Model of You is neither sparse nor overstuffed, relying on a few, highly polished elements to make up each song and allowing each of them ample space to unfold.

The songs are best when they say the least, implying depths that are, perhaps, mostly in the listener’s head.

The sound is open and uncluttered, rare for a genre that relishes tangles. There’s lots of liquid synths, and were they gracing a 4/4 thump, they’d have an Ibiza glow to them.

Third Time to Harm is a visceral pleasure, celebrating brawn over brains and shout-along choruses (“What pretty parasites!”) over songwriting complexity.

Amid the brightness and snark of another consistently entertaining Fujiya & Miyagi record, it’s a reminder that even our modern Lucifers have many dimensions to them.

Beauty & Ruin is Bob Mould’s catchiest, most tuneful album since Copper Blue, full of ear-wormy melodies and bouncy hooks.

It’s clearly the best Young Widows record.

There are differences around the edges that are making Fresh & Onlys ever more interesting, fresher and more singular, a better version of what they have been promising all along.

Seek Warmer Climes is still more visceral than cerebral. It washes over you in a foul, cold, gritty spray, and you can hardly breathe when it’s coming straight at you.

Admittedly, this is a record with a specific style and set of concerns: if you don’t like your post-punk hyper-focused and with Van Morrison-levels of nods to mysticism, you may lose patience with it quickly. For those who appreciate the iconoclasm involved, however, there’s plenty to savor here.

Sugar and spice and everything twisted, Daniel continues to write music for people who like to think about why they like something and can appreciate creative, sincere homage.

The balance is the thing, and on Here and Nowhere Else, the balance is very, very good.

At its best, A U R O R A is an exhilarating work, propulsive and contemplative, able to allow for moments of searing volume and elegant beauty.

The first four songs on Are We There don’t work as well as the later ones. Ultimately this doesn’t hurt, because the later ones are among her very best.

Tempest delivers her labyrinthine tales with forensic detail offered gracefully like Saul Williams, Roots Manuva, Asian Dub Foundation and Tricky / Martina Topley-Bird on Pre-Millennium Tension (think “Bad Dream”).

Musically, Sunbathing Animal is much the same as, but slightly more feral than, Light Up Gold, its two-stepping vamps harder and jitterier, its strangled guitar licks more aggressively atonal.

Three full studio albums into their reinvigorated latest phase, and Swans’ ability to surprise remains as potent as ever To Be Kind might just be the most startling and uncompromising of the trio, although these qualities take time to unveil themselves.

Whether or not this incarnation of Horseback is apocryphal--remember, Miller says he won’t have this form forever--it’s quite possibly the closest Miller’s come to seamlessly blending roots music and metal. Even if he doesn’t think there’s a line to cross.

Another subtle evolution of Fec’s homogenous sound palette, Ultima II Massage is a reason to keep you coming back 11 years into his career to witness him experiment with his inimitable aesthetic.

Asiatisch is impersonal and airtight. Musically, the album is fascinating, diverse and expertly produced. But a chance was perhaps missed to deliver something with more to say.

The best and most consistent Pink Mountaintops album to date, Get Back mines a deep vein of nostalgia via song references, memory-scape imagery, and musical touchstones in kraut rock, post-punk and new wave.

Dead Rider has created a vivid, weird, deeply compelling world on this album, but the band isn’t going to come to you; you have to get on its level.

The energy ebbs and flows between these two poles, so that intellectual inquiry becomes a gateway towards straight-on freakery, and wild intuitive leaps make sense of complex formulae.

The real masterstroke of So It Goes is that it’s not: This is one for the here and now, as contemporary as New York hip-hop gets.

Though this is an enjoyable listen and a vast improvement on their debut, the promise of where they could end up is its biggest appeal. Stay tuned.

It doesn’t help that the production is full of weird echoes and indistinctness.... And yet, there are some genuinely good songs here.

Throughout Boy, the action recedes into a murky distance from which disembodied details reach out like the tiny malevolent creatures that hide under the staircase in your nightmares.

Estara is not as musically challenging, hooky or advanced as some albums by similar artists.

The songs are abbreviated, but nonetheless complete, coherent and fully-fleshed.

They’re still nodding to early Pop synthesizer proponents (The Human League, Fad Gadget, A Broken Frame era Depeche Mode), and now mixing in a beefed-up, contemporary EDM blast with the je ne sais quoi that the group infuses into everything it touches.

If the quartet’s debut challenged the assumptions of what kind of music this group of musicians might make, this album shows off their own assurances: not a retread of what’s come before, but a solid follow-up to it.

If you’re a fan of the Whigs, Do to the Beast will push all the right buttons and even add a few new ones for you to think about.

Re-invented and fully assured, Pattern is Movement is a band that can do what it wants. One can’t argue with Pattern is Movement’s results.

Protomartyr has raised the bar high enough for any bands to follow, so high that most won’t even know it’s there.

