Atkinson, like other environmentally conscious composers such as John Luther Adams, Raven Chacon, and Liza Lim, creates an ecology when they create a piece, an environment they populate with sonic significations for their own meditation, and more so for our beleaguered world, its remaining beauty, and its tiny place in the universe. A favorite of 2024.

Nothing overtakes Williamson’s singing and the basic keyboard and guitar accompanying elements. The songs themselves are artful creations.

Like The Disintegration Loops, A Shadow in Time is not sentimental--it just is. Basinski’s music exists to make us feel, but won’t take the easy route in doing so.

While not exactly self-evident or easy to spot, the song structures are more prevalent than before.

Beulah have somehow blended the sounds their last three albums, each a significant achievement on its own, into one career-spanning epic, completely worthy of their reputation; any small ways in which their past work has seemed lacking, superficial, or scatterbrained is gone, and only the best points remain.

They’ve never interacted quite like this, and the results are correspondingly different from anything else they’ve done. ... Clocking in at just half an hour, Made Out Of Sound makes its points and moves on.

You could say that not much happens in Shone a Rainbow Light On, that it moves slowly and doesn’t progress in any linear way, but that would be missing out on the blessed stillness and calm that lives in these tracks.

The Purple Bird, recorded in Nashville, is one of his most committed forays into the genre — musically of a piece with the rich, twinkling chops of previous releases like Greatest Palace Music and The Best Troubadour.

The Shepherd’s Dog is a step forward for Iron and Wine in many ways. The only moments where it falters are where the tonal characteristics gesture toward the past. When it shines, however, The Shepherd’s Dog’s clever songwriting and creative instrumentation makes for the most complete record Beam has ever recorded.

There isn’t a singular, clear message of hope on The Great Bailout, but in documenting the rage and despair built into life under such a ugly and evil system, Moor Mother has provided something just as valuable — if not more so— in understanding the struggles of the present day.

A silky, bright, singing-in-the-shower masterstroke of joy and elation.

Making the transition from Songs into Instrumentals is more of a listening challenge than one might imagine. While both albums are populated by the same radiant guitar tone, the playing on Instrumentals is much more exploratory and tentative, dotted with hesitations, pinging harmonics, string buzz and misarticulated notes.

The three singles—“Home,” “Never Come Back” and “You and I” ... follow the trajectory of Caribou’s previous and most successful commercial album, Our Love, in the conjunction of dance, R&B and psychedelic electronics, and will likely capture the same level of attention for it. Yet there is also much to like in the quieter, more contemplative cuts where frail, gorgeous shreds of melody reside in intricate electronic settings.

Listeners wanting a somewhat more traditional metal record experience may find those tactics more comfortable to engage. Listeners wanting a SUMAC record will be happy to know that the band’s tendencies toward intuitive sonic conflagration are not entirely domesticated. .... Harsh, but beautiful. Bruising, but full of care. It’s a really good record.

At its best, A U R O R A is an exhilarating work, propulsive and contemplative, able to allow for moments of searing volume and elegant beauty.

Despite the length—and maybe because of it—this one drew me in and kept me there. It’s warm and casual and unstudied, which is not to say that it’s not technically proficient. It’s a campfire where everyone sings and plays preternaturally well, and it’s easy to linger there right through to sunrise.

As always, the beauty of Gendron’s music feels both hard fought and carefully wrought, something worth sharing and protecting.

Once again, the band demonstrates mastery both of crafting hooks and building compelling long form pieces.

For the first time in years, Godspeed is both operating at peak strength and not (as far we know) about to go on hiatus.

It’s rich; despite the fact that the cuts are short and sweet, each represents any number of possibilities for repurposing and restyling.

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

Hval is unafraid to experiment and let the chips fall where they may. The results on Iris Silver Mist are variable but always intriguing.

For an album with such a grandiose title, Big Thief’s Double Infinity is bafflingly mediocre — especially since it arrives on the back of a string of good-to-great albums.

Rather than just a haphazard collection, the eight cathartic pieces that make up Infinite Worlds work as a genuinely affecting singular statement--its idiosyncrasies stitched together by a strong lyrical narrative, improbably forming a cohesive whole.

The Body, the Blood, the Machine reveals a band that's a bit older, a step slower, and startlingly sardonic.

Freedom’s Goblin is remarkably coherent. Ty Segall may never have to make another album, so definitively does this one capture his art and possibilities, but you know he will.

