Barwick continues to refine and expand her particularly gorgeous and idiosyncratic sound.

Bottle of Humans was an amazing album, immediately hailed as a classic. Selling Live Water improves upon that album in every identifiable category.

Intricate and unpredictable, Deeper Woods isn’t primitive at all. It’s wild.

Laughing Matter is a Major Statement in the classic style, which might have been irksome if Wand hadn’t pulled it off. Successful gestures of this sort can serve the purpose of reminding us why those tropes were satisfying in the first place, and if this album doesn’t quite boast the succinct charms of past releases its makes its own, compelling argument to turn on, tune in, and just let it all wash over you.

It’s not what you’re expecting from Moon Duo, but it’s nonetheless quite appealing, this magic, glowing sound space that isn’t quite real, but better.

That Trees Outside the Academy is more accessible than Moore's usual output is a fair assertion to make, though there are facets innate to his music that seem sure to prevent the gangly guitarist from ever crafting an album of pure pop.

As strong as this set is, it still faces the originality conundrum. Rather than a group of songs individually composed and packaged under the banner of a soul album, Faithful Man can occasionally feel like one extended, vaguely monochromatic exercise in proving the vitality of a brilliant yet aging art form.

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.

Les Savy Fav has finally delivered an album worth shrugging about.

Like most things that result from improvisation, it doesn't always sound as new as it thinks it does, but the reggae stalwarts' freshness is timeless.

JG manages to both make fun and have fun, their music more goofy than cynical.

Now comes the Orchestre's first album in 20 years, Cotonou Club, and it has some of the bet-hedging one tends to see when musicians don't trust what they've got--re-recordings of old material and guest stars.

Emotional Mugger isn’t a bad record, but the songs are nowhere near as strong as the ones on Manipulator, and whatever Segall is trying to get at here is not yet in his grasp.

It is something of a missing link, and therefore a reminder of the often uncomfortably close proximity, between indie baroque’s earnestness and the pyrotechnic baroque of a lead singer who keeps a “passion coach” in his entourage.

The Tree of Forgiveness, ten breezy songs and thirty-three minutes long, is slight, but its brevity fits. The Tree of Forgiveness doesn’t rage against the dying of the light. Instead, it’s funny and it’s sad. It’s complicated. It’s over before you know it.

What ties all the disparate elements together is a taut thread of hip hop breaks, clattering electronic beats and wobbly dubstep bass.

While there are moments where En Form for Bla (named for the Oslo club where it was recorded) rolls right over you like a rogue wave, more often it sounds like the main action was situated a couple rooms away from the microphones.

Perhaps whatever he's wishing for or doesn't have is something too personal or boring to tell.

While not a rapturously groundbreaking record, Cold of Ages is a rock-solid entry.

The record called E, then, is not exactly what you’d expect from any of them, a volatile concoction of musical ideas and impulses that amplifies their distinctive gifts without sanding off any of the jutting edges.

The music’s references doesn’t sound particularly new, but Batoh sounds newly energized and fully in command of his new band.

Fans ignore these efforts at their peril, since Chasny’s long-form efforts are often his best.

Time Is Glass is lovely music — that much should be no surprise to anyone — but beyond that, it taps into something invisible, deep and important. Is it too much to say that these songs manifest the divine? Maybe so, but let’s stipulate at least that they’re trying.

Lights’ debut was a strange, beautiful thing, and one of my favorite debuts of last year. Rites is bigger, sharper and in all ways better. Lights just got a good deal brighter.

Lovely as it may be, Light of a Vaster Dark largely lacks the surprising, adventurous quality of Faun Fables's past efforts, coming off as monotone and unremarkable in comparison.

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.

The thing holds together remarkably well, thanks to Wale’s upstart charisma and remarkable versatility.

The Unicorns manage to polish an array of pawn shop instruments into miniature masterpieces.

Rave ‘Til You Cry is a welcome reminder of Raczynski’s skill, his lightness of touch and the sheer exuberance of his music. If it’s exhausting to dance to it’s great to hear and to reminisce about the Battles of Beatdom.

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

DOOM’s sounds as bold and battered as ever. You can almost hear the accumulation of Dutch Masters on his larynx.

“Sublime Eternal Love” closes the album with an affirming major progression. The vocal overlaps are still there, but Chrystabell’s diction is more distinct, ending a recording of dark pathways moving towards an imagery of endless light.

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

Most of what’s here isn’t memorable, but there is a steady flow of moments so ersatz that it is oddly listenable.

If nothing else, it leaves you receptive for the bruised and ravaged beauty of “meet me under the ruins,” as radiant as a Jack Rose raga, and a fitting elegy for all that precedes it.