Though perhaps not as unique or groundbreaking as Ugly Side of Love, Beyond Ugly is still a pretty fabulous record by a band mostly alone in a top-shelf niche.

Motion uses some new approaches, but ultimately it fits in just fine as another solid entry in a rich and rewarding body of work.

The vocals alone would be a lullaby, but in this broken orchestra, they’re insomnia. Yet spending time with this record allows the burs to break off. If you give in to its strange terms, You is soothing.

Daughters of Everything is a fine, fun rock ‘n’ roll record that struggles with a gimmick it didn’t really need.

These New Puritans are still thinking the same off-kilter, rhythmically intricate thoughts, but filtering them through a whole different music making process. Either way, it’s impressive and quite lovely. Nicely done.

All told, Light Divide is a pretty thing, transporting and enveloping and full of glowing tones. Yet even as you’re listening to it, it slips away, and when you’re done, it’s like you’ve been asleep.

You can’t hear Signals without hearing modern London.

The Eagulls’ album does a fantastic job of funneling the band’s energy. That’s the good part. But as for the subtleties--the way that players interact, the fit between chug and melody, the depth that emerges with occasional negative space--you won’t find any of that here.

An uncompromising set of solid songs set on the internal and external eve of destruction.

This is a record you could play on the car stereo whilst burning up the miles on the Tennessee interstate, and it’d never sound wrong.

Black and Miller aren’t as bluntly exposed as on their earliest records, but they still keep Diamond’s production bracingly in check for a sound that preserves a pervading visceral punch.

Unfidelity never feels derivative or retro, Edwards displaying an alchemist’s touch as he drags all these influences into a potent melting pot.

Lost in the Dream continues Slave Ambient’s trajectory, threading wispy, half-spoken melodies through emerald forests of tone, ducking conventions like riff and hook in favor of edgeless, shapeless sensuality. These are songs that drive off into dune-like landscapes, always in motion, never arriving.

These two tracks ["Feels Real" and "Do It (Right)"] read a bit corny on paper, but Lambkin’s knowledge of genre, song form and structure and how to make music evolve (i.e. filters, not just slapping in new sounds when something gets boring) bundle up the awkwardness with cool to present fresh ink amidst the droves of novice DJ nostalgists.

Though the harmonic material isn’t always major keys, everything (mix, production, sonic universe) is pleasant, resolves nicely; the song structures are divided into equal measurements; much peace and congruence are present.

These are exceptional bar-band songs, sure, but they’re still bar band songs. Where Tomorrow’s Hits suffers, though, is in its wholesale familiarity.

After years of sluggish BPMs and charts run by screw-influenced beats, the people may be ready for something with the uptempo beats of Presents James Grieve. The question now is whether Addison Groove wants to be the man for that job.

If the first half feels a little like a warm-up, they deliver the payoff in fine style and by the end you may feel as worn out as the band must be.

The album isn’t easily chewed or digested, but certainly worth the taste.

Emmaar’s reassuring familiarity in the face of the forces of war and commerce is at once reassuring and a bit concerning. On the one hand, it’s great to see that the group remains incorruptible and in touch with its essence; on the other, a bit of buffing and shining aside, if you know the band’s sound, you already know this record.

Its greatest strengths are more memorable: the songwriting is strong, even if the album is a little top heavy, and it’s a lot of fun to watch Aaron Funk go way out on a limb without a safety net in sight.

Alcoholic ne’er-do-wells or not, New Bums has allowed the duo to ditch old genre entrapments and celebrate new life as troubadours of enrapturing darkness.

There are so many things here that shouldn’t mix, but the brute force of Cherry’s personality smooths them.

On Sleepwalking Sailors, Helms Alee finally feels bigger than the sum of its parts.

Get beyond the Phil Collins-into-Peter Gabriel style clarity, and the songs start to take hold.

On this album, she both reminds the listener of her strengths as a songwriter and subtly redefines the ground on which her music rests.

Burn Your Fire is a minefield in the best possible way, studded even in its quietest moments with subterranean threat.

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.

It’s the steady pacing of Trouble, the band’s commitment to the thoughtful lyrics and the permission given to influences and early passions that guide Hospitality towards a sound that is recognizable, only richer, deeper and closer what they were aiming for all along.

Nothin’ But Blood is a wild, discontinuous kind of ride, rattling from tradition to mayhem, from salvation to specific descriptions of sex acts, in a flow of songs that are no more like each other than if you’d pulled them from a pile of tapes. What unites them? A bristling electric guitar. A laceratingly unsentimental view of life. A coruscating energy that burns right through whatever you were expecting and reveals the hard true life-force at the bottom of Biram’s songs.

With Held in Splendor, this group discovers their influences, then surrounds and deconstructs them. At its best, the album achieves bliss and demands attention.

