The pulse and stomp of opener “City of Angels” or the sparkling twilight balladry of “Misery Remember Me” are classic examples of what Ladytron has always done well and why it’s good to have them back. Especially on the back half of Time’s Arrow, though, there are some new wrinkles.

The title of nature morte might reference death, but this music is frightfully, joyfully and overwhelmingly alive.

On Shook, Franklin James Fisher, Lee Tesche, Ryan Mahan and Matt Tong sound refreshed, energized by collaboration and completely confident in their identity.

The Hypnogogue is anything but minimalist. It starts with a big concept, adds dramatic, room-filling rock arrangements and extends for over an hour. And yet, there are very few intervals where you wonder if things might have been better if they were shorter or more pared back. The Church is going out with a bang, not a whimper, and we’re lucky to be here to hear it.

Given how inspired they sound here, it’s clear their musical chemistry is as instinctive as ever.

Clattering drum machines and gorgeous washes of tone are topped off by a standout vocal turn that carries the album off into the clouds, a searingly emotional purge and soothing balm all rolled in one.

Two fistfuls of songs that are at once as tight and as expansive as the band has ever been. The trio isn’t unrecognizable in their compositions, but it’s the way they use space that appears to have shifted. The result is formidable for fans and an easy entry point for those just joining the journey.

Forster produces some of the most direct and affecting songs of his singular career. ... Forster’s observational directness and simple language are always in service to the deep feeling in his songs and few better imbue the quotidian joys of domestic life and the power of memory with such poetry.

They nail the curves and changeups so well that you only notice the complexity in retrospect. While it’s happening, it seems mostly like good rock music

Right from the start, it’s the attention to detail in the arrangements — what Frank Zappa used to describe as “eyebrows” — that brings Norm to vivid, radiant life. ... Regardless of how gorgeous it all sounds, sometimes the songwriting does feel a little wanting, as if Shauf has penned a decent verse and chorus, then run out of ideas about how to add another section to take the song to the next level. ... By keeping all the songs to a succinct few minutes, Shauf stymies their potential to evolve into longer, more complex pieces.

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.

If his last album 2019’s Occulting Disk seemed designed to alienate, Compositions for all its formality and repetition has a far more human aspect. Lugubrious yes, sometimes harsh but its granular beauty has a mesmeric effect that lingers.

We Cater to Cowards is a satisfying and sometimes thrilling record. Particularly in its final third, it finds a snarling, crunching groove that slots alongside the general feeling of our current socio-political conjuncture.

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.

It’s not that these songs are bad, just that they sound a lot alike: elegant, chilled, full of foreboding.

Though Furling is a fitting title in this regard, in the sense of closing around something, of creating a feeling of being safe and loved, there’s also a sensation of unfurling, of opening out, of expansiveness, of fearless abandon. That’s a rare balance to strike, and one that proves intoxicatingly addictive.

Even if the record had been inevitable, it didn’t have to be so engaging; fortunately, it is.

Bottom line: if you like diva pop with a little edge, have at it. But if you got into Billy Nomates because she reminded you of the Sleaford Mods, maybe sit CACTI out.

Landwerk No. 3 is, like its predecessors, a work of craggy beauty that does homage to a world—that of pre-war European Jews—destroyed in the same wave of technology and social change that made possible the preservation of its traces in the archival recordings and, in turn, rendered the recordings obsolete.

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.

As fine as the instrumental playing is here, Crutchfield and Williamson singing together creates magic.

Overall, Almanac Behind is perhaps the most successful of Bachman’s “noise records”.

The album is full of the small noises and cosmic visions that encapsulate life, death, microbe and universe, a tick of time, like a chord, both stark and larger than itself, establishing and destroying its boundaries. This all-in-all unity gives the album astonishing power and a uniquely familiar beauty.

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.

Comradely Objects, is the band flexing at the peak of their powers.

The album is warmly, insistently, alive. Its music makes no grand gestures but offers generosity and compassion in its connective tissue.

