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.

Polizze has escaped the weight of history, the whole of the Hiss persona reaching the higher plain that the guitar has occupied from day one.

McCauley writes within genre, embraces its trappings, and emerges with completely acceptable results.

Jim is pleasant, polite, listenable, smooth (it’s like Yacht Rock for the nu-soul set), undemanding…and a bit of a bore.

Chasny has souped up his production values, and they’ve never been sharper than they are on Luminous Night, checking everything Chasny has ever done well with unprecedented clarity.

Despite a smattering of highlights, there’s no gut-punch anywhere on Jukebox.

There’s nothing bombastic about it, but it’s large in a way that folk-picking seldom is, and it fills every inch of a sonic landscape.

Gonzalez has wisely resisted the urge to bulk up his sound, and concentrated instead on seeing how far a guitar, his voice and a few continents worth of influences can carry him.

The reality is that Valley Tangents just sort of floats by as background music even whilst actively listening.

Though the music lulls and comforts, you get the sense that these Lightman sisters harbor a prickly thought or two.

The first half of this album is so annoying that you might give up before you hit a few of the better songs, all tucked away after the halfway point.

If you're in the mood, the repeating riffs may fit right in; if you're not, you'll grow weary midway through each song.

As it is, Cyclop Reaps has the aura of automatic writing, a stream of unfiltered imagery that is, intermittently, quite arresting, but as a whole shapeless and hard to navigate.

Drones and feedback accumulate, intensify, and the whole thing threatens to collapse or combust. It does neither. ... Menuck’s difficult record is clearly a post-Trump artwork, a soundtrack for outrage fatigue. Its odd power raises questions.

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.

All these songs drown together, dissipating like wet Kleenex as soon as they're done.

None of this is terrible, but none, also, is as tensely, gloriously obliterating as Coconut’s opening blow.

Unlike previous output, the ten tracks on Attention Please are slick, synthesized, almost club-ready vamps (or at least that seems to be their aspiration). The affect may be intentional but for the most part I found them to be drowsy, forgettable, head-nodding throwaways with at least a passable amount of textural variety but very little in the way of memorable song-writing.

It is, in short, the sound of a group confidently, and unassumingly, re-defining its own universe.

While most of Here We Go Magic works well as a unit, the more noise-based, non-vocal tracks detract from momentum; they’re the least interesting things on the album.

In Heaven is a significant advance for Twin Sister, both in the way that it smoothes over and clarifies its original aesthetic and in the way it explores a handful of new avenues.

Ghettoville is a purposefully secretive record, a vision quest, a Cassavetes lens--at times challenging to sit through, but the more you look into it, the more you might discover.

It has a denser, more cohesive sound, more defined rhythms and richer arrangements--and yet lacks some of the subterranean pull of its predecessor.

Richard Youngs has given us an album that just about anyone can pick up a guitar to play along to, but that doesn’t mean the experience of listening to The Rest is Scenery is an easy one. Fans of his, of course, wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Errant Charm is by no means a bad album, but it's not great either; it's just nice in a way that is too easy to ignore for its own good.

The most interesting tracks on this album sound like music for the great Pier 1 Imports in the sky, suggesting an infinity of pure, terrifying stasis.

While Goldfrapp's new sound calls to mind the likes of the Human League, Donna Summer, and Soft Cell, it's more than the sum of those parts and benefits from much heavier beats than many of its apparent influences.

Promise Of Love would be a good joint, by indie rock standards, if the passive-aggressive everyschmuck ex-girlfriend mixed-tape staples on the latter half didn’t suck so badly.

Anxiety Always shows Miller and Kuperus trying a lot of new ideas and singing with much more range and emotion.

It's not as interesting as it could and probably should be.

Wolfe seems out in the open for the first time--overall, though, she's more interesting when she's deep in the woods.

Natural History is at its best when it's at its most focused.

Lust Lust Lust is the best The Raveonettes have ever been.

False Idols could have been impressive and believable at fewer than a dozen tracks, but nine of the 15 seem insufferably lazy.

It’s overkill. Gangsta rap parodies itself better than any outsider ever could. Homeboy Sandman is so far inside his self-referential bubble that he can’t see his target is already in on the joke.

A puny, ill-conceived record in comparison to both Alphabetical and its predecessor United.

