The album, produced by Chris Funk of the Decemberists, manages to be both weird and relevant, experimental and comfortable. Malkmus’s grounded surrealism makes for a series of songs that offer connection within a skewed take on life. The music, in any track’s given mode, encourages persistent resistance of the way things are without being heavy-handed. It bridges worlds wonderfully and shows Malkmus to be as vital as ever.

Kids Aflame is the good stuff, as loosely played as it is meticulously plotted.

Callahan’s honeyed, slightly gravelly bass-baritone, which comes across as dispassionate to the point of being noncommittal on Blind Date Party at times, and Bonnie Prince’s tenor, consistently vulnerable, raw, wide open, complement each other in a compelling way, establishing dramatic tension and unearthing emotionally resonant inner dialogues within the album’s songs.

Oceans Apart is the album that fans have been waiting for, the one that brings back the flawless production of their early releases and the cynical/idealistic tradeoff in Forster and McLennan’s songwriting.

It is full of unusual clarity and purpose and seems to have benefited from a certain amount of restraint.

The Mancy of Sound and its predecessor are straight-up essential listening, and gloriously exciting music. The pulse quickens each time I put this one on.

The emotions channeled here are wrenching, but they’re also honest, and this album’s victories feel earned.

You could spend a lot of time thinking about why these songs and what Terry and McGhee meant in their own time and what they mean now, but the songs are pure visceral experiences that you feel in your gut and your heart.

In the end, though, it is all but impossible not to come away from this album with a grin like Marshall Allen’s. The positive vibrations in the studio are evident, and the musicianship is, naturally, of the highest order (including Allen’s wailing alto).

Where on earlier releases Black Moth Super Rainbow seemed to be the gleeful expression of a twisted, sun-baked parallel world, the last two albums sound increasingly burned out on it. Panic Blooms, rather than reaching for the sticky pop highs of its predecessor, sounds like a purer expression of this emotional drift.

Back in the mid-1970s Faust asserted both ownership and ironic distance with the song “Krautrock;” here, they show that they can still wax motorik if the situation requires it.

Inches functions in the best way a retrospective of its kind can: the more primitive songs don't seem like missteps so much as enlightening diagrams of how the band arrived at such convincing current ones.

They’re almost what you expect, but not exactly, and that disconnect takes you into a strange and lovely little world.

Odds Against Tomorrow simply sounds a lot like [the album] Bill Orcutt. The new album’s original tunes evoke the same sense of Americana wrung dry of phony sentiment as its predecessor’s covers. ... The stuttering is gone because Orcutt is ready to show us straight up what he thinks matters.

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

Eighty minutes after Bajas Fresh started, it eases back into silence: a long album to be sure, but only exactly as long as it needs to be--no more, no less.

As a whole Book Burner may be as focused and relentless as anything they've yet released.

While the overall sound here isn't exactly unrecognizable from the band on Leave Home, there's definitely way more going on in terms of range and risk-taking.

It’s all attitude, baby, and on their second album Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic, it’s out in spades, for everyone who remembers when rock music rocked, politics and punk could live together without cancelling one another out (or making one more about the other), and bands could dig into a specific influence without being too obvious about it.

At nearly two hours, these two discs are an embarrassment of riches for the 65daysofstatic devotee and most likely sufficient for anyone casually interested in the band behind No Man’s Sky.

Kensington Heights isn’t drastically different from anything that’s come before, but it’s Constantines’ most consistent album so far, and a good starting point for anyone who hasn’t heard them and misses that old-time galvanizing, anthemic music.

Now, 17 years removed from the original stateside release of the band’s music, this expanded reissue (buttressed with an additional disc of decent live tracks and a few cool demos) gives an entirely new generation of pop fans an excuse to dive into the group’s music.

There is a sense of every note being where it should be, glowingly back-lit and carefully arranged. It’s far from the note-bending frenzy that Polizze often indulges in — and let’s not give up on more of that and soon — but it is very beautiful in its own way and captures this endless, featureless, daydreaming summer about as well as any music I’ve heard so far.

There are a few hollow trunk rattlers here.... At.Long.Last.A$AP is no fashion accessory, it’s practically a reinvention.

The usual and worn out horrorcore lyrics resemble now parts in “found poetry,” left to their own devices. They are no longer pastiches made by humans but cosmic shards of meaning. The tracks recorded with Benny the Butcher and Elcamino (“La Mala Ordina”) and with La Chat (“Run For Your Life”) are hints at what’s possible when our-worldly lyrics paired down with otherworldy music.

Human Animal is the most textured and abstract of the band’s “official” releases in years, and while perhaps their methods aren’t new, the results aren’t simply the same old Wolf Eyes.

There is definitely a hint of entropy, an intimation that even the most intricately constructed scenarios can and will fall apart under pressure, that wasn’t there before. And that, paradoxically, makes these tracks all the more beautiful. The noise and clicks and hum impend, but haven’t yet overwhelmed; there is order and serenity here for now.

It’s a fascinating, detailed and absorbing album, and one of the best electronic/dance albums I’ve heard in many months.

