All Tense Now Lax at times evokes luminaries like Coil or early Current 93, but ultimately exists as its own beast, one that is never predictable, always challenging and achieves that oh-so-rare feat in rock music now: it turns the genre inside out and pulls the remains into a brave new form of noise.

The songwriting and arrangements are uniformly strong, seemingly effortless and clever.

Lloyd, the Marvels, and Williams cover an array of emotions while remaining well focused in sound (with the exception of “Monk’s Mood,” pretty enough for inclusion anyhow). It’s an impressive take by a roster of stars given over to the bigger idea.

None of this is so very different from Swervedriver’s catalog, or indeed from the guitar-crashing dream pop of Adam Franklin’s Bolts of Melody, but it is very fine anyway.

The Fiery Margin shames so many songs being written today, not with reproach, but with example after elegant example of how it’s done right.

Mind Hive is concise yet full of restless intelligence, musical ideas and willingness to push boundaries. Taut, tense, not a wasted note, moments of great beauty, 35 minutes of Wire contains enough to fuel a multitude of pretenders.

That Allen is able to continue to do this 45 years on from when he first introduced us to Sailor, Spanish Alice, Jabo, and Chick is as moving and mystifying as that big Texas sky.

Songs for Pierre Chuvin, whatever its origin story, would stand on its own as a regular album, melding retro sounds and recent writing, with its spontaneity driving its melodies and structures. It’s a treasure for fans, full of references and idiosyncratic meaning. Even if probably won’t serve as the best starting point for newcomers to the band, it’s not strictly an insider’s work.

Wild Loneliness is the perfect album for this moment, in which darkness isn’t denied but is repudiated to within an inch of its life.

In the end, though, it is all but impossible not to come away from this album with a grin like Marshall Allen’s. The positive vibrations in the studio are evident, and the musicianship is, naturally, of the highest order (including Allen’s wailing alto).

We Cater to Cowards is a satisfying and sometimes thrilling record. Particularly in its final third, it finds a snarling, crunching groove that slots alongside the general feeling of our current socio-political conjuncture.

It’s a very good set of songs, sleek and wrenching at the same time.

Prog may still have its detractors, but This is BASIC is a case study in why it deserves another look.

It might not be indie (whatever that means these days), and it’s certainly not rock, but The Flying Club Cup is consistent in its idyllic, perhaps idealistic charms.

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

They’ve upped the speed quotient considerably on this outing, forgoing much of the Melvins-inspired slack of previous efforts in favor of ugly, rapid-fire riffing.

For as strong as much of the material on You’re Nothing may be, it is an uneven record, without the focus or pacing of its predecessor.

Hundreds of Days is proof that Lattimore has come into her own as a composer and that her career is taking on the contours of one of her pieces: from stark beginnings something rich and wondrous has emerged.

Rolling Golden Holy is more comfortable and assured than its predecessor, but not as eerily evocative. If the self-titled was a twilight vista full of mist and longing, the follow-up ambles through sunny backroads. It has a bit more Johnson, a bit less Mitchell in its mix, though the two artists find intriguing common ground on multiple occasions.

The main problem is that the songs are so quietly pretty that they slip by without friction, so that you're halfway through the album before you've registered a shift in mood or tempo.

Transference is the victim of an unfortunate irony--the more honed, the less it cuts.

In 27 short tracks, Flamagra creates a vivid, memorable collage of L.A. life circa 2019, speaking to both the complicated present and the imaginative future of the city Flying Lotus calls home.

The Snake displays many of its predecessor’s strengths--good songs, that emotion-laden voice, the amorphous blend of pop and jazz--without trying to be an action replay

Despite all these potential distractions, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill remains, quite simply, a beautiful album, possibly because. Harris feels so comfortable in her own skin.

The new record is less political than its predecessor, but seems to share the same, more expansive perspective.

It's just a smart encapsulation of underground dance music's better qualities, but not so showoffy that it can't work as an hourlong immersion tank.

Not all of the songs here find their mark, but it’s a fun ride nonetheless.

Thanks to Sherwood’s production, all nine songs on Rainford are engaging on the macro level; you won’t have to work hard to enjoy them, and you’ll remember how they go later, and the micro; they are, in the classic dub tradition, rich with bizarre surprises.

Songs From the Year of Our Demise never achieves the crunch or the sugar highs that still makes Posies records so addictive, but it never really needs it. This is pop for adults.

A potent mix of performance art, avant-garde tactics and imagined folk practices, O’Dwyer’s music feels adventurous yet also personal, as if she is examining not her own self but her body and its (temporary) presence in space.

It is awfully difficult to bring audiences out of themselves without stacks of speakers, massed bodies and the possibility of timing things just right, all of which only the right context can provide.

It wildly exceeds the expectations generated by Malkmus’s first solo shot.

Oneida have never sounded more ambitious, yet they’ve kept their proggy impulses on a short leash; the flourishes serve the music, not vice versa.

An album that, without lyrics, tells its stories with many voices and in a poetry that feels tangible, even as it transforms in front of us, catching more light in its sound as it blooms.