Two Ribbons is neither the sound of Hollingworth and Watson paralyzed by these varying levels of grief, anger, loneliness and guilt nor them pretending like everything was or is okay. It’s almost incidental that this is also their best album and one of the best synth pop records of the year. ... Two Ribbons is the kind of great record that you kind of wish the artists never had to make.

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

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 album seems like a simple, straightforward work, yet every song carries fitting surprises within its construction. ... It’s the singer’s own version of reality, but it probably isn’t that far from whatever’s actually out there. If it’s a little bent and a little brighter at the same time, it somehow only feels truer.

The fellows in Chat Pile still need to figure out how close to the bone of the Real they want their music to cut, and how best to achieve that. But many of these songs lacerate with convincing passion and rock with memorable ferocity.

With Shaw’s vocals as the pivot, Dowse, Maynard and Buxton flex, weave and dance around her, resulting in a nuanced listen that extends the band way beyond their pigeonhole of “post-punk.” Hard to pinpoint where Dry Cleaning belong now, which can only be a good thing.

Unfortunately, The Elephant Man’s Bones is a step back for both the artist and the producer. ... A generic Alchemist production makes for a generic Marciano verse. In short, there is no chemistry between The Alchemist and Marciano. ... The Elephant Man’s Bones sparks hope in the middle with “Quantum Leap” and “Bubble Bath” but after that it regresses again into a second rate lounge-y Marciano.

In the end, though, it is all but impossible not to come away from this album with a grin like Marshall Allen’s. The positive vibrations in the studio are evident, and the musicianship is, naturally, of the highest order (including Allen’s wailing alto).

Rolling Golden Holy is more comfortable and assured than its predecessor, but not as eerily evocative. If the self-titled was a twilight vista full of mist and longing, the follow-up ambles through sunny backroads. It has a bit more Johnson, a bit less Mitchell in its mix, though the two artists find intriguing common ground on multiple occasions.

The Beths took the path of being exactly who they’ve always been, but more intensely and immediately. Given the interruptions, they waste no time in getting going.

It’s a nice way to spend three-quarters of an hour, even if you don’t have much to say about it afterwards.

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.

His songs flash by in vivid, disconnected mental images, floating on an underlying current of mood. What we see passes by. What we feel about it lingers, evocatively, just out of reach and often filtered through digital mechanisms. ... The album’s lyrics are about all kinds of things, but its sound is about being isolated and frightened with contact only through digital interface.

Orcutt builds musical structures layer by layer, part by part. These compositions are sometimes jaggedly ecstatic – “Or head on” for one, leaps and lurches with joy. As in any congregation, sometimes a delighted, discordant, untrained voice rises in volume above the rest.

In times of uncertainty, you might very well look to the music Anderson interprets—folk, blues, gospel—for reassurance. But the uneasiness works its way in, even to these lovely songs. Anderson captures that conjunction of solitude and stress, of beauty in the moment and angst about what’s next, in a way that reflects very clearly on the last couple of years.

These songs have a dream-like, airy quality, despite the genuine rock fire power that Why Bonnie brings to the game.

You can hear the impact of the pandemic in this latest album from No Age, not in the recording, which sounds as assured as ever, but in the bouts of introspection, the intervals of lyricism, the sweet haze and jangle of home-cooked rock. Spunt and Randall went inward, not out into the world, to find a different way to sound.

The tunes tend to unfold at mid-tempo and with the logic of a short story as, once more, Jones composes and performs, with seeming effortlessness, a set of memorable melodies that reward repeated listening.

Despite its uneven presentation, Someday is Today is a beautiful, evocative record, whose charms invite and reward repeat listens.

These songs are direct, sometimes stripped down, but the components are robust, clear and smartly mixed. They sound like Osees.

As ever, he refuses to offer any easy answers, leaving the listener beguiled.

Success is a fine example of Oneida’s willingness to fly in the face of fashion and once again reinvent themselves.

