When “Upper Ferntree Gully” takes off, it’s to the sort of easy midtempo riffs that once made Billy Corgan listenable, with a soupçon of Mascis noise thrown in for good measure as Smit builds an intergenerational metaphor from a kangaroo pouch. It sets the scene for an album of sharp twists that owes its success to the personality and wit of Smit’s omnivore genre jigsawing.

10 unassuming but gem-like songs that live up to their past work.

He may not voice things like Ellington would have, but it doesn't matter. It could never stop, as far as I'm concerned.

The BQE is best listened to in complete ignorance of the track titles, packaging, or even professed subject matter. The music speaks best when it speaks for itself.

Like most bands, Girl Friday has never been crazy about genre labels, and if you asked them whether they were pop or punk or indie, they’d very likely just say yes. By sliding continually between categories, though, this band creates a very absorbing tension between what they are right now and what they might become in a measure or two. You have to pay attention. You can’t take these songs for granted.

Clattering drum machines and gorgeous washes of tone are topped off by a standout vocal turn that carries the album off into the clouds, a searingly emotional purge and soothing balm all rolled in one.

What To Look For In Summer is a terrific career spanning selection of some of their most loved songs the performances of which give lie to the common wisdom about a bunch of fey, romantically challenged, wallflowers. If anoraks just wanna have fun we could do far worse than spending 100 minutes with Stuart Murdoch and company.

The album is vigorous in its grooves and leaves a powerful, unifying impression with its words.

The result is a collection that transports you to place and time you’d probably never get to otherwise, rocks your body, feeds your curiosity and makes you feel at home. Well done, I’d say.

By repurposing this music with a child’s lack of regard for history, they make it fresh.

Akron/Family II really captures a feeling of happiness and at the same time melancholy, and that's what makes it beautiful: those two feelings at the same time.

Twelfth stands out even in their strong discography.

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

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

Less folky and more eclectic than his past work, Crow offers ample evidence of growth in Banhart’s range as both a performer and a songwriter.

[This] is the first time Bowie’s been interesting since 2002’s overlooked Heathen, and if you prefer his avant-garde side, this is the first sustained material of its kind in far longer; both of these are certainly things to celebrate.

Far Enough is the first of this band’s albums to get a wide U.S. release, and it’s a doozy, no question. ... This is no over-earnest diatribe. It’s a series of party anthems about stuff that matters. One drum flattening call to arms insists that “Anger’s Not Enough,” and that’s right, there’s a lot more here. But it’s a really good place to start.

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.

Although lacking an ear-grabbing single or a truly hummable hook, the New Amerykah Part Two does something that current R&B seemed incapable of: it charms.

Maybe it's less dangerous, stoopid and contagious in moments. But for this newest gift, I do feel blessed nonetheless. In the end, I guess this largesse just makes me smile.

For such menacing music, the overall effect is oddly inviting.

Jones remains emotive yet controlled, her artistry enhancing the warmth of her delivery, taking a sound from the past and making it still new and still vibrant. This one is a time machine of sorts, but it looks back to push forward, fulfilling the persistent vision of Soul of a Woman and Sharon Jones.

Tripper is the cleanest, leanest--and, arguably, most accessible--record Hella have made as a duo, showing off some fantastically tight playing and even a few hints of what their music desperately needs: clarity.

Heavy stuff, but the music is often not. Cuts like “Erghad Afewo” keen and wail ecstatically, the eerie vocals taking you to other, more triumphant places, the insistent rhythms urging your feet and butt to move. A Tinariwen concert is always a celebration, and since we won’t have access to that, the transporting joys of Hoggar will have to do for now.

Where Horn of Plenty still had spare singer-songwriter arrangements, Yellow House sounds far more elaborate.

The breathy blur of Pratt’s vocals give these tracks a will of the wisp quality, as you chase after the lyrics only to find yourself becalmed and beatific amid iridescent fog.

Joachim Nordwall, Daniel Fagge Fagerström and Henrik Rylander are enough of a quorum and enough in sync with one another to make a defining closing statement.

