Uncanney Valley looks like a Dismemberment Plan record and largely sounds like a Dismemberment Plan record. But yet, it’s not a Dismemberment Plan record. Not a very good one, anyway.

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

It’s its own thing, and a pretty good one.

While there might be a sketchy blueprint here, Prince took R&B to unknown places both musically and by integrating a bizarre personal philosophy that tried to make sense of God, sex, life, and death, but mostly sex.

The n’goni and Cheick Diallo’s flute indicate that Touré is going for a more pan-Malian sound; whether that matters to you or not, they give Alafia a more varied sound that its predecessor without sacrificing the propulsive, calabash-driven feel of its predecessor of its immediate predecessor Koïma.

Functional Arrhythmias moves briskly through these terse, but usually quite rich pieces.

As pleasant as Gunn is a guitarist, he’s an equally low-key vocalist, his flat delivery and barbiturate baritone unobtrusive and lackadaisical — just kind of there, often, buried slightly beneath Trucinski’s and well below his own gently spiraling guitar in the mix. It’s kind of a shame, actually, as Gunn’s Impressionist vignettes are quite interesting on close listen, showcasing Gunn’s marked maturity as a songwriter.

He is comfortable enough with the sounds and effects we associate with Sonic Youth to replicate them without the intervening distance of reference, but he is also ready to push these sounds into other more conventionally tuneful byways.

Though this release is bloated and sometimes inconsistent, Horseback remains a distinctive, at times even bewitching band.

It’s an intricate, carefully crafted set of songs that blows by in a warm breeze.

You don’t so much listen to this album as dive into it, immerse yourself, let it flow past you.

A tremendously satisfying and thunderous effort, and their finest work to date.

While bubblegum’s reliance on the hook has afforded Collins the opportunity to write some of the catchiest songs of his career, Ooey Gooey Chewy Ka-Blooey!’s strongest selling point is its extraordinary attention to detail.

Despite some good ideas and intriguing moments, tracks like “Inside World” feel unsatisfyingly aimless.

It’s a solid album where both songcraft and the estimable loud-quiet-loud dynamic can share the spotlight.

For those of us who love music, in whatever genre, that distorts and mutilates its own conventions, Legacy! is undoubtedly one of the releases of the year, with an infectious, yet challenging groove that startles even as it enchants.

Hard Rubbish is only a simulacrum of thoughtful, accomplished indie rock of the post-adolescent doodling variety.

It’s restlessly beautiful stuff.

Surrounded as a minor spit-polish improvement on Our Blood is sure to please Buckner’s cultish devotees.

Engravings does find Barnes reaching new peaks, even if he’s not radically adding to his sound.

Sleeper is a large, though not radical, departure from the bulk of Segall’s catalog. But in dialing down the fuzz and eschewing girls-and-partying songs to dig deep into his own personal demons, Segall shows marked maturity as a songwriter.

There is beauty on Nepenthe, but it’s altogether too clean and self-regarding to pack much of a punch.

All of what you might have liked about White Hills is here--the Hawkwind-ish guitar excesses, the free-form Kraut drones that go on and on, a la Wooden Shjips or Bardo Pond. It’s just that this time, all the cotton batting has been stripped off, the fuzz removed to reveal structure and complexity underneath.

Glynnaestra is not quite of this world, but that has a good bit of its appeal.

It carries the manic, youthful energy of Parks’s very best works, plants itself deep inside the listener’s brain as though tapping into some deep American (meaning in this case both North American and West Indian) musical unconscious, and magically holds together as a single, unified and exhilarating listening experience despite its meandering through a dauntingly wide range of material and approaches.

This is a significant step up for an already promising band. Speedy Ortiz may not be major yet, but they won’t be arcana for long.

OK, it’s not pretty, but it’s pure Fall. And that’s what makes them a difficult band to feel disappointed with, even if the release is, like Re-Mit, something of a second-rate offering.

It’s not sanctimony that drags the album down so much as lack of focus, both lyrical and aesthetic. Coursing between the ham-fisted message-moments is a nimble and reliably engaging display of verbal dexterity.

On It’s Up to Emma, her sixth album, songs like “My Man” and “What Can I Do” are a bit of a shock--lusher, denser, subtler, their gut-punching intensity smoothed with sustained sounds.

If you have a weakness for fat synth sounds and sputtering early drum machines committed to reel-to-reel tape, this stuff could set you swooning.

