This album certainly sounds more produced, but the band's investment in studio time mostly means sighing washes of prismatic reverb rather than a new architecture of synths and drums. Still, many of the album's best moments are its most... well, not beat-driven, but beat-bedazzled.

It's full of complexity and contradictions, and trying to grasp it is impossible. But what a joy to attempt.

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.

Standing at the Sky's Edge is Hawley's first major misstep.

It takes time to acclimate to the album's frenetic fog. In that sense, Centipede Hz is both a return to and rejection of form.

While Breakup Songs is hardly less fractured than Deerhoof's other albums, it's also one of their more coherent efforts.

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

Wild Peace is a work in progress, a document of a band on a very fast track, but still figuring out exactly who and what it is.

It's engineered, in a feature-article-friendly way, to embody its creator's personal development and comment on it in a way that's slick, weightless and easily disowned. For the first time in Marshall's career, lighter equals better

If he's not making his most important works of his career, it may well be his best.

Finders Keepers has managed to extract another handful of diamonds from a shaft seemingly unsafe for further exploration.

Guantanamo Baywatch is a pretty good all-instrumental surf band with a terrible singer. Chest Crawl... puts vocals on all but three of its 11 songs, attempting Cramps-style, reverbed rants, Trashmen-esque shouted call and response, Elvis-y 12/8 balladry and hiccuping rockabilly vamps and sheep-bleating, vibrato'd yelps, all badly off-key and dreadfully recorded.

African Electronic Music 1975-1982 is a deceptively smart compilation sequenced at least as well as Bebey's own albums.

The sounds don't mesh, they stand separate and unique, a convoluted series of unique experiences looped and falling over each other in a series of accidents Whitman wants us to call 'dance.'

Mostly, it reminds you of what you liked about both Comets and Six Organs, and takes that good stuff a few steps further.

The results are pretty weird. Which is a good thing.

One of Jamal's best in recent years.

Just as Yeasayer appears to have planted its two feet firmly on the dance floor, it seems to have lost much of its capacity for eccentric pop magic.

Thomas has a near prodigy-like ability to generate indelible hooks that pull from a relatively deep well of inspiration.

While the individual songs here impress, Holograms feels more like a collection of singles than a cohesive work.

Other than some inoffensive feignings at trying something new, there's not too much else to be heard.

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

Shrines lacks any friction; Purity Ring has created a very viable sound that doesn't offend or stick.

Trapist isn't experimenting anymore; the trio is using the tools they know best to subvert nostalgia and keep you ill at ease.

It feels like we are in the privileged position of witnessing a great guitarist running ideas out of his head and onto his fretboard.

In recognizing this missing piece [violinist Noel Sayre] straight on, Occasion for Song may finally have found a way forward.

Oh Holy Molar is a subtle album, but its impact is hard to shake.

Country Funk frontloads these generic examples, and leaves the rest of the compilation up to artists who managed to eke meaning out of the stylistic changes.

The songs punch and swerve and sway like organic beings, structured in a way that amplifies rather than hems in emotional resonance.

Occupied With the Unspoken can be challenging and obtuse. It can also unrepentently beautiful. And, at its best, it's both.

It seems like a humble accomplishment, but it is richly rewarding.

It succeeds, unequivocally, as usual.

Limbo could have passed as a follow-up to this year's excellent Mr. Impossible, and likely would have met with the same acclaim.

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.

More so than any record I can recall, Metal Dance cuts the widest possible swath through the zeitgeist that was British post-punk. Antichrist, meet then your children's archivist.

Their debut conveys a unique sensibility that's endearing without being cloying or calculated.

It's as though she's taken the lesson of The Trip--that you can get over the most extreme pain--and used it to come back to her musical home.

There is an introspective quality to Personal Space.

With piano, female vocals, strings and extra percussion, this is the fullest, most expansive Om album to date.

Whilst this is a lovely, well-made album, nothing separates it from countless other acoustic folk recordings.

While pleasant enough on a superficial level, the band's third full-length, Traps, falls short of the kind of coherent, compelling vision that would lift them up from intermittently-engaging mediocrity.

It's not Segall's best, but Slaughterhouse sits near the top of the heap of loud, ignorant party garage.

Throughout this often incoherent hodgepodge of tunes, Baroness has mostly abandoned the contrast that made its previous records work so well.

Mohn is a foreboding album that also has its comforts.

Broken Water's second full-length, Tempest, is at once a deeply competent and unoriginal record.

Go figure, the most enjoyable parts of the album are hard to separate from the most annoying.

Last year, the Moritz Von Oswald Trio sounded like they were headed for space. This year, I'd say the mothership has come back home.

Welcoming and unique, this is one of the best debuts in recent memory.

Brian Borcherdt has made rough, beautiful songs out of broken bits of things, haunting atmospheres from the gritty transience of dust, and that's something worth doing.

Skullways settled into a sound that's unstuck in time, and works for both the brain and behind.

Subtle differences aside, Magic Trick delivers the same kind of trippy, guitar-jangling, tambourine-shaking pop as Fresh & Onlys.

