It is a hazy and misty record, delightfully ambiguous to an extent, pulled together by meandering but highly competent playing tied down by small grooves, at times reminiscent of Sandro Perri.

The Eternal is a rock group playing at the peak of their powers: assured but not ‘comfortable,’ and free with each other.

No massive steps forward, admittedly, but I think Wood can justify exploring this patch of ground for a short while yet.

Each moment of each song is completely unpredictable, to the point where even after multiple listens some of these transitions still seem to come out of nowhere.

On Sunergy, Ciani and Smith have created worthwhile, intelligent work, guiding each other, delving into free composition to capture their environment and their influences.

Endless Arcade will do nothing for the people who wish they would let it rip again one more time—but it’s fine, well-crafted, intricately plotted mid-tempo rock. The edges, if they were ever there to begin with, have been sanded off, and it’s all rather noddingly pleasant.

England’s most defiantly rococo pop group can make a richly detailed record without really trying.

It's bold without making a big stink about it. It's personal without being solipsistic. It's a musical proof of Umberto Eco's thesis.

Screaming Females do not get me because I'm not surprised by them. I enjoy Castle Talk, but it's academic.

Da Mind of Traxman marries the soul of the past with the bangs of the future so fluidly that the sound's innately harsh nature has been marginalized, making for an all-around enjoyable experience no matter the location.

Dee Dee’s strong, confident voice and songwriting compensates for the lack of originality.

Absolute Dissent reaches a few new peaks, no doubt. The band is still challenging itself, much like art punk peers Wire, The Fall and Nick Cave have in the past decade.

It’s such a blessed relief that I Wonder When They’re Going to Destroy Your Face is not just extremely good, but that it is so in the way that Prolapse has always been great. Steelyard and Derrick are in classic form.

With Wheeltappers and Shunters Clinic are back, sounding like Clinic, and it’s a very welcome return. ... Clinic don’t so much sound reinvigorated from their break as they have issued a bracing reminder of just how distinctively compelling they’ve always been.

We have to unpack One Life Stand a bit to understand how its ambition operates. There are, to begin with, some tracks so fine that there is little more to say, except “listen,” including the opening “Thieves in the Night.”

Your Blues is a bold step in a new direction, risking over-the-top theatricality, but with its feet planted firmly on solid ground.

There’s a pleasing friction between the grainy or otherwise affected samples and the polished music around them. Whether they air the frustrations of pioneering artistic transgressors like Dilla and Bruce on “Poor Cops,” or propel the bombastic “Joyrider” with an echo chamber of exclamations right out of Ye’s Rick James sample on “Runaway,” they give the album an imminent sense of cacophony, of a messy world that can’t but intrude on McMahon’s thoughts. It’s a collective sound, and a haunting one.

Wincing the Night Away feels a little paunchy, a little resigned – this is music that not only is mature enough to know that it can’t change the world, but is content to not try.

This is the prettiest album Dorji has made so far, though it’s more than that, profound and spirit moving and just what we need at the moment.

Gloss Drop is the most self-sufficient world Battles have made yet, and a pretty good argument in favor of music that gets less and less interesting the more you know about it.

It’s a formidable return to his more familiar post-’04 pop form, a better album by any assessment than YATQ.

Danilova takes the peaks higher than ever and manages to avoid both the pitfalls of monotony and excessive experimentation.

One Bedroom is the LP on which The Sea And Cake jettisons most of its jazzbo pretensions long enough to finish the pure, catchy, consistent pop-funk record it's always been capable of.

The Line may be as polarizing as ever, but fuck me, can it play a righteous drinking song.

The Horror makes for a largely relentless, immersive listening experience.

His two band mates this time, Erik Walters of Globe and Silver Torches plus NW session drummer Sean Lane (who has played with Bazan solo and Silver Torches and many other artists), have never been associated with Pedro the Lion before. However, with Bazan on bass, they make a sound that is deeply familiar, rough-hewn and rambunctious with big bright guitar chords that punctuate moody, sharply observed narratives.

It's a welcome venture, for sure, and just like all those previous Hot Chip records, In Our Heads won't go unmoved to.

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

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

Strawberry Jam is a mixed proposition if ever there was one.

If an album could have hormone surges and acne, if it could sit home on prom night listening to Joy Division and smoking pot, if it could be as fully convinced of its inner worthlessness as of its ultimate triumph...in short if an album could be fourteen, this would be the one.

A stunning collection of unpredictability that has to stand among the best pop albums of 2003.

As far as conclusions about Popular Songs go, it’s fair to address the reader not as a consumer of the music, but as someone breezing through its clean, familiar architecture. You should check this place out. It’s pretty sweet, and I think you’ll like the light.

One skippable track makes for a slight mark against an otherwise strong return to the world. After decades of teases, EPs and live stuff, a few good singles would have been satisfying, but with a quality album, it’s certainly nice to have the Chills again.

