While Feorm Falorx may have some of the duo’s more simplistic songwriting, it’s well worth a spin for its textural delights alone.

If The Kills didn't try so hard to be sultry, they might have a similar breakthrough. They're more appealing when you've got no idea what's on their mind.

Oneida’s chemistry alone isn’t enough to make modest material effloresce.

Their various styles are integrated and naturally came out of the way the Get Down Stay Down coalesced.

Outside Love, two years later, is another solid effort with a handful of quite good songs--and only a few embarrassing ones.

It's enjoyable and I find myself anticipating the songs.

If you took away the melodica, the masks and the mystery of a band like Clinic, you’d be left with a Brakes; competent, middle-of-the-road, going nowhere fast.

This is an impressive statement from a band that’s still forming itself. Its sound is distinctive and compelling, but still audibly shifting as they go. It’s hard to imagine where they might end up ten or even five years out, but my guess is it’ll be someplace cool and very different from where they are now.

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

Your lost loves will not come back, but the morbid and exquisite plummet of losing them will, and rare is the artist that can make such a prospect as starkly comforting as it is here.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing to the band besides the concept. Far from ramshackle, exploratory fun, the songs are paint-by-numbers melodramatic nonsense with a few interesting genre gestures.

Eight is another slow burner but the flame is more ostentatious than we’re used to from the L.A. trio.

The stylistic ground covered on Pumps is a logical progression for Growing and leaves them with a number of interesting places to go from here.

With Mind Bokeh Bibio recognizes that our happiest, hands-in-the-air, hedonistic moments are shadowed with memory. A bit of hiss, crackle or distortion can evoke the sadness under the celebration.

His most personal recording yet.

The only real downside to Louden Up Now is the surprising amount of filler surrounding the meaner cuts.

The songs, then, have a warmth and immediacy, even when they turn to otherworldly topics.

Axis of Evol may not be a great album. It remains prey to some of McBean’s obnoxious corner-cutting. But it is his most resolute outing to date, certainly the first record he’s made that can be heard front-to-back, repeatedly, without losing most of its shine.

Nothin’ But Blood is a wild, discontinuous kind of ride, rattling from tradition to mayhem, from salvation to specific descriptions of sex acts, in a flow of songs that are no more like each other than if you’d pulled them from a pile of tapes. What unites them? A bristling electric guitar. A laceratingly unsentimental view of life. A coruscating energy that burns right through whatever you were expecting and reveals the hard true life-force at the bottom of Biram’s songs.

This is a feral, dangerous variety of punk rock, and if your favorite thing is Dry Cleaning mouthing witty asides in a BBC accent, you will probably not like it. But if you have any sympathy for the idea of burning it all down, here’s your jam.

For the most part, Write About Love is a disappointment. That's even truer, I suspect, because Belle and Sebastian aren't the only ones getting older.

It's easy to hear why Rubin swooped in to release this.

he's made one of his strongest, and certainly his oddest, albums.

Lesser artists might fall prey to pastiche, something Murcof artfully avoids. Instead he pulls off a remarkable feat--he makes the forgotten sound formidable, and the contemporaneous sound credible.

What makes KAPUTT so exciting is its elasticized unpredictability, the sense that these taut, punched-out firestorms could head in any direction. Anarchy has rarely been so tightly coordinated, nor order so slapped bloody and sore as on this debut.

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.

It’s all very soft and comfortable, musically speaking, like an old couch you can’t get out of.

Gone is all the nervous tension that crisscrossed most of Finberg’s twitchy, dystopian vignettes, replaced instead with carefully plotted fuzz and a general hazy ambience that suggests calculated late-1960s ennui more than anything else. Overall, that’s a really good thing, especially when accompanied with the band’s seemingly newfound ability to ply their songs with unexpected twists and subtle new details.

The studio can be the bane of a musician’s existence, offering a plethora of ways to work, often to the point of stultifying any interesting end results. This is not necessarily the case with Nace, but it begs the question of what stood between the more interesting work on this album and the pieces which seem to be caught under the inertia of their own weight.

The second half of Marciology especially drags on. It’s not songs but huge chunks of poetry piled up, heavy on wordplay, with rhyming done nicely, almost perfectly. But not many of the tracks work as songs at all. Mediocre verses from guests only makes the material more sluggish.

He navigates through colorized thickets of tone on the long songs with the knowing confidence of a veteran wilderness guide.