Desperation may prove to be the best rock record of the year.

English Little League starts with a memorable and high-quality opener in “Xeno Pariah,” a compact showcase of everything the band does right.... They don’t maintain that high quality--the off-key “Sir Garlic Breath” is just painful--and more often than not, the songs fall into good-not-great territory.

False Idols could have been impressive and believable at fewer than a dozen tracks, but nine of the 15 seem insufferably lazy.

12 Reasons doesn’t find Coles in poor form, but he’s nowhere near his Fishscale peak, in terms of lyrical depth or the intensity of his delivery.

The music is a lot more accomplished here than on, say, Up for a Bit, but still loose, unpremeditated and a little bit straggly.

While there’s not that much darkness in this album, there’s plenty of scratch and friction to balance out the pop.

It’s as classy and unassumingly smart as you’d expect.

The version of Low that helped define a subgenre remains recognizable throughout, but their sound has expanded.

While the album stands well on its own, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors provided an essential scaffolding.

You’ll Be Safe Forever is a wormhole backward in time. It’s also a timeless reminder of how valuable both Mark Van Hoen and WFMU are to the contemporary music landscape.

It’s a magnificent mix, of course, and a great summation of everything we came to accept about this group and "encapsulating an era and putting it to rest.” That’s what makes it feel like such a hollow gesture, a pat on the back they deliberately rejected for years.

Wolf People is working out the difficulties of splicing hard rock guitars and post-rock rhythms with diffident folk melodies as if for the first time, and their full-bore concentration makes it sound fresh and unexpected and interesting.

Excavation is a dark, ominous and sinister album, but Bobby Krlic is too smart to focus solely on scaring the shit out of his listeners, instead using electronics and beats to explore the haunted past and uncertain present in ways that build on his previous output without rehashing tired “hauntology” clichés.

To See More Light is another strong effort from Colin Stetson, and a familiar one. Should there be another entry in the New History Warfare series, Stetson would benefit from a broadening of his tactical approach.

It’s atmospheric, infectious and enjoyable.

While Sky Burial is a bit overlong, and meanders a bit in some of its textural climes, it’s a fascinating statement from a young band to watch.

As it is, Cyclop Reaps has the aura of automatic writing, a stream of unfiltered imagery that is, intermittently, quite arresting, but as a whole shapeless and hard to navigate.

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

Thee Oh Sees continue to mutate in fascinating ways.

No matter the tempo or timbre, this album always feels like an act of love between SeiTang and his vintage equipment.

Vanishing Point serves as a 34-minute distillation of what those who still expect things out of Mudhoney expect from Mudhoney.

The object of his lamentations is conveniently out of reach, hence the constant cat-and-mouse game between enunciation and melisma. When Blake sees fit to loop a phrase or attempt a chorus, the undertaking breaks down under its own weight.

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.

V may be more intimate and introverted than Ancestral Star or Lost in the Glare, but it is no less cinematic. It’s a remarkable return to the fore for Porras and Caminiti.

The songwriting is just as strong as anything in Lerner’s output and much like emotional nadirs, emotional zeniths also fade. Lerner’s moment in the sun is as fun for the listener as it is for him.

As distinctive as it is complex, is as much about the journey as its component pieces, commanding all the familiar electronic music components with ease, but infused with the warmth of soul and a kind of cross-continental sophistication.

While Wakin On A Pretty Daze may not be an anthemic leap forward, it is in many ways even stronger for its existence as example of a craft being so finely honed.

Impossible Truth is a dense and compelling album, but also one that shows room for him to develop into an even more impressive musician.

Shaking The Habitual is quite simply a triumph, a bold and experimental statement.

Cosy Moments moves slightly toward pop-and-hook than the last Kinski album did, but more than maintains its integrity as an outsized purveyor of aggressive guitar rock.

Haw is, likewise, bristly, indelicate, often beautiful but never precious. It bursts with life.

It remains to be seen whether Nomad reveals Bombino to be an artist of limited means or one who is making the occasional misstep on the way to something great.

As an album, Ride Your Heart seems less like a collection of songs and more like a collection of expertly selected Tumblr-ready rock ‘n’ roll signifiers.

You can’t listen to Via without going through the wringer, but you also can’t listen to it without feeling stronger, surer and more defiant afterward.