The songs here have lost none of the lonely strength of their earlier material, and the band’s performances are no less gorgeous; but the new strength of Gem Club is that their music is capable of being just as joyous as it is devastated, and the result is powerful.

From All Purity will never have the impact of Earth’s second album, Khanate’s self-titled debut, Take As Needed For Pain by Eyehategod or Sleep’s drone doom bible Dopesmoker, but it contains all the important ingredients that made those records so essential.

Ghettoville is a purposefully secretive record, a vision quest, a Cassavetes lens--at times challenging to sit through, but the more you look into it, the more you might discover.

Morgan Delt is too academically rooted in the past to really disconnect from it. Still, as a debut, it shows some promise.

If the first half of Chiaroscuro is tragedy you can vogue to, then the ending is just tragedy--pure, simple and affecting.

[The songs are] skeletal, bittersweet and exquisitely quiet--open enough to make the most of what her cohorts could offer, firm enough to have a semi-personal punch.

Mug Museum gives off a solid first impression, but gets sturdier the more time you spend with it.

Come to Life feels fragmentary in places, still more mixtape than debut album. It can be amazingly disorienting.

Innocence finds Pontiak as hefty as ever. Its opening salvo finds the band in particularly fine form, carving out melodic passages from a tempest of fuzz and feedback.

Taken as a whole, Brothers and Sisters is a remarkable piece of work. It easily outclasses the two previous Jurado/Swift collaborations, and makes a strong opening bid for one of 2014’s best albums.

Sonically these songs are crafted out of beautifully thin, translucent textures that brush over one another to create half hues and harmonies. And lyrically, too, they pile evocative, not definitive, images one on top of the other, until a song can encompass two diametrically opposed ideas without any tension at all.

There’s a jump in recording quality, but this isn’t always a boon to this sort music and can be a distraction here.... When they put their harmonies in unexpected setting, it works.

If you can’t conceptually get behind the concept of a metal kid giving up noise for beauty, you’re probably not going to like the record. Otherwise, check it out. It’s lovely.

Rave Tapes is the sound of a band equally unafraid to strike out in a markedly different direction, one confident in its voice and skills in a way that, along with the quality and control of the songs here, speaks well for Mogwai’s future.

In a world where electronic music is omnipresent, Laurel Halo succeeds on Chance of Rain in creating a distinctive voice, one that never allows the listener to settle into a sense of security.

When they’re not trying to imitate the inimitable, Painted Palms hit a pleasant if not ground-shaking plateau.

When it comes to the spiritual, Bad Debt is a worthy addition to a lineage that preaches the complicated records resonate strongest.

Until the Colours Run is a huge improvement, though: bigger, messier, louder and more transcendent. If you’re into Speck Mountain, The Besnard Lakes or No Joy, this one is worth a spin.

There’s a Dream I’ve Been Saving is an engrossing 107 song compilation of weird artistry that panders to all the trends of its era, that being 1966-1971.

The most heartening thing to be said about Music for Shut-Ins is that it reflects the opposite ethos, a go-for-broke glut of great songs in or around house music’s orbit.

It may be that he doesn’t have a country bone to stand on, but he obviously knows all about the music’s spirit.

It coasts at times too comfortably its relative strengths, and it never really generates a significant excitement in its more extended jams.

Ski Mask is almost certainly not Islands’ most accessible or enjoyable work, but it ranks with the band’s most forceful and accomplished.

He works in a middle ground, neither minimal or elaborate, making strong impressions by getting pushy. That’s what follows seduction.

Silver’s a markedly better songwriter on Outside than on Continent, more adept pacing and structure, more keen on crafting variegated moods and atmospheres. But Continent’s strength was its insistent hip-hop thump, which is largely lacking on Outside.

Too many records are boring. This one is visceral and scary, which is an improvement.

Whether Ferraro’s singing is purposefully amateurish or not, it puts the album in a particular light, one in which NYC, Hell 3:00 AM is either an awkward misstep or a tongue-in-cheek spoof. Actually, it probably falls somewhere between the two, but either way, this isn’t James Ferraro playing to his strengths.

There is something very powerful about these interpretations, as Stewart and his crew cut past the elegant phrasings and the precise constructions of Simone’s songs, and expose their bruised and bleeding vulnerabilities.

Though each of its cuts clocks in at less than 10 minutes, Forever Becoming is still largely imbued with Fire’s sense of movement and grandeur.

Even as Barnes works with a more limited palette, the drums/bass/guitar ensemble sounds as tight and crisp as could possibly be desired. He just doesn’t seem to want to be as gentle as the music that he has created here, resulting in a frustrating, and sometimes rather irritating listen.

Solar Motel is Forsyth’s most traditional album in recent memory.

Burial doesn’t step into the spotlight particularly masterfully. For the first time, his rhythmic choices get a bit lost, and some of the cuts to silence are more clumsy than disorienting.

One of its strongest allures was its comfort and maturity.