There are plenty of moments among these 15 songs that are devastating in a way that’s unique to Xiu Xiu, but also moments that leave me frustrated and baffled. Essentially it’s business as usual for this brilliant yet confounding band. They challenge you to turn away, yet reward the brave and patient listener with flashes of startling beauty.

The third of the record that’s truly Molina & Johnson shines the brightest, when their discreet identities fall away to create Burroughs’ and Gysin’s third mind.

Among the remaining eight songs is some of Raposa’s strongest songwriting.

Despite the up-tempo spunkiness of half the album’s songs, the prevailing tone seems to be that of a musical android--equal portions ukulele and digital distortion.

Tallied up, the hits and the misses are about equal. But it would be unfair to describe Interstellar as middling. What the misses lack is not quality but a strong sense of self in terms of songcraft.

Pole’s familiar synth-hissing static has been removed but a chilled atmosphere remains, successfully transforming this release into four club-friendly tracks that will leave you feeling warmer than a glass of red wine.

What's perhaps most interesting about the album is that it steers clear of most indie rock tropes.

The lyrics (and their alternately crooned and flat-rapped delivery) are nothing new is probably the worst that can be said of them.

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 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.

It's a pleasing set on its own terms, but it's just as interesting as a contrast to contemporary electronics, to hear what traits and effects have faded as its evolved so rapidly.

Presley is an oddball psychedelic pop artist of considerable appeal. He’s also an experimenter in digital minimalism. Larry’s Hawk eats all kinds of stuff, apparently, and you just have to keep feeding him.

A ragged, gnarly listen, Future Teenage Cave Artists is, fittingly, one of the band’s most experimental offerings in years, offering short bursts of breakneck, catchy garage rock, counterbalanced by plenty of reverb-drenched dissonance and eerie atmospherics. Just as it feels like it may be settling into something approaching conventional songcraft, the band chucks in a blast of competing ideas that sound like they’re eating each other alive, desperately scrambling for survival.

Though comprising only nine songs across just over half an hour of music, Actually, You Can is bursting at the seams with ideas.

Ultimately, The Iron Soul of Nothing feels considerably more like a NWW album than a Sunn 0))) album. But somehow that doesn't come at the expense of the source authors. Rather, it's a satisfying document of Stapleton's ongoing creativity as well as confirmation of the potential always nascent in the doom duo's earliest work.

Venus on Earth proves that world-pop fusion needn’t be a pastiche of watered-down musical tropes, but rather something vital and soul affirming--a fever to embrace.

Like many collaborations, the material on Stoney Jackson is varied and can feel rudderless at moments.

As distinctive as it is complex, is as much about the journey as its component pieces, commanding all the familiar electronic music components with ease, but infused with the warmth of soul and a kind of cross-continental sophistication.

Temper is rewarding in a conventional way compared to the surprise of Precis, less something iridescent found in the sand and more the product of resourceful and masterly design.

Here are very lovely songs, tempered by oblique though evocative lyrics; here are rustic landscapes juxtaposed with computer sounds and eccentric field samples; here is violence couched in the gentlest possible terms.

It may have taken a while, but the rewards of this belated collaboration are exquisite.

This time out, more than ever before, it really feels like Brooks and Co. are half-assing it, victory lap style, when they could have soared once again.

The album is an enjoyable listen, but not enough is at stake for it to get under your skin.

Freaks of Nurture needs a bit more abrasion to leave a mark. Sunny and pleasant all through, it blurs together like vacation days, each enjoyable, but hard to remember afterwards which was which.

Ascension reaches for the infinite, but achieve it only intermittently. Mostly you're left with songs that don't stop time, only slow it down.

At its best, Surf City's debut is catchy in both melodies and enthusiasm. And while the latter occasionally prevents this album from achieving resonant emotional depths, "Icy Lakes" suggests that they are very capable of achieving those if they so choose.

Ultimately, Conquistador contains few surprises, but its stark beauty and understated textural depth prove that Carlson is still finding new and engaging ways of repeating himself.

As a cohesive statement, this very well could be their best in a very long time, if not ever.

Ultimately, however, too many of these tracks, whilst foundationally strong, don’t linger much in the memory. The Neo-Realist (At Risk) remains the strongest aspect whilst the singles and outtakes feel more like filler. As such, Artificial Dance feels more like a beguiling curiosity than a lost masterpiece of American post-punk. And yeah, those Eno and Byrne and Talking Heads similarities are a bit problematic at times.

All in all, Metalmania is a lovely little album.