These songs are direct, sometimes stripped down, but the components are robust, clear and smartly mixed. They sound like Osees.

Black Mountain won’t win any prizes for innovation, but their slightly bruised brand of retro is far more fertile than that of their contemporaries.

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.

The mixture of the mundane and the otherworldly is powerful. The writing is exceptionally good. You probably forgot about The The (I did), but it’s time to take notice again.

While I liked it immediately, it took a long time to settle on favorite tracks; there are no obvious bangers. Still settle in, and it’s like having coffee with an old friend, familiar but occasionally surprising, kind but full of raucous humor and very, very real.

Even at its most abstract and cerebral, Fluorescent Black is made irresistibly catchy by its wildly eclectic tracks (courtesy of unsung genius Earl Blaze), at once the smartest and most ig’nant windshield-rattlers out.

Now, they're just going through the motions.

In brevity it betters the 1999 boxed set, in songwriting it plateaus.

Field Music can certainly use each song’s inherent tension to keep each song coherent, but over two album’s worth of music, that tension is diluted, and the songs tend to run into each other.

If you’d said in 2014 that by 2019 Earl Sweatshirt, a scrawny kid from Odd Future, would be one of the most well-regarded hip hop artists, nobody would have taken it seriously. But after 2018’s Some Rap Songs, it has become evident that it’s true, and the new EP proves it.

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

A record that spits in the eye of assertions that they don’t make records like they used to.

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

Almost all of II has a first-take rawness, well recorded, but without fuss.

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.

Everything about Snow feels worn-in, the loose but precise way that guitars and drums and basses coalesce around melodies, the seen-it-all cadences in which these songs are sung, the bemused sense that here we all are again, still mired in a dissatisfactory world, still shrugging away things that hurt and perplex.

Venom Prison makes songs that are just as musically violent as the stuff their deathgrind peers churn out, often thrillingly so. But the Welsh band lifts the subgenre out of the thematic gutter. ... This is a terrific record.

An Imaginary Country is a solid record, but in the context of Hecker’s discography, it can also be underwhelming at times.

Songs of Shame is more humble by an entire order of magnitude, but still contains that feeling of honesty, a feeling that should allow Woods to be more than just some ephemeral pleasure once the hype around the band and their Woodsist label inevitably withers away.

By letting their music do all the talking, Russian Circles have told the story of their personal growth entirely in song, and it’s a growth that involves all the melodic intricacy and inventive theme-and-variation play that their contemporaries have had much greater difficulty overcoming.

Wolfe’s act appears, from a distance, to dare that kind of cheap easy success without succumbing to its tastelessness or disposability. Abyss wins that bet across all of its 11 songs, steering close to the simple release of power chorded, full-throttle choruses but often withholding complete release.

Thankfully, these dudes--singer/guitarist Wesley Patrick Gonzalez, bassist/vocalist Mike Lightning and drummer Darkus Bishop--do a fine job of remembering that the wit will only have a lasting impression if it’s built into some solid songs.

At its best, you can get lost inside Garden of Delete’s rabbit hole of different directions and unexpected asides, but at other times it’s easy to feel shut-out, as if you’re looking in at someone’s intellectual ADHD, but he’s steadfastly refusing to meet your gaze.

Ultimately, Williams never made a record as intense and as beautiful as Our Blood.

Much of what lends the album distinction is the tension created between the band's bold, confident projections and the more delicate core at their center. At times, that tension can be disorienting.

While they sacrifice a little of the propulsive excitement of their debut, the tweaks to their sound deepen the emotional impact of this new set of songs.

It’s as if the drug and crime infested landscapes of Sicaro were Jóhansson’s underworld, but, unlike Orpheus, he did not look back on his return, absorbing and assimilating his discoveries into his increasingly unified compositional aesthetic.

Though generally safe and un-"sexy," Nouns is the sort of album around which healthy musical communities could grow, and that seems to be the point.

Their potential is the wrong thing to appreciate: it's their immediacy, their unstudied and unfocused energy, that hits the spot.

The churning, blues-rock approach is a recent (Smog) development, and too often it overwhelms the feeling of cracked intimacy that makes him great. There are other times, however, when it really works.

It is really a much more modern album than the Americana tag would at first suggest, and the songs are as instantaneous and memorable as the best pop music.

Real Estate’s sound is imbued with the same sentimentality as the rest of the indie class of 2009, but with zero ambition.

The reason this album is such a remarkable feat is because they've willingly entered some of the most tired territory in rock over the last decade and still manage to make it sound as fresh and exciting and invigorating as the first time you or anyone else you know heard music like this.

Bermuda Drain bears the influence of Fernow's recent work with gloom-pop monger Wesley Eisold of Cold Cave. Synths dominate: crystalline, graceful and clean.

A series of alternate takes, compilation tracks and previously unreleased songs that hail, aesthetically, from the Burn Your Fire and before era. Which is to say, they are pared back, emotionally lacerating and carried by Olsen’s eerie country soprano, which wobbles and flutters in a high lonesome style somewhere between Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison.

