A dream of an album.

Thankfully, the music that accompanies their lyrical flights of fancy and ever so stoned imagery soothes the chafing caused by such unabashed and often lurid flower power ranting.

If the proceedings get a bit "same-y" at times, it's with good reason. Johnson understands the concept of expansion through repetition and uses it to great effect. As the album tumbles to a close with the eight-minute "Goners," the band's operational scheme seems stunning in its clarity.

So what’s a band to do that sticks to its guns and produces some of the finest sludgy blues-punk this side of Blue Cheer? Well, for starters, add horns. Call it a gimmick or a last-ditch effort at reinvention, whatever the case, but it works.

If you want stark, memorable melodies, you’re better off turning to McCombs’ combo Brokeback; for inarguably affecting rhythms, seek out Herndon and Parker’s turn with Ken Vandermark’s Powerhouse Sound; and for shiny sounds molded into pop songs, you’re better off with McEntire’s other band, Sea And Cake. But if you want that patented Tortoise blend of electronic tones, varied beats, and just-so textures treated as ends unto themselves, The Catastrophist delivers.

The Triad has no standouts and doesn’t even stand out in the Pantha du Prince catalog. What it does do well is provide a consistent listening experience, blending all of Hendrik Weber’s strongest proclivities into a 10-song, 63-minute album best thought of as a mix.

Bodega have extended their musical palette and tightened their songwriting to produce an album that bristles with energy and intelligence.

It's as if More and Black set out to purposely compose a more "mature" album. By slowing things down they're able to accommodate R&B outings, spoken word stories and artsy offerings, but to be honest, it's not all that much fun.

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

Succinct. ... While Madness begins in a state of chaos, it reaches an uneasy resolution over its half-hour runtime, exploring some emotionally resonant territory along the way.

Over the course of three decades, Gelb has managed to make two albums that are great all the way though: Chore of Enchantment and 'Sno Angel Like You. He's made dozens that are uneven, and this is another one.

The unifying factor is Mi Ami’s live vibrancy. Except for the overdubbed vocals, almost the entirety of Watersports was performed live in the studio, allowing the three musicians to explore texture and space, collapsing their influences into a gripping dialogue on the darker side of human experience that we so often ignore.

This is punk rock that's both intellectually challenging and young at heart.

More than nihilism, the songs on Death Magic ultimately resolve that what’s important is loving and understanding each other because there’s nothing else. Going in that direction at the same time as their songs go in a much more immediately ingratiating one is a bold move for HEALTH, and here it pays off.

These might be the awkward years, but they’ve resulted in an album that’s both rewarding on its own merits and a suggestion of interesting progressions still to come.

The band falls apart attempting to sound like the whole of the late ’60s and the start of the early ’70s all at once, like listening to The Notorious Byrd Brothers, American Beauty, Moby Grape’s self-titled, the Hollies’ Stop! Stop! Stop! , and a Sloan record played simultaneously; a tepid mash of classic styles all fine on their own that cancel each other out when played together.

On the Moog axis of pop, they’re skewing less towards Six Finger Satellite and more towards an asymmetrical version of the Rentals.

These are exceptional bar-band songs, sure, but they’re still bar band songs. Where Tomorrow’s Hits suffers, though, is in its wholesale familiarity.

These are beautiful, rather unsettling pieces that feel almost right, almost wholly natural, and yet just off.

While I enjoy Erase Errata’s new album, At Crystal Palace, in the larger, more convoluted scheme of things, I am not sure if I am truly impressed.

If the joy of the album is tracking Ranaldo through his worldly interests, his hippie mode, his indie-rocking, then the struggle is never feeling at home because the record never quite finds its sweet spot.

Reviver might make for interesting enough listening in the immediate, but it‘s also a prime candidate for the cut out bin of memory once the band finally arrives at its aforementioned new destination.

In the end, it's the restraint, control, and unlikely expansiveness that make The Best of Gloucester County a strong and surreal step forward for Smith and his band.

V may be more intimate and introverted than Ancestral Star or Lost in the Glare, but it is no less cinematic. It’s a remarkable return to the fore for Porras and Caminiti.

The songs hover around the four-minute mark, and are economical in their implementation, with an overall sheen that does occasionally come close to overdoing it.

While wildly uneven and far from either's strongest work, Instrumental Tourist does have its moments of inspiration.

Tao of the Dead makes me, by turns, want to improve my attention span and want to listen to something else.

The BQE is best listened to in complete ignorance of the track titles, packaging, or even professed subject matter. The music speaks best when it speaks for itself.

If the first half feels a little like a warm-up, they deliver the payoff in fine style and by the end you may feel as worn out as the band must be.

You'll hear a hint of Arcade Fire in the shout-along choruses, a whisper of Neutral Milk Hotel in the tales of deformed love, an intimation of the Decemberists in the pantomime sea shanties that explode into rock. They're all pretty faint echos, though, the vaguest kinds of familiar outposts in a sea of strangeness.

Beautifully played, immaculately recorded and bloated to the gills with 1970s album rock pretensions, it's a throwback to a time that most people don't remember very well (and few of those have any desire to revisit).