The result is his most fully realized album to date, and a reminder after those lower-profile years that Lekman’s voice is a singular and valuable one.

One of Deerhoof’s finest albums, something we should have been prepared for, even this far into the rockers’ career.

The music offered here constitutes the expected fluid mixture of rhetoric and instrumentation.

Ugly is Screaming Female's Steve Albini record, an inevitability for a group like this, and the trio brings its "A" game to the project.

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

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.

Comradely Objects, is the band flexing at the peak of their powers.

If you like dub techno - and who among us with a taste for dissociated, repetitive, awesomely deep and gritty music wouldn't? - you're bound to like a lot of this stuff, and love some of it.

Yes, you’ll hear echoes of influence but McGreevy and Lewis have forged their own path based on really good songwriting and musical chops.

Though their formula has changed scant little over the past three decades, it has lost little of its potency.

It is the first album he ever recorded in a studio, and both the clarity of the recording and the precision of the performances betray considerable effort spent getting it right.

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

Orange is another worthy and replayable stack of oddball tunefulness.

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.

Bozulich stumbles through a sagging mansion of sound like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, which is to say, arch, elegant and utterly used up. But there is power in the decrepitude.

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.

However central Sylvian’s bleak commentary, the weight and suggestiveness of this record gives it a sense of unpredictability, possibility, almost an openness beyond itself. It’s absolutely superb.

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

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.

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.

The band’s mechanics are becoming more masterful, with Marian Li Pino’s drums particularly boosted on this outing.

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.

Despite a 100% turnover in accompanists and recording locations from his William Tyler-produced debut, he doesn’t sound terribly different here. His big, distinctive voice can hold you via sheer volume and timbre even if you don’t listen to a word he says, and his robustly picked electric guitar is a band by itself.

The point is that new stuff is added without compromise or dilution. And listening here, you realize that change is good and maybe even necessary, no matter how much you like how Protomartyr has always sounded.

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

The roughness, the edgy vocals, the cacophonous guitars won’t be for everyone, but this set is a welcome window back through over 20 years of avant-rock.

I do know that there’s a lot to love about Cutouts, and it’s certainly a more substantive release than its title might suggest — that these are the cutting room–floor tracks from the Wall of Eyes sessions. Far from it: overall, this is a more colorful and dynamic record.

Fennesz has produced a maximalist experience with apparently minimal equipment but this is not about the machines rather the human producing the sounds. Agora is another deep exploration of the boundaries of experimental guitar ambience in which to lose oneself.

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

The whole thing took shape with hardly any notice and minimal rehearsal, across language and cultural barriers and in front of an audience, but nonetheless catches a wave and holds onto it in a very intuitive way. Probably if the players thought too hard about what they were doing, they’d lose the thread, but they don’t. It’s a fast ride and a jam and well worth experiencing.

There’s a lot that could go wrong with this approach on Sun Gangs--but nothing does. For all the arch drama, the big rock songs on here are frenzied, and the small indie pop songs are lean and melodic.

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.

Sometimes I Wish I Were An Eagle is like a Technicolor epic--brass accents, swelling strings and an odd, lingering hollowness at its core. Apocalypse, on the other hand, is more like an 80-minute Ranown picture--sinuous, slippery, less accessible, more satisfying.

Dizzying and beautiful at once, it is unlike anything else from 2009.

Polizze is in no hurry to make an impact, allowing the music to grow organically, often spreading out into long-form improvisations. ... Worth the wait? Absolutely.

Five years is a long time to make fans wait, but the quality of the material and willingness to tinker with their fairly rigid pop formula has resulted in another memorable, extremely listenable collection of songs.

Preserved and proffered in sound, the Parks, both physical and cerebral become a source of solace and wonderment.

Dupuis’ reference may run more to punk and indie, rather than disco/R&B, but the effect is eerily similar: gender studies inquiries encased in the kind of music that once looked uncritically at female disempowerment. Yet while it’s serious stuff, it’s also fun, with big bashing choruses and somersaulting strings of words that surprise and entertain.