Revisiting the past isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but turning elements from one of their discography’s savage outliers into a competently turned-out, but not outstanding new chapter in the ongoing story of Wire hardly seems like the most ambitious thing they could have done with that material.

Ripely Pine is overloaded with sound, lurching with sudden dynamic shifts, swiveling from one melodic idea to another, trembling with strings, gleaming with brass, fractured into colored shards of bright feeling.

It’s worth your time to follow him through these grayer back alleys. Once you get your bearings, you’ll wonder where he’s going next.

The members of Ensemble Pearl have made an album that takes heavy, and turns it into a contemplative virtue.

This fourth Purling Hiss album takes a lot of what was exhilarating about the self-titled and Hissteria and adds some structure and melody.

It’s all very soft and comfortable, musically speaking, like an old couch you can’t get out of.

On an emotional level, LISm is hard to get at.

It goes through stretches of boredom. From a distance, the album seems concise and poppy. But up close, the heavy grazing of each song bursts its seams.

Cerulean Salt is a very strong album, frank and blunt and vulnerable.

For illumination on this particular sect of techno’s journey over the past few years, it’s hard to think of an album more deserving of the limelight than Incubation.

New Moon contains a handful of good songs, just like The Men’s prior two albums for Sacred Bones. The main difference here is that the stellar tracks aren’t embedded amongst thrilling instrumentals.

As one comes to appreciate them through repeated listens, it becomes clear that what initially sounds like a letdown is, from another vantage point, an impressive achievement.

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.

Thom Yorke used to make better music than the nine anemic Atoms for Peace cuts here.

Unlike the dark, industrialized beats currently populating many dance music playlists, Woo is light on its feet--more the soundtrack to an evening of beachside serenity than a 5 a.m. scream from some Mancunian warehouse.

Despite its velocity, the album is ambient in the sense that it sounds best when heard with the same indirect, free-associative attention that’s behind it.

Eight is another slow burner but the flame is more ostentatious than we’re used to from the L.A. trio.

As Long Island is the most attractive and consistent Boog release to date, it is still a difficult proposition to say “hey, this band is for you.”

Not much of a change then, is it? But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

There are two fairly strange intermezzo experiments and a few heavier-hitting sing-a-longs thrown in to excite ardent fans of their self-titled debut, but overall the album sacrifices listenability to broadcast and hint at Payseur’s “I will say what I will” evolutions to come.

In between [“Very Large Green Triangles” and "Aesthetic Vehicle"], some of these tunes feel a little bit generic; those tracks have notable features, but they don’t seem to do anything that’s all that different from other Matmos albums.

They’re no longer one of the torchbearers of a perceived trend, but they continue to grind out records of a style and overall quality that are still hard to come by (whether we need more of them is certainly up for debate).

These songs stick in your head in a way that 15-minute guitar jams never do, while still maintaining a bit of hoary mystery at their core.

Push the Sky Away’s rewards are interspersed among plenty of frustrating moments, yet even at its worst, it’s a fascinating album.

A successful homage, What the Brothers Sang seems to distill and convey this vision, showing us the Everlys through McCarthy’s and Oldham’s eyes, but in such a way that allows their distinct aesthetic to shine clearly through.

As is often the case, the idea of this partnership ends up being better than the result.

Perez, Pattitucci and Blade are about as blue chip as they come, and they easily outclass their somewhat calcified counterparts on the Rollins outings, but there are still sections in the collection that don’t feel on par with Shorter’s storied brilliance.

They are super-tight and competent, but with an undercurrent of madness and chaos, a well-oiled machine that is infinitely more interesting because it might blow up at any time.

This is a record of a rare stripe--one that manages to pull a lot of disparate ideas and influences together to inhabit a unified world all its own.

No one’s going to herald Waiting For Something To Happen as a great leap forward, but there’s a subtle refinement in approach happening for the attentive of ear.

No Elephants is a gorgeous album, but maybe the most interesting thing about it is the way it bites through the beauty.

Honeys, like Hope for Men, has some dead spots in the middle, but this time it doesn’t lessen the impact of the whole record, or the underlying fear of sinking back into office park anonymity.

m b v is an impressive work, one in which adventurous and nostalgic listeners alike will find something to appreciate.

Almanac, on the whole, is warmer, more confident and polished than Widowspeak’s self-titled entrée. Enthusiasts along with those on the fence may well find themselves bewitched.