PH's previous efforts (the live shows, in particular) have been experiments in what an average listener can take, punctuated with bursts of pleasant catchiness. On Laced, Whitehurst has inverted the ratio, which works, which means the more grating leftovers can be appreciated for the oddities they are.

Architecture in Helsinki delivers complex, dynamic composition and arrangement in a package that, while not universally digestible, is entertaining for all.

While a well-concocted snotty attitude may be a decisive factor in any number of great rock albums, Born Again in the USA feels lazy without any particular agenda. It’s good for a laugh and a couple of listens, but ultimately does not resonate.

These songs are meant for dancing. The pieces are sharp, but they fit together in irresistibly body-moving ways. The music stretches out in easy hedonism then judders to a freeze tag stop, holds a pose just long enough that you can admire it, and jitters on from there.

It’s a testament to the strength of Ashley’s reality, and more importantly his adaptability, that the album holds together at all. Although it draws on half a continent’s worth of source material, The Golden Hour still bears, at every turn, the dark, swaggering cynicism that has always defined Firewater.

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

Alpers is smart, you can tell immediately, yet the album feels carefully scrubbed of identifying marks, swinging between Flaming Lips-size pomp and Laurie Anderson-style catatonia.

The music here feels not so much modern as refurbished.

Horses... is Silver Mount Zion’s most musically satisfying disc to date because, while the well-worn formulae are present, sonic variance and compositional modification has brought a welcome diversity to an increasingly wearisome aesthetic.

I suppose that this isn’t the album a lot of people were probably hoping for. But it’s never the album people were hoping for.

The end result is a sugar-high of electronic keyboard and guitars reaching glam-rock heights and booty shaking lows, all based around very simple, classical ideas of song-structure.

The kids will tolerate Maladroit, and probably many more dull records just like it, because it’s a product of Weezer.

While a somewhat trained ear could tease out what came from where, it's a lot easier in this case just to sit back and enjoy work that seems to value interesting textures and arrangements - but not at the expense of the songs themselves.

An album that can be assertive as it is reflective, and as troubled as it is engaged.

Even though this is Blackburn and Hartley’s first record as Higher Authorities, they’ve had this psychedelic, dubby feel nailed down for years now. Making it more prominent is just a nice touch.

The closer “My Will” is a hymn that induces chills, the choral heights a total wave that subsumes the tom tom trot. Those rhythms make this add up to more than folk + rock. But the ancient rhymes transcend equations.

They don’t shy from their strengths, but they don’t struggle to feature them either, creating an album that never feels like a flippant one-off. Big Walnuts Yonder might be doing a whole bunch of things, but it’s largely an album about making those things cohere.

There’s nothing wrong with the playing here--it’s all good and some excellent--but these guys are still looking for their killer song.

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.

Stir ends in relative quiet and serenity with “Path to the Peak,” little flares of guitar anarchy quickly sluiced over pensive bowing. The dialogue here, as elsewhere, is fluid and intuitive, as each player hears, contemplates and reacts to what the other proposes, not in synchrony but in understanding. They move gracefully over a landscape that is always shifting under them.

These cuts have a lively, volatile energy that reflects the fact that they were improvised and captured mostly in single takes with minimal overdubs. You can hear the two musicians thinking about how their instruments can sound and work and reflect on each other in the moment, untethered by conventional expectations for guitar and drums.

As a listening experience it’s akin to viewing a water color painting, its delicate hues no doubt appealing to anyone attuned to such subtlety. But to someone aching for a little more conviction, grit and risk, it may prove frustratingly listless.

“Six Six Seven (Monsieur Faux Pas)” is all rushing, clambering, beat-wrecked chaos (and very early Liars), while the single “Strawberry Hill” fills well established structures with pastel colors, a pop song melting into dream state. You could fit this latter song onto an Animal Collective-family album, Avey Tare or Panda Bear, possibly.

It’s a languorous, barely moving, fever dream of sustained organ tones and ritual chants, but it creates its own world if you let it.

Tripper is the cleanest, leanest--and, arguably, most accessible--record Hella have made as a duo, showing off some fantastically tight playing and even a few hints of what their music desperately needs: clarity.

This is not a one-hit wonder situation, or even an album with only one good song. With King Night, Salem exhausts all its resources in a singular moment, which leaves the rest of the record to suffer through its own paralysis and mediocrity.

So, enjoy it if you will, and forget it if you like.

Even as Barnes works with a more limited palette, the drums/bass/guitar ensemble sounds as tight and crisp as could possibly be desired. He just doesn’t seem to want to be as gentle as the music that he has created here, resulting in a frustrating, and sometimes rather irritating listen.

What Lali Puna does, and it’s very apparent on Inventions, is to really use the simplicity of pop for all it’s worth.

Whether a frolic or a detour, the latest stop on Hynes's winding musical road is worth a listen. But take his own early words as this listener does: out of context, as an invocation of caveat emptor.