Wallpaper Music is a lot more complicated than it seems, and those complications give it a depth and resonance that most garage punk records can't muster.

Researching the Blues may be one of the most pleasant surprises of 2012.

In the end, it feels wrong to call this album a solo record, since it is defined and elevated by the people Goddard works with. He’s been adventurous in seeking out partners, choosing some familiar ones and some that no one would have predicted, and the risks, especially, have paid off.

In the newfound center on Thank You Very Quickly, Eagleson and company have stealthly transitioned from indie ethno-experimental vanguards to genuine Afro-Rock champions, erasing 7,000 miles of distance and so many years of history.

You Are Free almost has two disparate styles, and that would be the criticism here. Yet that's the result of her particular mania: stand up, shout then quickly retreat to your seat and hide your face.

There’s actually a groove there, however, and Author & Punisher’s lot is to never give in to the base aesthetics of speed or pummel. Instead, Melk En Honing explores every corner of sub-doom tempo, with occasional detours into extreme melody and harmony buried deep enough to avoid comparison to Alice In Chains and neo-doom sweethearts Pallbearer.

Downstate is far more varied [than 2023's Upstate] and the songs make their point and get on with it — a definite improvement.

It's Bowles's reflections on the silence of the desert, the way its stillness rearranges your molecular structure, that resonates with Travels In The Dustland.

Life has a wholly predictable uniqueness.

This is an album that pulls you up out of gloom and into exultation, and if it’s manipulative that way, so be it. As Watts says, we would like to be like that, and Full Circle makes it feel, at least for a little while, like we are.

At its best, it's both cathartic and transformative, harnessing the transformative power of empathy to politicize the personal and personalize the political.

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.

With these five songs, The Fresh & Onlys have finally moved out of the garage for good.

The band comes together neatly, covering a range that encompasses stripped-down recordings and wider-canvas anthems. Avi Buffalo make songs that, at their best, remain lodged in one's head for days.

For the most part, Birgy’s excitability lends the album an infectious charm. Ultimately, Mega Bog deserves to be appreciated alongside similarly talented proponents of the absurd, such as Aldous Harding and Cate le Bon. Dolphine is a strange and affecting listen; the sound of a free-wheeling afternoon in the sun curdling into early-evening shadows.

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

Benchetrit and Spearin’s production work gives You, You’re a History in Rust a pleasantly unpredictable nature.

Dry Cleaning gave us a taste in 2019; New Long Leg is a banquet upon which to feast.

Way is cleaner, clearer and more luminous--in all ways Ecstatic Sunshine’s best effort yet.

The Australian trio feedtime's 1980s recordings, which are collected on The Abberant Years box set, prove them to be traditionalists of the best sort.

The concept and the execution are both spectacular.

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.

An intriguing record that never repeats itself.

It’s a wonderfully rich sound palette, and one that plays to the strengths of both musicians.

An album of subtle yet emotionally resonant songs.

The end result is that, as far as we know (for now), Album of the Year is Black Milk continuing along at his very best.

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

While Teenage Hate sits squarely in the flamey-shirt scene of the '90s, even the greaser version of Jay knew how to bust up cliches.

DIIV have synthesized a bunch of fresh influences, including guitarist Andrew Bailey’s penchant for hip-hop, plus the band’s new-found fascination with sampling and tape loops, to craft their most diverse and perhaps finest album to date.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor still has a place in this flattened landscape despite its familiarity, its flaws, its limitations. Luciferian Towers is testament to the group’s staying power, an unexpected but welcome declaration of defiance.

What makes the band so great isn’t just their utterly compelling sound; it’s that on this, their finest record, they’re not so much going for “fucking epic” as for emotional heaviness.

Perhaps most impressive is that in what is arguably the band's most traditional record to date, Tinariwen manages to loop in highly recognizable people and sounds without any effort.

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