stark self-revelation with sleek synthesizer arrangements.

It certainly makes for a more expansive work, but loses some of the immediacy that defined Stott’s music as recently as on Drop the Vowels.

As the album advances, you get the sense that Clark is finally accomplishing what he claims to have been doing all along: making a techno record.

Despite the generalization that they “sound more like themselves” than ever, it’s worth noting that this isn’t a watered-down performance--all parties involved perform with the conviction necessary to sell an increasingly rarified brand of big-room rock.

The songs are more cohesive now and Walker’s focus has narrowed, honed to a sharper edge on shorter time and the steel of SunnO)))’s contributions, but some of the posts, beams and plumbing still show through its exterior. Those little gaps in the facade help Soused sound more approachable.

Not quite folk songs or noise experiments or vocal soundscapes or really anything you can pin down by category, they are nonetheless very beautiful and as quietly striking as any music you’ll hear this year.

As with many works that get tagged as major breaks from an artist’s established work, truthfully much of Too Bright still feels very much like the work of the Perfume Genius, and anyone looking for more of what they got from past albums will be very satisfied.

It’s heavy in concept but sprightly and reverential in its execution, its hallucinatory breadth reminiscent of the outre jazz of Sun Ra and the wily funk of Parliament, of mid-’70s Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock.

He navigates through colorized thickets of tone on the long songs with the knowing confidence of a veteran wilderness guide.

Iceage cleans up its sound, slows down the tempos and adds instruments like strings and piano on this third full length, but none of this takes the rawness out.

A delicate, quietly ruminative collection of songs that she herself arranged and recorded on computer. It sounds, one supposes, exactly as Bunyan intended.

Guitar solos are fiery but brief and tethered to the main melodic ideas. Everything has been brightened, amplified and streamlined for immediate appreciation.

The emotions channeled here are wrenching, but they’re also honest, and this album’s victories feel earned.

This album is louder, catchier and more memorable [than King Tuff]. It doesn’t break rules or upend conventions, but it fills its songs with more oomph and pressure than ever.

Purling Hiss’s rough but accessible rock, made with craftsmanship and taste, does a difficult thing. It pleases old indie-heads just as easily as it can draw in the new kids.

The results are truly thrilling, mechanized dance for a post-industrial age.

In A Dream ain’t no slouch, but is better piece-by-piece than a continuous flow.

Carnival is far more subdued than Shanghai, simmering with supernatural menace, but never quite breaking into frenzy.

These two groups disappear into each other as naturally as vapor disappears into the air, and the general atmosphere favors an industrial interpretation rather than a drone or doom-metal one.

Goat are a bit too tight and knowing to be transcendental or truly trippy, for now at least, although the Afro-beat leanings that crop up all over Commune point at avenues rich in potential out-of-body experiences.

It contains everything that makes Eyehategod the unique proposition that they are. It’s an Eyehategod album in excelsis, if you like.

You could hardly spend a pleasanter half an hour than drifting to these slackly tuneful, drivingly rock rhythmed, 1960s-esque songs.

It’s a calm, beautiful oasis in Mascis’ coruscating career path, prettier even, because of the carnage before and after.

This album is more grounded in sounds recognizably made by physical instruments. It’s also, in places, openly archaic in its devices and treatments.

Everything is sharp and lucid and full of impact.

The Bug can still shock, and with so many highlights here, it’s hard to complain.

They’ve created one of the most haunting and terrifying metal albums since the legendary Khanate broke up.

More even-tempered than almost any of their previous efforts, it’s their most consistent full-length since Realistes.

Most of what’s here isn’t memorable, but there is a steady flow of moments so ersatz that it is oddly listenable.

This is a hard record to get a hold on, but its vapors make you dizzy.

This is no victory lap around the baptismal fount, but rather a document of spiritual struggle and hard-won artistry.

With Shattered, he isn’t just showing today’s garage-rock young guns he’s still got it. He’s showing them how it’s done.

The aesthetic is head-scratching; ideas are stunted and unreadable as themes unless you look at the music as an arc. But the duo is clever enough to generate an initial sonic mystique that makes you long to figure out exactly what you’re listening to. And that’s the mark of a lasting record.

End Times Undone is another exceptional album from an artist who doesn’t seem to make any other kind.

Past Life Martyred Saints was a ferociously personal record in a way that people responded to, but The Future’s Void is just as intense, even though it takes on almost entirely new subject matter and methods.