A buzzing, humming distillation of time and melodic idea that drifts by in sighs and stares and one paragraph written all day and wondering if there’s anything in the refrigerator. It is very much like 2020 in the bunker, hard to see from the road but pulsing with shimmering life inside.

While he has first and foremost created a dance record, it is one that rewards the two left-footed listener with its intricate sleights, redirections and deconstructions. It is also a reminder of the joy of unfettered movement and the art behind craft of producers who provide music that encourages it.

The songs start bare and personal, and if they swell with strings or rollick with muted celebration (as in whirling “In Your Ocean”) they never really escape the quiet, contemplative category. Not that this is an entirely bad thing. There are still effortlessly shapely melodies, fitted like skin with perceptive turns of phrase. There are still very lovely arrangements, a little airy this time around, but neither slack nor stuffed nor overly attention hungry. And the musicianship is, as always, excellent.

Formerly Extinct is a little over-cooked, and the album would have benefitted from being left a little more raw at its core.

Psapp's music is so beautifully complex that upon first listen it might seem a bit haphazard or amateurish -- with all its bells, whistles, whizzes and whirrs -- but after repeated listens, the oddities take on a precise purpose and fit perfectly within the melodic structure.

It’d be hard to be disappointed with Convivial, however. It’s not necessarily an immediate listen; it took a few spins before the leaps Ripatti has made started seriously to sink in. But it’s the strongest thing he’s done, either as Luomo or under his Uusitalo or Vladislav Delay guises.

It takes an incredibly steady hand and a reservoir of patience to pull off this tone, but delightfully, still below the surface is that tension. There are these competing moments in her music then, and it is the way they compete that makes her aesthetic unique and beautiful.

It's decidedly a Pallett album, just breezier. I like it.

No posthumous album can be heard without a sense of loss and absence. No matter how much you enjoy these tracks, you must also acknowledge as you listen that the world will go on without this singular talent.

At its best, though, We Are Nobody nails an uneasy mood that feels like a natural evolution of the Chap's acerbic wit: waiting for a punchline that never arrives.

One of Jamal's best in recent years.

Répercussions exists in a completely different universe, far removed from rock tropes, and sits comfortably within the spectrum of modern electro-acoustic and minimal composition.

Just Say No… is quite probably the group’s heaviest and most abrasive salvo to date.

Its tracks are elliptical and abstract even as they stretch towards forming actual grooves. But in that respect it’s close to being the most rewarding for those who can stomach this strange, out-of-sync universe.

It’s all very nice and a bit surprisingly, like your grandma’s favorite stew with some unexpected new spices in it. For an impromptu gathering of talents, Bonny Light Horseman feels very lived in. Here’s hoping it’s not a one-off.

Sagittarian Domain is an intriguing offering from Ambarchi, if not something with a great deal of potential for repeat success.

This is not your parents’ contradance music or your cool older brother’s free improvisation or even your cousin’s slightly over-ripe New Weird Americana, but something else entirely. Amidon learned the old tunes by heart so he could stretch and cut and distort and juxtapose the pieces to make music that resonates and expands.

If you set aside some uninspired, cryptic-as-poetic moody fantasy lyrics (and a few forgettable songs truly as slight as whispers), Becoming a Jackal reveals a hidden stash of imminently memorable melodies.

It's another misfire with a handful of great moments that point to something better.

The opening seven tracks on The Sun Awakens are probably the strongest sequence of songs on any Six Organs release so far.

It's great that Natalizia and Willis are playing with the boundaries of genre, but the experiments feel overly cautious, leaving the album full of pleasantries and devoid of punch.

Though Good Sad Happy Bad do outstay their welcome across these 40 minutes, there’s plenty here to enjoy if you like sing-song sweetness that’s bent lysergic and girded with a sneering, switchblade edge.

Damon and Naomi and Kurihara have made art out of what was in front of them, and it’s a gorgeous, emotionally resonant reminder of the times.

Antibalas is charging ahead, poised for continued recognition and celebration among Afrobeat devotees, as well as first discovery by world music dabblers.

There's a number of visual pieces that lose their power, and while Notaro is good at describing what she's talking about, those visual bits interrupt the flow. In that sense, Good One feels like a straight showcase for her act, one that doesn't make concessions to the audio-only listener.

Despite there being a wealth of moods and stylistic flourishes on Distractions, it nevertheless coalesces into a forceful and homogenous whole.

Despite the subtle stylistic shifts and gradual momentum building and releasing, no song feels out of place or misjudged.

It's All True is exactly what mature dance pop should sound like in 2011.

If Some Of My Best Friends Are DJs doesn’t do anything that wasn’t done on his enthralling 2000 LP Carpal Tunnel Syndrome -- and if, at a scant 35 minutes, it’s almost over before you notice it’s on -- it’s still worth hearing.