Doseone’s rapping is thicketed to the point of impenetrability; whatever he wishes to convey gets lost in his internal rhymes.

If that all sounds a bit lofty and conceptual, well, BBF is just that, but it’s also fun. Some tracks plod a little, and will sound pretentious to some ears, but each one contains a wealth of detail, and its best moments are miniature triumphs.

While everything is kept at a smoulder--the words unclear, the tempos slow--this new Om album is anything but boring.

As I said, there is nothing really to fault, at least superficially, with Night Gallery, but it just never builds on the decent ingredients at play. It's simply far too easy to forget once you've heard it.

It is damned good, a concise exercise in muscular rock and roll whimsy that, while not quite knocking Bee Thousand off its perch, is perfectly in line with the steady stream of quality guitar rock that Pollard has been churning out for decades.

The music is something to behold.

So yes, they've still got it. But that still begs the question; do you need re-recordings of tunes that changed the face of rock music? Not as badly as you need the originals, that's for sure.

The elements of Eddy Current Suppression Ring have always been very simple, yet they congeal in a primal, supremely compelling way. However, this time around, they’re still fundamental, but perhaps a bit less urgent, especially early on in the disc

Sprawling but consistently clean and light, Among the Leaves is sprightlier than much of Kozelek's previous work.

King of the Beach has a few decent approximations of beloved styles. Perversely, they don't seem like breakthroughs--they make his old songs seem less special.

While Dulli has mined the same vein of pop music for almost 25 years, he has nonetheless accomplished an awful lot with it.

Despite the record’s minimal evolution, it’s still a joy to hear, an extension of the promise displayed on More Parts Per Million.

If the consistently lovely Piano is radical at all, it’s in a subtle and contextual way, serving partly as a space for Taylor to investigate several of his own previously released compositions and a few covers with a quiet kind of focus, and partly as a sustained exercise in mood.

At just four songs, each hovering around the 10-minute mark, Destination Tokyo feels more like a peek than a coming-out party.

Album closer 'Warlock Psychologist' is a glorious mess of distorted keyboard and poetic non sequiturs that less dedicated bands would probably have left off the record. But not Swan Lake, whose perverse commitment to farty art-rock is to be respected, perhaps even embraced.

With perhaps the exceptions of "Silver > Blue" and "Levitation," none of the songs catch your attention. No melodies stick in your mind. No spirit of the album lingers, and the room isn't warmed by its presence. It's there and nice, but then it's gone.

The album is just disappointing: full of slick beats of undisguised artifice and lacking the one thing all good slow jams need – namely, great vocals.

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.

It’s fine for a lark, but you can leave the tikis in the attic where they belong.

No matter what tweak to the overall aesthetic Nelson may make, Pan-American’s music is as interesting as ever, precisely because there is no end in sight.

There is an introspective quality to Personal Space.

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

The latest full-length from the latest version of The Shins has some amazing songs.... But it also has some of the worst songs The Shins have ever produced.

While it sounded on 2003’s Promise of Love that the American Analog Set were turning themselves into a shoegaze-revival band, Set Free sounds more in line with the gentle atmospheric rock on their finest album, 1999’s The Golden Band.

Plague Park’s nine tracks seem to be over before they reach their potential. The record gets better as it progresses, and successive listens reveal more interesting facets to the songwriting.

Wooden Shjips’ pleasant but toothless music feels insubstantial, if not insipid, in relation to the demands of our unforgiving present.

Czarface Meets Ghostface may not be the stone cold classic the participants are capable of but it is a very enjoyable trip through a world populated by comic book and movies heroes and villains.

Mascis’ songs are still simple, clever, and catchy.

You can hear the absolute precision, yes; but the head and hands have not left the heart and soul behind.

To Rococo Rot's Hotel Morgen is seductive and suggestively sculpted; romance music for people with unforced, natural, and charmingly contrary style.

Loney Dear’s latest, Dear John, is an endearing slice of small sigh indie-pop, well ornamented and too cute by half.

They pull off a wide sound for a duo, sometimes creating too much space. There's some room in the back seat for more low end. Then they'd really boogie.

The Mynabirds should probably have cut a couple of the less memorable and longer songs (“Omaha” and “Hanged Man”) to keep the disc focused. Even so, Lovers Know makes a strong statement, full of well-rendered wisdom and heart.

