At 20 songs deep, this is a long program, but there is really no fat to trim. All of the songs are patently fleshed out, and in spite of the laundry list of ideas, it never seems claustrophobic.

To anyone enamored with the effortless elegance of Loma’s debut, some of Don’t Shy Away’s more adventurous and synth-heavy production may feel a little jarring. However, surrender to the album’s luscious sound design, emotive vocal performances and smart narrative arc and it can be just as intoxicating. As far as front-to-back album listening experiences go, it’s among the year’s best.

With Forgotten Days, the band don’t so much extend the sprawling prog-laced epics of the previous album as blend them into tighter, more direct tunes that feel very appropriate for the moods of this long, fractious year: at times ornery, restless and deeply sorrowful.

Whatever we think of Jung’s psychoanalysis, it’s interesting to hear a hardcore record driven by such relatively hifalutin concepts. And it’s excellent to have more music from Gel, a band that continues to grow and make some of the best punk of the decade thus far.

Brickbat is a worthy addition to the growing canon of bands and performers addressing the powers that be.

A record that’s wonderfully represents Clark as the songwriter he was without turning the focus to Earle and the Dukes.

It’s a fitting near-farewell for this disarmingly tender and enjoyable album.

And in the Darkness Hearts Aglow is already a formidable amalgam. It will be interesting to see where the third volume of the trilogy takes Weyes Blood.

While there are no lyrical revelations to be found, the non-specific words suit the “What Has Happened” may be the perfect gateway into Petunia’s intoxicating sound world, but it’s far from the only magic trick the White brothers pull off.

Though there’s less of Chasny’s questing idiosyncrasies at play, it’s hard to pick fault with music that taps into such a universal sound, like stepping out of the way of the self to see things anew. It’s beautiful yet strangely daunting; like waking up somewhere familiar and having to reacquaint yourself all over again.

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

It's just a smart encapsulation of underground dance music's better qualities, but not so showoffy that it can't work as an hourlong immersion tank.

Everything on this oddball album demands your attention, often in unexpected ways.

If you come to this record for the title, expecting rueful literacy and songwriterly self-deprecation, you might be pleasantly surprised by how hard it rocks and what an undemanding good time it can be.

Model of You is neither sparse nor overstuffed, relying on a few, highly polished elements to make up each song and allowing each of them ample space to unfold.

Emanon moves through dimensions and times with a surprising fluidity. That the album includes three discs and a graphic novel gives it unusual heft, but Shorter’s construction of the segments provides insight into his recent era, particularly stemming from 2013’s Without a Net.

Slater has found a way of collating a raft of familiar guitar tropes and injecting them with fresh energy. He seems to have ideas simply pouring out of him, plus enough of a quality-control filter to stack up an album’s worth of songs that fizz with inspiration.

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

Pollard’s imagistic lyrics and ragged musicality create a bridge between the mundane and the exceptional.

Her soundscapes are transportive and evocative, but they also contain detail and texture that plays with a sense of natural versus unnatural soundscapes, the real versus the imagined. Left in the between space, this is fascinating stuff.

Despite its music-geek-pleasing period references and psychedelic density, this is ultimately a frothy pop record full of hopeful love songs.

So yes, the combination of energies works as well as it ever did, a remarkable 30 years after it started. The pandemic, far from crushing the joy out, coaxes an unexpected giddiness from two lifers playing as hard as they can for the love of it.

Autobahn makes a very recognizable kind of dark, dramatic post-punk-into-new-wave music, and the easy thing would be to dismiss them as a mid-1980s knock-off. But The Moral Crossing is a very enjoyable record from a band that is already pushing the contours of its sound to find its own center.

It’s bit of a risk for Chasny to polish his sound, but he’s succeeded in bottling the imaginative, audacious overflow of his past efforts into perhaps his most cohesive record yet.

There is something very powerful about these interpretations, as Stewart and his crew cut past the elegant phrasings and the precise constructions of Simone’s songs, and expose their bruised and bleeding vulnerabilities.

I'm more than happy to take this album as it is, blemishes and all.

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.

Michael Chapman’s songs are gorgeous, dark-tone places, full of the work of musical collaboration, but also haunted and spare. Lovely stuff.

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.

Far from being liabilities, such disparate moments help define If… for the better: as a work that frolics in different directions without losing control or coherence.

Takes is most worthwhile for Adem fans, but intriguing for anyone who enjoys a new perspective on old tunes.

What makes Muhly’s work particularly interesting then is not only his use of this style--comprehending the four movements of the title track is particularly vexing as bits of voices mingle and move at different velocities--but the use of the style in a dynamic way itself, reminiscent of Nyman’s compositions.