Inches functions in the best way a retrospective of its kind can: the more primitive songs don't seem like missteps so much as enlightening diagrams of how the band arrived at such convincing current ones.

There probably won't be many albums in 2003 that will combine images, sounds and deepfelt emotions as well as The Violet Hour.

It does contain some beautiful songs. Its deficiencies won’t miff his indulgent cult (at least not any more than they’ve been miffed previously). But it doesn’t quite hold together.

The Mancy of Sound and its predecessor are straight-up essential listening, and gloriously exciting music. The pulse quickens each time I put this one on.

Ultimately, this album manages to sound like all and none of these, making Barn Owl a band that's becoming harder to pin down and easier to appreciate.

The ghosts in Monolake's latest creation are more subtle -- bubbling, evasive presences that unsettle the equilibrium of each track without derailing it.

It seems like a humble accomplishment, but it is richly rewarding.

Pye Corner Audio's latest [is] the marquee example of Ghost Box at their most distilled, their most essential: reaching beyond by reaching within.

For illumination on this particular sect of techno’s journey over the past few years, it’s hard to think of an album more deserving of the limelight than Incubation.

It’s as classy and unassumingly smart as you’d expect.

If you have a weakness for fat synth sounds and sputtering early drum machines committed to reel-to-reel tape, this stuff could set you swooning.

Solar Motel is Forsyth’s most traditional album in recent memory.

Every song on his debut album is sourced from an old record or field recording, but he and producer William Tyler have gone out of their way to ensure that they don’t sound particularly antique. In fact, while they’ll rest pretty easily upon Americana-tuned ears, they don’t slot too easily into any particular scene.

It’s easy to forgive Gnod such self-indulgence, however, even if it means Infinity Machines just about fails to maintain interest throughout, because this album sounds like very little out there, at least from a rock perspective.

That link underlines that Red River Dialect’s pensive, acoustic incarnation is not incompatible with the wilder, louder more forceful material before it, that indeed, it funnels the same intensity through quieter, more melancholy channels. Tender Gold and Gentle Blue is a softer album but no less true.

This record doesn’t want to be anyone’s friend, but if you’re ready to feel, it’s real.

Allen writes like a painter, renewing familiar material--in this case, poorly behaved men and resourceful hookers with Spanish names--via quirks of perspective and peculiar taste in details.

The energy, from the opening whistles and stomps that kick off “Driving School” to the final crazed, surf-guitar-on-two-wheels of the “Batman” cover, is anything but studio; it is immediate, volatile and contagious.

It's brutal, direct and reflective while struggling for a way both out of and within the dark.

The band sounds more at home playing these than they do on the Invisible Hands’ two albums, and the empathetic accompaniment of guitarist Cherif El Masri and organist Adham Zidan contributes immeasurably to this project’s success. Despite being recorded in Cairo and Seattle between 2014 and 2017, they sound more like they were done on the set of a spaghetti western or live in Nashville the day after Bob Dylan recorded Blonde On Blonde.

Even as the album’s often joyful, always human stories unfold and crackle with inspiration, intoxication or love, the haunting sense of irreparable change lingers.

Thematically, with three songs inspired by a graphic novel, one inspired by a tv show, one re-recorded deep cut and two covers, What Heaven Is Like is a bit scattered. Sonically, however, What Heaven Is Like is Wussy’s most cohesive, best sounding album to date.

There is machinery working even in the greenest corners of this sonic garden, whooshing and clicking and percolating in the interstices to make everything look a little brighter and more colorful than life.

Coding emotional experience into sound is what this stuff is all about, and Jones nails it again and again.

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.

Across The Field’s lyrics are dead serious, yes, but their tones are ethereal and arrangements spacious, sounding as if they’ve blown in on the keening breeze, to the point where “Carolina Lady” almost melts into air. ... Due to pairing of Louise and Morgan’s voices, Across the Field is never less than lovely.

At its best, jazz is a genre capable of evoking every other musical discipline, and the deftly-played music on We Are Sent Here By History serves as an energizing reminder of that. It’s deeply felt music that makes for a rewarding and often thrilling listening experience.

While Long in the Tooth offers more or less what you expect, it does so at a very high level. The band has never sounded tighter, more collaborative or more sure of itself.

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.