Load Blown is stunning. It engulfs. While sacrificing little if anything to compositional templates, the record is remarkable listenable.

The immediate embrace of anything analogue-warped by certain corners of the Internet shouldn't detract from Forever, as it's quite an engaging listen when the right (nocturnal) mood strikes.

The record’s oversized persona feels strange because these sounds don’t owe that much to the twang or crate-digging excavations that built Romweber’s reputation.

Ellington and Bean’s voices braid pleasant timbres that sound quite right sailing over the band’s strum and shuffle, but they’re curiously lacking in the chemistry that separates necessary from nice.

All of the songs here are strong enough to be bolstered (rather than swamped) by their rococo touches and period piece flourishes.

It's striking how well the gypsy sound fits with older material, but even so, the best song on Alegrias was written specifically for the album.

That such disparate musicians with such massive amounts of tape from the field could put something together this tastefully gives hope that whatever and wherever Albarn decides to operate next, he conducts proceedings in the same considered fashion as he has here.

No one’s going to herald Waiting For Something To Happen as a great leap forward, but there’s a subtle refinement in approach happening for the attentive of ear.

It's the first record that, overall, feels serious.

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.

Acoustic guitar, electric often played clean, and politely-tapped drums have never married pop beauty and frightening moodiness like they do when Supreme Dicks hit a stride.

Maybe the problem with The Politics of Envy is that these tracks just sounded too good playing back on shiny studio monitors to a roomful of old friends. If he's struggling to say something about the wider world, maybe Stewart should consider a retreat into his own eccentric interior.

Its greatest strengths are more memorable: the songwriting is strong, even if the album is a little top heavy, and it’s a lot of fun to watch Aaron Funk go way out on a limb without a safety net in sight.

He sings in a voice that makes everything sound like an indecent proposal (and honestly, some of it is). A younger, less whispery Leonard Cohen with a slightly wider range might be the best point of reference.

While a lot of their peers have attempted (unsuccessfully, mostly) to beat down the doors of California's psychedelic myth, Sic Alps have taken their time and found their own way there; in doing so they've created one of the best records of the year.

Personally, the album works for me because it's kind of a gloss on intersecting listening practices that also has a distinct identity; the concentration of techno, the emotional lift of pop, the cratering impact of dubstep, and CHLLNGR himself are all there. It follows that the highs are toned down a bit for all those to fit comfortably. But then, the album feels so complete in itself, you don't really notice.

Jónsi plays with orchestral beauty and flirts with pop, and ends up somewhere in between, fascinating and inscrutable.

Even more striking is the way she folds all this talent into her songs, keeping all the bits distinct while shaping them into a complicated, intricate whole that breathes like a living creature. Nicely done.

Lamping has some catchy songs and some interesting lyrics, but feels too inconsequential, too easily sloughed off.

Unfortunately, the greatest asset to Splazsh also feels like its greatest Achilles heel. The territory this album spans is substantial, but almost impossible to get into without focused, repeated listening.

Perhaps in the end it’s best to just say that The Besnard Lakes sound like themselves; they’ve certainly found a way to refine their own sound, and the jarring beauty that can be heard in A Coliseum Complex Museum is a prime example of it.

The result is an album that is as notable on its own as it is in the historical chillwave narrative.

A pretty percolating electro-pop record that embraces sweetness and strangeness in equal measure.

An album like Alien in a Garbage Dump is interesting for its first spin, when the listener has the resources to make something of it. Past that, you’ll need to make an almost ritual commitment to teasing out the clashes that push the music forward.

You may stumble upon an experiment or a minute-long fragment here and there, but the deck is stacked with memorable songcraft and an attitude that understands silliness without succumbing to sketch-comic dead ends.

No matter the tempo or timbre, this album always feels like an act of love between SeiTang and his vintage equipment.

While there’s no disputing the attractiveness of its well-polished recording... it’s patchy and... in places, disturbingly adult-contemporary.

The end result is the 11 songs on Unlearn, which I'll save you the frustration of calling "eclectic" and opt for the even more euphemistic "well-informed."

The ride is fun enough, better than average for the masses, but for this band it’s an off-day: once it’s over, you don’t even think to wonder why it was fun.