His songs succeed when they balance on the knife-edge of banality and pathos, and when they succeed in making formula redeem itself and regain a kind of innocent power. For most of Realism, unfortunately, Merritt fails to even remotely strike this balance, abandoning any emotional power as he falls victim his penchant for formula and banality.

The momentum picks up a notch on “Whitewaterside,” in which O’Connell recounts standing in cold water, watching the ripples and admiring the quiet stillness of night. The stage is immediately set for a stark, reflective listening experience, with nature as a focus, rendered with zen-like clarity.

Nothing wrong with clearly highlighting your influences, although you do run the risk of reminding listeners why said influences are better.

Their latest is just as bright, bold, and bludgeoning as their past work but adds complexity and depth to their sound.

Wolf People is working out the difficulties of splicing hard rock guitars and post-rock rhythms with diffident folk melodies as if for the first time, and their full-bore concentration makes it sound fresh and unexpected and interesting.

These songs are ultimately undone by their ambition in an attempt to turn what could be pleasantly ephemeral fare into moment-defining anthems.

Echoes of Faust's enduring impact leap to the forefront constantly, but by the end of Something Dirty, it is clear that the anxiety of influence remains on the present generation, not vice versa.

This is Quintron's best summation yet of his iconoclastic melding of raw rock & roll, R&B and funk, experimental electronics and art.

The good news is that this is the band’s strongest music since Seasons in the Abyss. The bad news is that, compared to their vaulted ’80s output, the album lacks intensity.

Fab Four Suture is a virtual treasure map, a plane of possibility.

The concept and the execution are both spectacular.

We can see Power as a breakthrough provided that we do not think about the DFA, !!! or Out Hud, or Les Savy Fav. Unfortunately, Q and Not U do not have much to add to what those bands have already done.

A gorgeously euphonic skull-crusher.

Chemical Chords is more compact, true, but they’ve not lost their character through economy.

More than anything else, one gets the feeling that Bespoke exists to defy categorization and manifest that essential need to live as a unique being, no matter how inevitable the factory-churning repetition of prescribed lifestyles may seem.

This is a “nice” album, not a great one. It pleases with clean, intelligent production, thoughtful arrangements, clever, elliptical words.

While Lortz's body of work as a songwriter has grown larger, The World is Just a Shape to Fill the Night may occupy a spot similar to the one Get Lonely owns in The Mountain Goats' more varied discography.

Most times, Moon Duo seems to distill whole rock songs into a single measure, refracted into a million repetitions as through a funhouse mirror.“Creepin’” vamps a blues rock riff into oblivion, transforming heat and friction and diesel dust into something otherworldly. Only “White Rose” is given the room to stretch its limbs.

Skelliconnection feels more like a series of singles and EPs rather than one statement.

The songwriting is just as strong as anything in Lerner’s output and much like emotional nadirs, emotional zeniths also fade. Lerner’s moment in the sun is as fun for the listener as it is for him.

It's a great, moving set of songs from one of the few modern songwriters to actively challenge his own preconceptions of his art.

Bold and exciting, the project demonstrates the infinite possibilities available to modern producers, if only they look in the unlikeliest of places.

The cool thing about Protean Threat is that he’s got the beast and the collar. He can let things run wild in complicated ways while also keeping it wholly and brilliantly under control. Let’s not mince words. This is one of the best rock albums of 2020.

By most measures, Cream Cuts is Tussle’s most enjoyable and fully realized release yet, but its excellence can’t compensate for the nagging sameness that plagues most of its songs.

Goblin is the messy schizoid splatter painting of the child we've raised and ruined, and it's coherent only as a hopeless plea for us to expect nothing from him again.

Entirely derivative but somehow not obvious, the record is surprisingly--and pleasantly--strange.

That flair for the undramatic has produced yet another fragile and entrancing record.

It’s still a trip, just a marginally more vivid one, and that’s a good thing.

Personal Life is absorbing and entertaining the first few times through, but many may not find it as engaging as the Thermals' best work.

Violent Hearts occasionally plods, as on "No One," "Other Girls," and the opener "Believe," (at least before its delightfully messy climax). But more often it quietly impresses, revealing new melodic and harmonic strands with each subsequent listen.

Pink Graffiti is a strong album, and one that grows on you the more you listen to it. Your opinion of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys probably won't affect your judgment of it all that much.

N-Space was at best ignorable, but Departed Glories makes a mark. Play it quietly and it shades the atmosphere; play it loudly and you can get lost in its sculpted tones and distilled emotions.

The album varies between affecting and emotionally resonant straightforward pieces, and at times moments that increase the level of abstraction and repetition into minimalism. ... Sun Piano is a meditative and elegiac set, yet points towards the possibilities of endless variation and reflection.

Urban Turban is consolidation for Cornershop, pulling together old and new tracks and showing as many hands as they can.

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

This is not a welcoming album, but it’s as gripping and immersive as a good film about dystopia.

Side one of MCIII consists of perfectly enjoyable songs, with similar ingredients--piano, interesting guitar work, a voice reminiscent of ‘60s pop, but that ineffable thing that makes songs stick in your head just doesn’t seem to be here.... The second half of the album is problematic in a different way.