The reality is that Valley Tangents just sort of floats by as background music even whilst actively listening.

This is not a diamond in the rough as much as it is a piece of carbon that might, with extreme pressure and effort, turn into something someday.

In Longtime Companion, he puts the drawl and shuffle of country into the service of a very peculiar vision, embracing and even seeking out the contradictions.

The layers of rhythm, voice and electronics here possess the ability to tell stories, just like the novel after which they're named, and out of their conjurings emerge atmospheres and melodies that will remain in your head.

[The production] intrudes on the songwriting, distracts the listener, and interferes with what are otherwise solid and sometimes deeply moving performances.

While providing an exciting document of this stage of the band, We Rose From Your Bed… offers a tantalizing hint at what's to come.

The Lost Tapes doesn't feel like a barrel bottom being scraped; it's a scoop into a pond still teaming with life.

The best moments on Appia Kwa Bridge stand up to anything he's ever done, and while it purposely breaks no new ground, there's something to be said for sticking to what you do best.

Natural History is at its best when it's at its most focused.

Shackleton, if there was any doubt, can do big picture and tight focus equally well; he can lead us into the future musically while digging in his heels against the one that's actually in store.

While Puny will likely draw few new fans into Neville's unique sound world, those who have long fallen under the spell of his corroded Kiwi fuckery will be rapt yet again.

They're not breaking significant new ground here, but neither are they standing still.

However it started, this joint project evolved into something unexpectedly powerful, and that it would be a shame if it stopped here.

By blurring the lines of his influences, Wymond Miles has been able to create an album that is very much a reflection of his own vision and personality.

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

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

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.

Halo's voice, pronounced in the mix, artfully mangled, purposely unperfect, reaching at unreachable notes, and occasionally beautiful, is far from a relief. Whether this is riveting or off-putting is for each listener to decide.

Overall, Dub Egg isn't as strong as The Young's debut, Voyagers of Legend, but second-album jitters aren't the problem. If anything, The Young have a little too much confidence in their style. By the time the finale drifts into its dissipating breakdown, it feels a song too long.

It's scattered, without a singular vision, and successful nonetheless.

A little older and a little more experienced, the sound of Claro here is slower in BPM but more graceful as a result.

Early music is fascinating to people in a way that goes deeper than anything else, and for musicians and artists, all those early things spill out in the things we make. Gonzalez does that here in a fun and remarkable way.

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

Throughout, Sylvian's songs retain their peculiar emotional coloration, of tension bubbling just under the surface.

It's good to hear a group continue to challenge themselves without kicking their strengths to the curb.

Even if The Diver is too lacking in originality for many, it does what it says on the tin, with verve, energy and a keen sense of what went before.

Hit Parade is such a pleasure, well made and artfully played, deeply felt but never mushy.

Overall, though, the mood on Fear Fun is consistent in its constant fluctuations; it's eerie when it needs to be and just familiar enough to lure in the listener.

Everything else seems comparatively flat and unsurprising; while the components of the individual songs are different, the results are of a kind, like a set of recipes using the same ingredients.

You can feel him, almost, willing the elements of words, drums and bass to come together in a music that is more than the sum of its parts.

To that end, the most interesting moments are the endings, and the most interesting song on a whole is the title-track that concludes the EP.

Perlas is a lovely, understated album, sure in its stride but happy to wander, and somehow peaceable and playful, even as the songs hymn broken hearts.

A few tracks wisp away into nothingness, but on work like "Your Heart is a Twisted Vine," Nadler approaches timelessness as well.

"Third Mouth" is arrestingly pretty, with its delicate guitars and looming, swelling synth notes, but also unfathomable.

Mostly, though, the record shows off Grass Widow's continued ability to hone their own style.

Sprawling but consistently clean and light, Among the Leaves is sprightlier than much of Kozelek's previous work.

Ufomammut has a compositional focus and restraint that frames the sonic elements well. An excellent continuation of their recent work.

True with its fey, reverb-soaked vocals, its synths and the jangle that recall the late 1980s/early 1990s when college rock started to segue into indie rock, is fun and catchy and worthy of an audience.

Later in the CD, Middleton makes room for his own voice, and there's something very powerful in the way his rough, organic morose-ness combines with the bright glow of electronic instruments.

The Narrow Garden is, at times, polite to a fault, its sensual romance lacking visceral urgency.

The ghosts in Monolake's latest creation are more subtle -- bubbling, evasive presences that unsettle the equilibrium of each track without derailing it.

[Space Homestead] is another in a long line of seductive drift-songs from this most wise, peripatetic and yet enigmatic duo.

The most disarming thing El-P's got going for him is his ability to sound like he's broadcasting from an impossible future even while he's standing right next to you in the present.

This is brink-of-apocalypse dubstep, wringing your guts with its internal tension rather than banging you over the head - without being didactic.

Macaroni is an album that deserves to be heard.

Despite the added breadth, Porras still sticks to the bare necessities to get his point across, making for guitar passages that meditate on every ringing note and hazy chord.

The tracks that are built on longer samples and vocals are more involving.