With The Follower we have the first truly top-tier Field album that seems to draw its energy more from refinement than innovation, from the spin of the wheel rather than the speed of the car.

This crew has figured out how to make it work as a quartet.

Father Divine ranks among the best of Ladd’s efforts, and is easily one of his most adventurous.

He’s a better photographer than he is a musician, but Eggleston’s passion and restless, searching creativity shine through here. And as with his finest images, these deceptively simple pieces can conjure a range of emotions and narratives for more complex and rich than what an initial impression might hold.

We have a groundbreaking album re-released, with some strong live material

It may be that he doesn’t have a country bone to stand on, but he obviously knows all about the music’s spirit.

Sonically these songs are crafted out of beautifully thin, translucent textures that brush over one another to create half hues and harmonies. And lyrically, too, they pile evocative, not definitive, images one on top of the other, until a song can encompass two diametrically opposed ideas without any tension at all.

Ultimately, what you see here is indeed what you get: amour, imagination and rêve from two men who fell to earth...from the dark side of Méliès' moon.

Whatever a given listener’s quibbles or preferences around the two versions of the album, there’s another thing that points to a core truth about Terror Twilight: both versions still ultimately sound pretty damn good.

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

Imperial Teen crafts a super-clean, super-sharp, inordinately complex collection of songs that, nonetheless, go down like cherry cola.

North is an album intended to be accessible, and it embodies its time and place more honestly than most records released this year--which is a risky thing to say while also acknowledging that the title refers to a time as well as a place: the Northern England of Joy Division and The Human League.

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.

The sound is open and uncluttered, rare for a genre that relishes tangles. There’s lots of liquid synths, and were they gracing a 4/4 thump, they’d have an Ibiza glow to them.

Lotta Sea Lice avoids the potential flippancy of a side-project, using well considered song selection and quality lyricism to drive a singular but, we hope, not a single collaboration.

Ordinary moments are distilled into liquid bits of musical clarity, surrounded by a rich but muted palette of sounds and let fly into the world. It is rare for songs so soft and confiding to sound this sophisticated.

The Stage Names is raucous, rambunctious and occasionally quite funny.

The most heartening thing to be said about Music for Shut-Ins is that it reflects the opposite ethos, a go-for-broke glut of great songs in or around house music’s orbit.

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

C Joynes and the Furlong Bray have dreamed up a wholly convincing invisible city and utopian alternative musical history of the world. While the beleaguered Havians “do not excel at the musical art”, the Bray boys do, and have created something warm and joyful out of the long ages.

It meanders stylistically all over the map, but unites all those styles in a pounding, obliterating “Bristol Road Leads to Dachau”-style drum beat that punches you right in the soft tissues.

The Books have always been both playful and serious, but their latest album moves between the two easily and without making the listener take note. It is so subtle that even when paying attention, it still feels natural.

The band strikes a balance between symmetry and expansiveness, which gets at the core of why the krautrockers have endured—disciplined beats allow the free-form wanderings to reach places that more shaggy jamming misses.

Brown addresses alienation, identity, the lure of the spectacle, religion but she does so with an oblique approach to words that mirrors Drahla’s approach to their music. If this all sounds very serious be assured that Useless Connections is an album that, above all, rocks.

The Imperial [is] a pleasure to hear. Sonically, the dark, rich timbres of The Imperial are as wallow-worthy and voluptuous as bar-light or certain kinds of sadness. Like the assuredly crappy hotel from which it takes its name, The Imperial is too run through with exhaustion to want to spend a lot of time with, but it’s perfect for retreating into when you can’t feel right about anything.

The album is full of superlative performances, and exudes an uncommon level of energy and joy, even at its more melancholic moments, and is a far cry from Roberts' often cold and hermetic (but excellent) solo performances. Despite Morrison and Roberts's being the featured performance, this is clearly a group effort, a fact further underlined by the band-credited arrangements.

Original Detroit, Northwestern, and New York garage bands figure equally in the blueprint, resulting in a robust hook-fest that plays like a mixtape of the greatest rock 'n roll songs '65-'78.

Future Islands clearly wanted to tug some heartstrings this time around, and in the respect, On the Water is an unqualified success.

It all just flows, never exploding but never falling into a stupor, either.

Sartain has always sounded wild and dangerous, but Century Plaza is, if anything, more hair-raising than usual.