David ain't the kind of thing you want to hear every day, but it's the kind of thing someone is going to play every day for a month. Or months. Whatever it takes to come back to life.

His taste in sounds and sense of what to do to them is unimpeachable, but the album's greatest strength is its resistance to categorization.

There is a coherent sound throughout the album––psychedelic electro-hop perhaps––while each song develops fruitfully without ever being dragged out.

Life Metal is music as event. It’s a terrific record.

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

The album seems like a simple, straightforward work, yet every song carries fitting surprises within its construction. ... It’s the singer’s own version of reality, but it probably isn’t that far from whatever’s actually out there. If it’s a little bent and a little brighter at the same time, it somehow only feels truer.

Given how inspired they sound here, it’s clear their musical chemistry is as instinctive as ever.

You’re going to want to hear this one.

It's brutal, direct and reflective while struggling for a way both out of and within the dark.

The sound on Darkness Rains is in line with 2016’s Glow in the Dark but seems to have sharpened and gained force in the intervening years.

On first listen Halo’s compositions tend to merge into one another, a blur of impressions like looking down on a cloud dappled landscape or passing buildings through a rain smeared train window. The atmospheres are foggy, drenched but rich, infused with the apparent illogic of dreams whose significance must be pieced together with hindsight from clues obvious and obscure.

The old version violently rejected oppression, the new one quietly totes up the damages. Both are valid approaches, and both are musically satisfying.

LUMP, a collaboration between Tunng founder Mike Lindsay and Laura Marling, is cool and enveloping, a mesh of luminous electronic textures and subtly placed instruments, all arranged around Marling’s silvery voice, often doubled or overlapping in harmony.

Little Hells, for all its melancholy, gives Nadler’s fans another reason to celebrate; any continuation of the momentum birthed with Songs III is a happy thing, indeed.

Breakdown is gleeful, digestible, and eminently enjoyable.

If you’re seeking a dose of danceable, retro futurist fun, Vanishing Twin are a good bet. Though far from original, Ookii Gekkou offers plenty of upbeat, colorful and likeable tunes.

Even the most contemplative cuts move with purpose and vigor and carefully plotted complexity. Long-time listeners might well miss the fizzing, popping, overload of good feelings that Eyes and A Certain Feeling brought on, but quieter, darker tunes have a value, too.

The Decemberists fill the album to overflowing with sharp, catchy songs, Colin Meloy’s idiosyncratic bookishness well-turned for emotional resonance without relinquishing energy or wit

Blue Eyed in the Red Room doesn’t fit any hip hop preconceptions. Moving deftly from influenced to influential, Boom Bip defines himself by leaving limitations behind.

It's furious and raging and exhausting, and the end result is exhilarating.

The main album is sharp and vitriolic and honest, with hardly a place to take a breath.

Bardo Pond isn’t so much about evolutionary change as the recurrent invocation of altered states via sound.

They may only be covering a small slice of what they’ve achieved previously here, but they so totally capture their moment that these songs blot out much of the world around them, so that they only exist, with you, blanketing day and night.

There’s a playful tilt to even the most serious songs, an arms-thrown-up celebration embedded in lacerating criticism. The revolution will not only be televised, but tracked in every conceivable and intrusive way…but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it.

Gold Record is honest in its own fanciful way, proving that not everything has to be literal fact to be true, and not everything needs to have a physical presence to be real.

Susanna’s voice is a reassuring constant, an effortless, uninflected carrier of melody. She has her diva-ish moments, but mostly lets the notes assemble out of air and fog, coalescing with a purity that seems not quite human. .... Susanna’s earlier works distilled agitated work into timeless, edgeless serenity, but now her arrangements fuel the music with urgency.

The good news is that Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is Spoon's best record in a while - if you liked "Gimme Fiction," you'll probably like this too.

Lookout lacks the piercing insight of Berman’s best work––those Old Testament and American Gothic retellings laced with sarcasm and self-loathing. At the same time, there’s a casual quality to this set that trumps the belabored tangle of the last go-round.

A chilly, deliberately off-putting, but deeply fascinating record.

The energy, from the opening whistles and stomps that kick off “Driving School” to the final crazed, surf-guitar-on-two-wheels of the “Batman” cover, is anything but studio; it is immediate, volatile and contagious.

Owl Splinters is a testament to what practiced musicianship, studio know-how and an ear for textured complexity can accomplish.

It returns to the sly humor, the hypnotic barking aggression, the occasional whiffs of wistful tune-ish-ness slipped in between robotic beats of Divide and Exit and maybe does it one better.

Razorwire-sharp and reflexive, Eton Alive sees Sleaford Mods knowingly take the existential dare once more, and mostly win.

The album as a whole, however, is more than reasonably enjoyable. While still by its nature loosely strung and carefree, Born with Stripes demands your attention in a way that Living on the Other Side never did.

Macaroni is an album that deserves to be heard.

Hoffman used to be in Ex-Cult. They have the same driving, droning, chanting, intoning attack, and though it’s pitched way up high in a womanly register, it concedes nothing else at all to conventional femininity. Great stuff.