Even the soccer dads and middle-management types might find themselves nodding along to lyrics like, “It’s losers all the way down, stay undefeated.” That’s from the album’s flat-out banger, “Wage Wars, Get Rich, Die Handsome,” a sing-along celebration of nihilism that pounds and punches and exults in itself.

Though the album is closed out well enough by the droning “Atomkerne,” it’s “Be a Pattern for the World” that leaves a lasting impression.

Every sound is thrown like a punch, rocking you back with sheer bludgeoning impact. The sound is instantly familiar, though surprisingly hard to pin down with punk antecedents.

It’s an eccentric mechanical universe that Kamikaze Palm Tree has constructed and well worth visiting.

Everything Was Beautiful isn’t some showy highlight reel, though; it’s an example of how keenly Pierce has honed his inner space rock and how much room it still has left to soar.

Kode9 fans will enjoy club ready tracks like “Uncoil” and “Lagrange Point” and as with his previous work, the mastery of dynamics and the production values are to rights but there’s a sense the music cannot carry the weight of its associations alone.

The music sometimes meanders as perspectives shift and but Barbieri’s juxtapositions of church and club in which transcendence through music can be both a public and intensely personal experience is never less than transporting.

The interaction between machines and the power and tone of branch’s trumpet is the core here and the duo play off each other with unerring control and infectious joy.

Such clear chemistry and inspired interplay will hopefully lead to future releases in the same vein. Anyone with a penchant for classic-sounding ambient electronica with a kosmische bent will find plenty to nod along to here.

A graceful, thoughtful, utterly modest triumph, wrapping its twisty modal melodies in layers of fuzz and convening a junk shop orchestra of synths, drums, keyboards and, occasionally, harpsichord to fill out their fragile contours. Like all good pop, the songs have an emotional ambiguity.

Arkhon is a distinctive and consistently winning album. It is a departure, but one that still manages to be an addition to Danilova’s catalogue that complements her other releases. Some of the best singles of 2022 reside here.

If the Sadies had set out to make a final statement—and let’s be clear, they did not—they could hardly have done better than Colder Streams, a swirling, trippy summation of their journey so far. ... The whole album is great.

It’s remarkable, throughout, how well Purim has held up, as a singer, as a jazz composer and band leader and as an artist. You wouldn’t know, from listening, whether she was 80 or 60 or 20. The songs are vital, pulsing with bright energy, imbued with a lifetime’s skill but effervescent. Not many women got to play as pivotal a role in jazz as Purim did. This retrospective makes the case for her importance without getting bogged down in it.

A colorful, evocative dream-pop record.

Classic Objects demonstrates Hval’s capacity for musical growth and lyrical introspection. It is her best work thus far.

It’s a lengthy, reflective and beautiful record that mostly steers away from the more rock-oriented sound of Shearwater’s last two releases.

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.

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.

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.

Ultimately, whether The Smile spells the end of Radiohead feels beside the point when the music that Yorke and Greenwood are making at this stage in their career is this damned good.

Listen to the second album next to the first, and it’s like when the eye doctor finds the right lens strength and all the letters become legible.

You could spend a lot of time thinking about why these songs and what Terry and McGhee meant in their own time and what they mean now, but the songs are pure visceral experiences that you feel in your gut and your heart.

The atmosphere is lovely—it refracts the light like the last traces of fog in sunlight—but there are songs here underneath, good ones, and that makes all the difference.

An ambitious, wrenching, majestic album.

Raum shows that they can still make it happen, vast swatches of sound, space and symbol coalescing along paths toward those points in time when Tangerine Dream sounds like no one else.

The recording’s sessions were done in a few days, and the final product retains a fetching immediacy and intimacy. A fundamental lightness of affect pervades the recording, even when it delves into heavy or sad topics.

Given DePlume’s voice is such a strong flavor, Gold’s appeal will no doubt hinge on whether it’s to your taste. I find it fine in small doses, but domineering over the course of a double album. There’s some great music here if you have the patience to cherry-pick the best bits.