Everything in Between is as fine a monument to imperfection as they've built so far.

This is mom-and-dad rock, no more ready to pack up the fuzzboxes than it is to become a grandparent.

It wouldn't be a Low record without plenty of unease, but the soothing, uplifting music works at cross purposes to the lyrics.

It’s this balance between distortion and purity, between chaos and clarity, that makes Red Sun Through Smoke a compelling listen. There’s urgency behind these compositions, reflected in both the intensity of IWC’s vocal delivery and the severity of signal degradation applied via his tape machines

White Chalk shifts between comforting melancholy and supremely discomforting performativity with preternatural ease.

On Lambchop's more ambitiously simple albums, such as Mr. M, that darkness is all the more affecting.

It’s in those moments [of appealing moment of vulnerability] as well as in the swarming chorus of 'God’s Children' that the duo hit their true heights, and those same qualities are the ones most likely to mark this album as an enduring piece of work from two icons of a class that has long since graduated.

Faithful Fairy Harmonies often sounds like a song hunter’s discovery, a forgotten cache of preindustrial songs left behind on wax cylinders in someone’s dusty attic. Yet there’s something very modern about the idea of Josephine Foster being able to create this work almost entirely on her own and driven solely by her own artistic preferences. An old-fashioned voice singing exactly what it wants is not old fashioned at all.

Beast Epic is a good album. In some senses, it’s satisfying. It just doesn’t get to the concreteness, to the creation that makes it something more.

Though the length of each successive Grouper album wastes away, at only 22 minutes Grid of Points provides such compelling sketches that the lost minutes only manifest after the music has stopped. Harris’ sound has always been haunting, but by investigating absence on Grid of Points she haunts herself, capturing a restlessness that has returned to make sense of its ending.

Little about the album feels predictable, neither the musical texture nor the oblique and sometimes imagistic lyrics. Gordon can be startling at times, and she does it all with a cool (a non-commercial, unreproducible cool, that is) that, as much as anything, makes No Home Record so particular to Gordon.

Layers of clever reference resolve into songs that resonate emotionally. They’re smarter than most songs and better played, but they also have that elusive way of landing, so that they seem to tell you more about life and persistence and suffering than what’s in the words.

The Midnight Organ Fight is sharper, more polished, and better in parts than "Sing the Greys." There’s only one unfortunate downside. This sharper, more polished effort displays fewer of the things that made the first album so enjoyable.

While most of Slow Riot and at least parts of Skinny Fists shine through from a distance, much of what makes this album great is its painstaking detail.

Loud, large and unrelenting, Hate is stunning, orchestral pop.

It’s an impressive display of the sort of catchy and fun (natch) music that Newman can make, even without the substantial talents of his usual collaborators.

While Endless Falls and its predecessor created an organic sound by including improvised contributions from a small ensemble, the string and piano contributions here stand with classical seriousness.

If you want to make good, solid, loud rock music in the new millennium, this is your blue print.

Bullish and forceful, The Disco’s of Imhotep is also a work of considerable intricacy and mystery. Jamal Moss aims high and rarely overreaches, making the album not only ambitious, but a welcome blast of modern house that would live up any club night.

Even as you nod indulgently to Jordan’s assertion (on “Pristine”) that she’ll never fall in love again (of course you will), even as you worry (in “Golden”) about her a little confronting an ex- by blurting out “I’m not wasted anymore” (are you sure?), there’s an integrity and authenticity to her perspective that commands respect.

Most importantly, Imitation of War feels more like an evolved, full-band recording, rather than a solo, singer-songwriter record embellished by the contributions of other musicians. Though Cohen strips back to just voice and her formidable guitar chops on songs such as “Under Gates of Cobalt Blue” and “Olympia,” it’s the full-band songs that really shine.

The density and rushing tempo are balanced by more laidback, acoustic numbers such as “Snow” and “Who We Used To Be.” And there’s also a couple of unexpected cover versions — Neil Young’s “Red Sun” and Lovers’ “How the Story Ends” — that integrate seamlessly into the tracklist.

Pajo employs quiet space beautifully here, amplifying his hushed couplets and fret noises by surrounding them with nothing but a vague tape hiss.

The Bones of What You Believe loses steam quickly, leaving nothing new that approaches the promise of the group’s early releases.

Goreas’s more prominent vocal role provides a payoff that helps to balance the moments on this album where the group’s musical ideas aren’t quite as seamless as on its predecessor.

Beirut’s brilliant debut album is full of grandeur and intimacy, with accordions, ukuleles and brass instruments complementing contemporary notions like drum machines and digestible song structures while simultaneously channeling the ancient appeal of Balkan folk music.

Twelfth stands out even in their strong discography.

The potency of AHAAH's genres of choice are both the album’s difficulty and strength; if you aren’t partial to Balkan brass, klezmer or mariachi, abandon all hope of sticking this one out.

This is an awkward pairing -- there are a number of nice moments, but many haven't been fully developed, and seams divide them.

Whether you want to get lost in the detail, immerse yourself in the whole or a combination of the two, this album will reward, awe and occasionally terrify you.