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.

The slight psychedelic divergences and other assorted flourishes keep the album interesting, but they’re not enough in the forefront to make Oakley Hall come off like some permutation of psych-rock.

Hundreds of Days is proof that Lattimore has come into her own as a composer and that her career is taking on the contours of one of her pieces: from stark beginnings something rich and wondrous has emerged.

If you ever liked guitar-driven blues punk, whether in its 1970s first run or the aughts revival, you need to hear this record.

This Mess Is a Place is considerably more grown up and pop-leaning than any of Tacocat’s previous albums, with lavishly massed vocals and bounce-y hooks, yet it retains an air of joyous subversion, sweet but spiky and smart.

On Dragonslayer, perhaps more so than any of their previous albums, Sunset Rubdown is able to create memorable, multi-part songs that stay engaging throughout and that don’t meander aimlessly.

'Love In Outer Space,' is as seductive, giddy, and beautiful as ever. It’s a testament to the album’s overall strength that it comes near the tail end of the record. It’s about as perfect a mixture of dubstep and techno as anything out there.

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.”

This is a prickly, buzzy, invigorating record from a songwriter at the top of his game.

The music can sometimes obscure the words, with only snippets allowing themes of love, loss and solitude to creep into the listener’s consciousness.... Have You in My Wilderness is another arresting album by an equally arresting artist, one who is clearly at the forefront of the global avant-pop scene and will be for some time.

Its mix of absurdist humor, lonely stoner confusion and detached sadness could not be more miserably, cathartically timely (albeit in its own, unboxable way). Smart money says this one only gets better.

The Babies' debut, released on the long-running Shrimper label, speaks well of collaboration. The album succeeds by touching on the hallmarks of both bands' sounds, while standing strong on its own thanks to some unexpected touches of true rock 'n' roll grit.

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”).

I Am All Your Own could be mistaken for a depressing and soul-searching breakup record if it weren’t so beautifully calm and thematically ambivalent.

As with their earlier release, Extra Golden seems to shine particularly in two speeds: an amped up tango rhythm that seems to accompany the more soul-driven songs, and a faster gallop that tends to yield the most sweat

Vernon’s voice is the showpiece here––a fragile, technically imperfect falsetto, he multi-tracks it into a shimmering, heat-giving force on each of the record’s nine songs.

It retains Mountain's dense production, but swaps out its calculated affectations for raw sexual urgency, deep-black humor and desperate foreboding.

When drums and fiddle swagger, it feels like a Krautrock hoedown. Still, the harmonium exerts enough of a presence to give the music a devotional quality. In combination with the chanting, this music invites you to surrender to reverence without telling you what to believe.

The in-the-moment experience of Fernow’s music is all physical; the aftershock is almost all intellectual, the specifics of the apparent transformation provided entirely by the listener, who is left standing not so much accused as self-implicated.

It’s not often that music this loud and distorted can break your heart.

Here’s an album that gets at the balance between pure, raucous, positive punk energy and the elegiac textures of lush, baroque pop.

The songs here have engaging, melodic hooks to spare.

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.

Picking out parts is really beside the point – the album works as a restless, searching, gorgeous whole. Morris and his band have never been better.

In the end, Switched on Ra is the best kind of tribute, demonstrating a fundamental grasp of the original material but taking it in an entirely different direction.

The track [“A Study in Vastness”] initiates a string of four pretty flawless songs at the heart of this album that do very little very well. Single ideas unfurl across five, six, seven minutes at a time, never feeling like they need to go anywhere other than patiently exploring exactly where they are.

La Forêt isn't nearly as overtly poppy as Fabulous Muscles was, but it's just as well written.

This one, the first all-Segall live recording (he split a 2015 Live at Pickathon with King Tuff), manages to increase the intensity. It documents a monster tight, no-frills session from 2018 in obliterating, over-the-top style.

Carried to Dust represents a refreshing return to eccentricity.

On the Tylers’ third and best album, The Ox and the Ax, there is no obscuring the harsh world conjured by these songs with elaborate instrumentation, overwrought singing or dance tempos. Recorded in crystalline clarity, the instrumental accompaniments are usually little more than guitar or banjo, and while they’re skillfully played, it is the Tylers’ voices, unadorned and rich, that are the center of this record.

Layers of clever reference resolve into songs that resonate emotionally. They’re smarter than most songs and better played, but they also have that elusive way of landing, so that they seem to tell you more about life and persistence and suffering than what’s in the words.

Mostly as enjoyable as it is edifying from start to finish, the program repeatedly underscores that without artistry of expression, associative anger and the demonizing of one's enemy, however righteous, rarely lead to lasting empowerment for a person or a people.

DJ Haram is all jaded Brooklyn sophistication and all wide-eyed exotic transcendance, all at the same time, and it’s wonderful.

More accurately, these duo performances are truly sympathetic and move at the molecular level, making each piece on Cosmic Lieder wonderfully dense with information and ideas.