Minor quibble aside, Warm Chris is a fantastic record full of color, humor and wonder.

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

Aware of the vastness but alive to the myriad small beauties that flit in and out of view, seemingly oblivious but alert to the potential threat of your presence. Carmen Villain captures these delicate balances in her music and invites the listener to ponder their passivity and question their gaze.

Wild Loneliness is the perfect album for this moment, in which darkness isn’t denied but is repudiated to within an inch of its life.

It all reminds you of how great a band Sonic Youth was, even at play, even at home trying out tunings and motifs, tossing one idea out into the amplifiers and hearing it echoed, altered, elaborated by tuned-in others.

Salvant shows off a sharp wit in the talk-sung, “Obligation,” a fluid sophistication on “If I Lost My Mind,” and a little bit of swagger on the brief, piano-pounding “Trail Mix.” Her original songs are as varied as the covers.

With his debut album on Shady Records, Conway the Machine shows that he remains a gifted lyricist and a good storyteller, yet hardly offers anything original.

Havasu is raw with current and remembered emotion, but there’s love at the center of it – for the girls at school, for the places he went and even for the family that misunderstood him— and that warm forgiveness makes it all the more powerful.

Still Life seems mostly solid, presenting evidence of talent, taste and potential, but not quite pushing things over the top.

A surrealist song cycle that is both oblique and engaging.

If you like jagged, body-moving beats and clever kids slinging dissatisfaction, try Silverbacks.

Overall, its more up-tempo songs aside, Lucifer on the Sofa is a disappointment, offering regrettable evidence that Britt Daniel’s laudable song writing mojo may have gone off the boil.

The songs’ stoner shoegaze impact can be appreciated even if you miss the line that tells you our narrator is an asteroid miner. But if you do lean into meditating on its themes, the phantasmagorical desolation that is Dissolution Wave’s intended setting makes the songs hit even harder.

As good as its individual songs and moments are, Summer at Land’s End is even better experienced as a whole, where it takes on a world-of-its-own feel, thanks, in part, to a pair of hypnotic instrumentals.

The most surprising aspect of DNWMIBIY is that for a double album, the quality control is high and the sequencing is especially effective. ... In the meantime, DNWMIBIY is the first album to join my best of 2022 list.

The album sounds a little warmer and less rustic than might be expected. The sound’s not inherently better or worse, but it suits Fussell’s movement toward more expansive orchestration and a more contemporary feel.

The longest track on the recording, at 7’21”, is “Sadder than Water,” where the stasis of basslines found elsewhere are broken into an angular melody overlaid with oscillating chordal material. This, along with the outer two tracks, points to a promising way forward for Shenfeld, in which her skill at creating textures is matched by her ability to develop them.

Most of the record is engaging stuff, noisier than pretty, stranger than it is studied.

An album about finding meaning in the quiet, and even people who will never take psychedelic drugs or visit remote Ecuadorian caves, can get something out of that.

Callahan’s honeyed, slightly gravelly bass-baritone, which comes across as dispassionate to the point of being noncommittal on Blind Date Party at times, and Bonnie Prince’s tenor, consistently vulnerable, raw, wide open, complement each other in a compelling way, establishing dramatic tension and unearthing emotionally resonant inner dialogues within the album’s songs.

The hooks are strong, and the harmonies sweetly hypnotic, but in between the choruses, you can still catch a firehose blast of pure guitar that will knock you back flat if you’re not braced properly.

It still has a sonic attack and extreme enough structural sense that the genre tag on its own probably doesn’t do enough to sum up what’s going on here. Baker and Buckareff are the rare creators who absolutely locked into their particular sound pretty much immediately and through many (many) releases over the years have never really sounded like anything but Nadja, and yet within that distinct soundworld they continue to find new shades in what in lesser hands would be a pretty limited palette.

A monolith and a kaleidoscope of detail, Der Lange Marsch is a hypnotic adventure in which to lose oneself.