These are not songs that wander aimlessly, that get lost in mandala-like intricacies that make sense only in large, sunny green spaces, late in the afternoon, preferably in Vermont. There’s a tight cohesive tunefulness to this second album from the New Jersey-based band that transcends the genre.

The Hold Steady will probably never match the thrill of their first three releases, but Thrashing Thru the Passion is the most enjoyable record they’ve made in thirteen years.

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

The music is a lot more accomplished here than on, say, Up for a Bit, but still loose, unpremeditated and a little bit straggly.

These are rather beautiful ambient sound worlds, however she created them, full of dread, anticipation, joy and peace. Perhaps it’s best if you can’t see the wires and knobs and plugs that make them possible.

Mirror II finds The Goon Sax deep in the lovely, perplexing mess of life, embracing the pain and pleasure, savoring the taste of change, finding inner strength and the consolations of a collective that allows individuality to flourish and supports it with an empathy which seems so sorely lacking in our world.

Morgan Delt is too academically rooted in the past to really disconnect from it. Still, as a debut, it shows some promise.

Out My Window, Koushik searches for--and at times strikes--the fine balance between structure and flexibility, rigidity and looseness, body and soul.

Like any good ongoing collaboration, theirs is already moving beyond its initial definition, gone past the novelty of lutist and filmmaker into something more enduringly interesting.

Dream logic rules this world, with periods of calm beauty, eruptions of noise and the sense that for every step forward there are delays, disruptions and detours that must be dealt with in order to proceed to a distant destination. If abstraction is the rule, the emotional resonance is real and deeply felt.

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

There is the danger that The Voidist comes off as a collection of songs, not an album. But for the most part they’re really good songs, and sometimes that’s more than enough.

While there’s not that much darkness in this album, there’s plenty of scratch and friction to balance out the pop.

JJ continue to build on the promise of their early albums with an eclectic sound which appeals to devotees of many different musics including jazz, rock and beyond.

It is quite elegant in its clarity and cleanliness.

Anyone seeking the nightmarish flipside of a Herzog soundtrack will find H-p1 a rewarding listen.

They’re still nodding to early Pop synthesizer proponents (The Human League, Fad Gadget, A Broken Frame era Depeche Mode), and now mixing in a beefed-up, contemporary EDM blast with the je ne sais quoi that the group infuses into everything it touches.

A dramatic, often fascinating work, it inspires repeated and careful listening, and stands alongside the best of Bachmann’s work.

Often more conceptually interesting than practically solid.

Wareham’s sideline fantasy life becomes the Luna fan’s candy-infested playground.

Even if Radical Connector beckons with a shelf-screaming sheen of freshness, much of its contents are merely the microwaved scraps from Basement Jaxx’s block party.

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

These songs are smart and ingratiating, and slightly squeamish about the world of privileged, post-collegiate ennui they inhabit, and... that's what they are.

It’s a confident outing from an outfit with all the right reasons to be confident, a unified and often arresting record with few qualms about what it’s supposed to be.

GEM isn't just a fresh take on an old sound; it's an audit of the constraint placed on female artists in the past and a table-turning journey into what might have been possible if musical freedom meant more than obedience to parents, husbands and record producers.

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

I was really hoping that some critical insight the bigger publications had missed would shine through here, and on this front I am let down, albeit pleasantly: all this record strives to be is a power-pop record, of second-string Lennon/McCartney-crossed-with-Americana type that proliferated in the ‘70s and has carried on, doggedly, through the decades.

Sound Kapital never quite settles into a comfortable pattern of pop.

'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.

Like a raging flood, JSBX has picked up all sorts of things on its way down, but unlike Irene, the band has turned a jumble into something tight and precise and essentially its own.

Provider isn't necessarily going to settle old scores. Its a notable release, though, both as a new work by a talented singer-songwriter and as one of what one can only hope will be several satisfying postscripts in the narrative of a great band.

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.

None of Molina’s songs gets an extreme makeover here, and, indeed, one or two wild cards might make the whole collection more interesting. However, it’s telling that so many young, vibrant acts honor the material enough to deliver it straight.

The mix's most pleasing moments and its most successful don't usually overlap: some of the beats are fresh, some of the basslines impeccable, but it's the extramusical sensations, those slithering intimations of robotic insects rooting through the garbage for your financial information, that make this worth engaging with on his terms, not your own.

Enemy takes the game Built to Spill has been playing for a while now and hits the right emotions in the right way.

This is cold, lonely stuff, in other words, high on harsh and gloomy textures, low on solacing gestures.

Out Where suffers from heightened expectations and, strangely enough, predictable ingenuity.