Ishibashi arrives at points of repose on “Nothing As” and the closing title track, leaving behind the more challenging arrangements to focus on piano and a yearning vocal melody. It’s these moments of immediacy and unassuming beauty that leave the strongest impression.

Intense and moving throughout, Six builds a fair amount of variation into its downbeat aesthetic.

It’s loose and enthusiastic and full of joy. The radiant jangle, the bloopy bassline, the dreaming, coasting vocal line of the title track all speak to substantial talent and skill — but at play.

Ultimately, it's not likely that those who've yet to be Quasi fans will be converted by this album, but it would nonetheless be worth their while to give it a listen.

Virginia Wing pack a lot into their pop songs. Glowing hooks and nagging phrases continually draw you in.

She hasn’t lost anything, just slipped her message into an unusually sleek, attractive covering where we might not have been looking for it.

The tales they tell are, while gruesome, well told. And they’ve never sounded better; not only has the time off done no damage to their brash, south-of-the-Ohio harmonies, but the band has taken on the challenge of sounding bigger than ever before and come out triumphant.

Range Anxiety provides plenty of action and feeling, though not always in the ways you catch on a surface listen.

It’s head-nodding, melody-following joy, which maybe shouldn’t work for a bleak album. But it does.

It’s the sound of epic detail in exquisite registration, and Albini perfectly vivifies Mono’s Technicolor wall of sound.

The Knot turns the cliche about sophomore slumps on its head by being much stronger than If Children.

Does it work? Of course it works.

On Civilian, the band shows that it can be serious without being overbearing, evocative without being histrionic, and accessible without being derivative.

Mandel, of course, steals the show: it’s an eight-track statement for him to make, and he has plenty to say.

Every song comes from the same mold that they've been working with from the beginning. And as the critical mass of messy hits continues to pile up, there are new revelations that rise to the surface, as well.

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

Though this is far from an easy listen, and can be frustratingly wordy and repetitive at times, it’s a rich, admirable and thorny work of art. Invest the necessary attention in this record and it’ll reward in spades.

Nightcap leans more towards the song-ish end of things in its first half, though bits of free-wheeling freakery are tucked in between verses and choruses. In the second half, it sprawls more open-endedly across cuts that lead one to another without pause for breath. ... The effect is more like a suite than a collection of tracks, a bravura show of musical prowess that winds through moods, time signatures and keys.

This album sounds vast and intimate at the same time, like keenly recorded sketches.

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.

Cheers to the second installment of this beautiful friendship.

Psychedelic Pill is earnest and perverse, simplistic and complicated, epic and underachieving--guess the old cuss still has it in him after all.

To make so many overt references to his musical heroes while never losing sight of himself speaks to Iyer's own command. His improvisations have such clarity and vision, and it's rare that he stretches things any longer than necessary.

A collection of past moments, which add up to a splendid memorial to a monumental moment in New York’s musical history.

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

Trouble is a grand survey of deconstructed rock which achieves its greatest highs via the winding routes it travels. Not all those who wander are lost, indeed.

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.

They’ve upped the speed quotient considerably on this outing, forgoing much of the Melvins-inspired slack of previous efforts in favor of ugly, rapid-fire riffing.

What's new? High pitch frequencies; cell phone samples; the vocoded & pitched-down techno-poetry; a clean aesthetic from DE9 era running roughshod over a dark palette; and the fact that it sounds utterly different to his previous material, despite the references.

It’s a record by a mature band, setting itself to a serious task. The fact that it’s so effective--that Our Raw Heart can move you from one mood to another, and leave you feeling larger--is testament to the earnestness of their art.

Positively stomps and bristles, with Smith and his band summoning up the type of chutzpah not normally found in middle age.

The Fiery Margin shames so many songs being written today, not with reproach, but with example after elegant example of how it’s done right.

On this album, she both reminds the listener of her strengths as a songwriter and subtly redefines the ground on which her music rests.

You hear none of that struggle here. She has labored and sweated and stressed to make a record that is completely devoid of these characteristics. It might have reared up out of a clam shell like Botticelli’s Venus.

That Vashti Bunyan had the courage to step out of seclusion and follow up her classic debut is admirable. That she was able to do so with an excellent batch of songs is a joy to behold, pure and simple.

The result is an intriguing set of tracks which sound, one hand, very much in line with Matmos’ percolating, abstract grooves, but also very different. ... With “Flight to Sodom / Lot do Salo,” the album moves into even more riveting abstractions, a sampled voice pulsing like a drum as rich textures of synth swirl around it. Here too, denatured vocals surge and fade in a not-quite-human choir sound. The second side turns more ominous and atmospheric.