The potential guitar soup and airless drum patterns of death metal is helped along by Bogren’s crisp production. And with Twilight of the Thunder God, they’ve written a set that takes full advantage of experience and polish.

Even after several weeks of listening to this thing, I still don’t feel like I’ve truly got a handle on it. Prepare to immerse yourself in order to tap into its mysteries. Thankfully there are abundant rewards to be found amid the surges of widescreen sound.

As deeply rooted in American tradition as that sound is, it is never straightjacketed by nostalgia.

That shiver of foreignness adds interest to what is essentially a frothy pop sound, as does the occasionally mesmerizing distortion.

Smith’s tracks are both banging and self-effacing, yet the two opposite impulses never seem fully at odds with each other.

Taken individually, the album’s 10 vignettes suffer slightly from a lack of individual cohesion, their structures incorporating mostly several short, seemingly miscellaneous scraps. Yet over the course of several listens, Toxic City Music does provide some sort of overall flow, its slippery patterns serving as auditory snapshots of dank irradiated zones and heat realm communities quarantined in an airless isolation.

The Hard Quartet is one of my favorite recordings of the year, a strong collection of songs made by established artists who refuse to be hemmed in by anyone’s expectations.

Though far from perfect, they flit by in an instant, all washes of trebly guitars and nervous vocals that leave enough heartwarming traces to warrant subsequent returns.

For a band whose promise has often outdone their execution, All of a Sudden is their most complex, accomplished and well thought out record.

The now-well-established ensemble pulls off a notable twofer with Give the People What They Want. It’s made a full-length album that hangs together as a distinct whole, and it’s also written a collection of unique songs that stands tall as an example of what still makes the genre vital.

That this focuses entirely on the unadorned piano may feel like a step down from those who embrace his more adventurous works. The instrumental chops heard here, though, stand on their own very well, and reveal another side to Hauschka’s music — and, perhaps, create some ambiguity as to where he might head from here.

With Trampled by Turtles is indeed closer in the sense that these are verse/chorus/verse songs largely performed by acoustic instruments. Anyone familiar with the sometimes-bluegrass, wide-reaching folk band Trampled by Turtles might guess, though, it still doesn’t sound much like Low. And the record is better for that.

It’s another high point in an increasingly strong discography, one that demands more than just mild praise.

Maybe a bit more editing could have given it more coherence. At the same time, there are no duff tracks, and a lot of fascinating moments.

The darkness of gender dysmorphia may indeed be vast, but given the right illuminating gift, Baby Dee proves there's still light nonetheless--even for hir own chamber music.

More accurately, these duo performances are truly sympathetic and move at the molecular level, making each piece on Cosmic Lieder wonderfully dense with information and ideas.

It remains delightfully messy and is all the more viscerally resonant.

A Bomb in Gilead, assisted by several garage vets (Tim Kerr, Lynn Bridges, Jim Diamond), captures that live sound and goes it one better, uncovering unexpected depth, soul and intelligence in a set of boot-stomping songs.

In short, it’s a one-off that makes accidental magic, bringing disparate talents into temporary alignment without blunting their differences. If it’s a reality show, then it’s one that works and one in which no one should get voted off the island.

Mandel, of course, steals the show: it’s an eight-track statement for him to make, and he has plenty to say.

With The Alligator Bride, more than previous Howlin’ Rain albums, the breadth of the band’s scope shines in streaming color.

The songs often seem made up of sharp, conflicting parts, that come together at angles, fitting into the spaces left by one another.

Rose Golden Doorways is an astonishing experience, uncompromising in its willingness to map extremes of ethereal quiet and the physicality of sound, played without fear by musicians drilling deep into an ugly core to extract beauty and return to share their findings with those who would care to listen.

You could spend a lot of time thinking about why these songs and what Terry and McGhee meant in their own time and what they mean now, but the songs are pure visceral experiences that you feel in your gut and your heart.

The album is warmly, insistently, alive. Its music makes no grand gestures but offers generosity and compassion in its connective tissue.

Ultimately, the songs have a provisional quality, provocatively lovely but elusive and unfinished. If you love shoegaze or the Drop Nineteens or both, though, this is well worth checking out.

The spell is strong enough that you can’t help but follow.

A lot about One Hundredfold reflects its unsettling time and place, with its gleaming technological surfaces, its machine-like precision and its invocation of rot and threat and corruption. If we ever get through this period, we may not want to hear it again, but for now, it’s a mirror to what’s around us.

Silver Age is a very good album, one that recalls, in all the right ways, Mould's best post-Hüsker work, and in particular his Copper Blue.

It’s strange to encounter an album that is so deeply weird and disjointed, and yet feels polished and made with the utmost craft. The result is otherworldly, and plays like a soundtrack to a moody and impressionistic film.

Going Down in History is a visceral, gut-thumping, pretty-close-to-live album one of whose main themes is astonishment at being alive, still, inexplicably.

What makes the Constantines appealing, then, is not that they do something totally new but rather that they do something familiar very well.

It’s definitely a more expansive palette, and not entirely to my taste, but I’ll defend any artist who takes a chance like this.

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.