The pulsing, nodding, whisper-y grooves are a kind of accomplishment, too. Subdued, sure, enveloping and lucidly becalmed, you can float on them like warm salt water, no effort required at all.

It often feels vast, tracking the curvature of the Earth, but it never forgets that music is made by people, and that there is real intimacy in the consort of two individuals relating to each other through simple gestures like singing, or brushing against six guitar strings.

It’s kind of fun to hear Ex Hex experiment with their production, but it would have been more fun to hear them take some real risks with, say, an acoustic number or some synths. Truth is, despite its heft, It’s Real isn’t a huge departure from Rips. It’s more like a bulky rough draft of the record that preceded it.

The majority of the first half finds Ejstes at his most melodically direct — including singles “Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus” and “Skövde” — while the second half indulges some questionable studio experimentation.

Knowing that music of this stripe is only pretentious if it doesn’t work, it’s a near miracle that the entire album holds up, front to back, even those ballads in the second half that might have ruined lesser works.

A love of/obsession with antiquity can, at some point, become unbearable. To my ears, The Repulsion Box is one such ridiculous period piece.

It contains everything that makes Eyehategod the unique proposition that they are. It’s an Eyehategod album in excelsis, if you like.

In the format of the double album LP, with over half the songs heading into 10-minute runtimes, he's going to take you on the scenic route through all the pain he's experienced. If only Pearson was as compelling a lyricist as any of the abovementioned figures [Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, and Townes Van Zandt], Last of the Country Gentlemen might have matched the power of his earlier work.

The Fool brims with potential for something more substantial, but never confronts those depths.

Though it doesn’t hit the peaks of No Earthly Man, his 2005 foray into the pure history of the ballad, Spoils easily holds its own.

Sonic Nurse is the happy medium they've been craving. The songs, despite being mostly over five minutes long, are all to the point without feeling meandering.... The balance between noise and melody is right, with each emerging and vanishing at just the right point.

In expanding her breadth, Merritt relinquishes too much of the depth that made her debut so distinguished.

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

On the inauspiciously titled Take Care, Take Care, Take Care, the band's sixth album, it's focused inward and enriched its traditional dynamic ebb and flow with some artful embroidery.

As rich as this stuff sounds (it’s hard to think of a working musician with classier production values) or how much she emotes on the mic, it’s calculated, cerebral and a little bit cold.

Alas, the manic pace of the total structural collage makes it awfully hard to settle in as a listener. Deerhoof vs. Evil has a Guernica quality, in which pleasure and humanity are sublimated to the grotesque, which in turn is justified by the supposed inevitability of rational progress.

They’ve attempted to tighten up where their debut hung slack – shorter, less songs, less room to drag. Yet dragging is all that Celebration Castle does, falling deeper into the garage-meets-new wave dichotomy that looks good on paper but would require considerably more talent to execute.

It’s a better album than Is This It, but then again, so were a dozen other rock records that year.

Stone Breaker is undeniably a Mark E product, propulsive disco-house clouded by his trademark ambient haze, with terrific builds and releases. It's easily one of the better dance music albums that will come out this year.

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.

The unpolished, unpredictable nature of Meridian is certainly part of its charm, one way or the other. There are a lot of cinematic drone albums out there, and the organic, human touches here lend this one more personality than most.

Where the debut felt, at times, unnervingly exposed, Iron Gates has a sense of center, balance and calm.

Having demonstrated their ability to adeptly blend movement and atmospheric melody, Caminiti and Porras should aim higher than simple--albeit skillful--drones. That said, Ancestral Star delivers more than enough to reward the patient listener.

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

The individual tracks here are no less weighty or patient, but it feels like a fire has been lit under Morgan, moving him to make his point more sharply than any before.

There's a distance between the trauma in the lyrics and the overall mood of the song, which only reinforces his albums' theme of optimism in the face of the worst circumstances. So, how does it stand up? Pretty well.

Though the scale of these EPs isn't as wide as some of Muhly's other recent works, it feels every bit as immediate.

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”).

Without a doubt there are quite a few moments on Loose Fur to enthrall diehard fans of anyone involved. And yet, when all is said and done, I’m still wanting more, wondering what else they could have done.

I like this relatively blunt, unadorned Tracey Thorn – not that she was ever forced or florid in her expression, but Love and its Opposite offers her most complete disarmament yet.

So it continues with Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, an album with no missteps...because every trick that Mogwai has used in the past is present in almost comically balanced fashion.

With its powerfully cohesive sonic topography and motley cast of rat smashers, ill-fated squires and cigarette eaters, Space Gun is a robust marriage between the band’s rugged past and more polished present. Further, it’s a reminder that, ultimately, Bob Pollard’s best character is himself.

Don't Be A Stranger is very subtle album, soft in tone but twisted and eaten from the inside by corrosive intelligence.

The eleven tracks here are tight, raw, and marked by insistent thumping rhythms and taught chunky riffs, laying the groundwork for one of the band’s most straight-ahead rock albums in years.

Yeah, it’s a mite catchier than Heron King Blues, but Roots & Crows ain’t much of a stylistic shift from Rutili and pals’ earlier material.

She certainly turned in some of her most thrilling performances for the Peel Sessions.

The record proves that Lightning Bolt are still very much a force to be reckoned with.

The Beths are bigger, better and more complicated than they’ve ever been. This is the record to beat from now on.

With Stranger Fruit he’s gone even further than that; he’s made something powerful, something that amid all the ritual and esoteric language and bloody events foregrounds the humanity of these imaginary, unnamed people and their real world brothers and sisters in a way that’s far more effective and unforgettable than most metal bands will manage to be on any subject.

Let the Poison Out only ups the ante. Distortion is easy and lo-fi bands are a dime a dozen, but hardly any of them clean up this well.

The songs are good. Both musicians are pros. The execution is offhandedly excellent, like they’re not even trying but nailing it anyway. But you never get the sense that these songs matter all that much to either principal. It’s a parlor trick, a juggling act that they could do all day without dropping anything, but the stakes don’t seem to be very high.

No question that Fohr and her cohorts genuinely like and appreciate the thumpy, cheesy Eurodisco that shimmers through these songs, but they put an unusual spin on it. There’s a warmth in these plastic grooves, an experimental inquiry in these hands-in-the-air raves, a spiritual striving amid hip-jutting, butt-swaying ecstasies.

Scatterbrain is a record of stocktaking but also of hope, at 32 minutes perhaps a lesser entry in The Chills’ canon, it is reminder that one of the great shapers and survivors of the antipodean sound still has much to offer.

The songs feel pared back and polished and just about exactly right, whether in the gospel-swelling idiom of Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam or in the jazzier, more experimental haunts of Calexico. There’s nothing extra, nothing silly, nothing distracting, these songs are as streamlined as an otter in water, slipping through in cool, frictionless purity.

The vocals on cuts like “The House That Doesn’t Exist” may be soft and high, but the melody slashes forward with determination and force. Even the Nico-esque whisper psyche of “Flowers Turn Into Gold” exudes intention. Daydream soft sonics swirl in clouds around Prochet’s mic, but she, herself, is wide awake and in control.

Cryptograms is a tonal wash of brisk speed kicks and seasick comedowns, the kind of thing you could lose an afternoon to.

Credit to Beam, of course, for challenging himself rather than continuing to remake The Creek Drank the Cradle over and over again, but Kiss Each Other Clean is unlikely to count among his best work.

It’s all rather good in a discombobulating way, where the monotonic tension of, say, the Pop Group, meets lavish, emotion-harboring flourishes reminiscent of Orange Juice and even, in a couple of places, the Joe Jackson Band. You can’t get too comfortable even being uncomfortable, because Omni likes to mix it up, the jitter and the sway.

Basic, unassuming, and calling to mind a grip of classic material without going to great lengths to mimic it, Rush to Relax, the band’s third LP, adds almost nothing new to Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s repertoire.

Even if it is hard at certain points to cut through the thick fog of psych drum riffs, Everything Ecstatic leaves ears ringing like a loud summer afternoon in the city – sun-drenched cacophony that doesn’t quite know where it’s going just yet.

It is a challenging and humorous album that works like a society brave and wise enough to allow dissent.

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

Volume 8 explores some interesting byways of the Bardo Pond sound.

Like Darnielle’s shrill tone that many have come to love and now mourn, We Shall All Be Healed is sometimes on the mark, but often left of center. Its moments of clarity, although surely there, don't come around enough to keep it near the stereo.

It’s particularly satisfying to hear confident music like this, played with the fiery purpose of those who pioneered it over the last two decades.

It is unremarkable to the point of being enraging.

Envelopes could so easily be a cheap Belle & Sebastian clone or a second-rate Magnetic Fields, but they pull off what nobody remembers to in this line of work anymore: personality.

Zeroes and Ones, like Eleventh Dream Day’s early work, has the direct, immediate quality of a live performance.

Living with the Living is Leo's most diverse album yet, a sort of musical "This is your life," where the artist revisits styles and forms that he's loved in the past.

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

This is exquisitely made, moodily complicated stuff, and if it doesn’t fit into the current landscape, that’s more our problem than theirs.

Nothing Hurts goes in the ear loud and fast. And out the other ear just as quickly.

Impeccably tasteful, Kitty Wells Dresses is no mere museum piece. It deserves to rest in an enthusiast's country collection somewhere among, say, Buck Owens Sings Harlan Howard and Del Shannon Sings Hank Williams.