Dorji’s playing exudes a confidence that doesn’t rely solely upon volume or muscularity. Years of pitching himself headlong into musical situations have cultivated his ability to develop a piece of music on the fly, using rhythmic variations to make the listener feel like they had better hang on tight, and spinning intricate elaborations upon an idea until nothing seems to exist besides the shudder and vibration of steel strings and wood.

Amiable adaptability is a constant across the three concerts. Fidelity is conversely variable, but improved bootleg editions of the material and always listenable.

Martin and Chen create a world of liminal spaces on In Blue, the invitation to share them is persuasive and rewards are many. The Bug is a mercurial but known entity, his work always impressive, his choice of collaborators telling and Dis Fig shines in this setting. Hers is a voice and a vision you’ll want to hear more from.

Yes, you’ll hear echoes of influence but McGreevy and Lewis have forged their own path based on really good songwriting and musical chops.

Years of careful post-production honed this impressive exercise in large group improvisation into a multi-hued vista replete with crepuscular silhouettes and flecks of effervescence.

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.

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

Jazzy horn breaks? Twinkling bar-room piano? Doo-wop backing vocals? All this and more crops up in ways both unusual and satisfying. Rutili is also in fine lyrical form. Many of the songs begin with strange and imaginative opening lines.

I DES is an ambitious, moving work.

The Umbrellas have always offered bashed up, joyriding sweetness, but here they reach at—and intermittently attain—a Spector-esque wall of rock ‘n roll sound. Even better, that larger scale doesn’t undermine the vulnerability of their songs, but instead amplifies and clarifies it.

Y’Y has its lovely moments, but it wallows sometimes in woo-woo-y mysticism. It’s a bit soft and cushiony, hard edges sanded down to harmless auras.

It still squalls and surges and executes little folk-infused turns of melody, it still uses words with a scalpel to precise and premeditated effect, and it still sounds great.

There’s a light-footed joyfulness in these tracks that’s far from insubstantial, and in fact, borders on the profound.

The music has a spaciousness to match the timeline: jangling steel strings slide over martial drums while fuzzy synthesizers burst and Rigby repeats the title phrase. She sounds both invigorated and uneasy; a little bit triumphant and a little bit daunted by her arrival.

The Innocence Mission delivers its tunes with an uncalculated freshness, still innocent, even now.

It’s confident, focused, and consistently strong enough that it feels like the right place for newcomers to start paying attention.

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.

Some feature Morteza Rezâei on dohool (cylinder drum). Heydarian’s playing is so full and out front in the mix that it is difficult to distinguish the two instruments, though sometimes, as on “Nishtemân,” their interplay is heard clearly and to great effect. The longish tracks, ranging from four to 11 minutes, give Heydarian ample space to develop his ideas.

You might flash back to 1990s Primal Scream or the Madchester grooves of a couple years prior, to certain Spiritualized cuts or even, in the flurry of woodwinds, a bit of Sun Ra. It’s quite good if you can get beyond wishing it were really Clinic. It’s maybe the next best thing.

This second Quade album is lovely and strange, fed by crystalline streams of rustic sound but not limited to them, and indeed, reaching into post-rock and symphonic art rock with its haunted melodies.

DJ Haram is all jaded Brooklyn sophistication and all wide-eyed exotic transcendance, all at the same time, and it’s wonderful.

Some vibrate with a ghostly blues — lovely, haunted “This” and the bent note mirage of “June Bug”—while others swagger fancifully like barroom tall tales (“Monkey”). Older songs, like “Abominable Snowman,” first recorded for 1995’s Parsnip Snips, and “Indian Chiefs and Hula Girls” from 1988’s Water Tower, sidle casually into the present moment, sounding well-loved and unbothered by the passage of time. They sit right next to newer songs like “Fava,” with its transfixing twang of guitar.

This is a lovely album, its only drawback being its brief running time of barely 30 minutes.

I’m not sure anyone was looking for a doo-wop revival led by a father and three sons, but here it is, and it’s a kick.

As Keepnews said in the original liner notes, “There can be room for vast newness within the unhampered framework of this ‘old’ music.” [Ahmed] have continued to mine that sense of discovery with ongoing zeal.

Memories Are Now is a composed but not utterly controlled place, and within that tension, Hoop’s music and message, together, find their highest vibrancy.

It's not Segall's best, but Slaughterhouse sits near the top of the heap of loud, ignorant party garage.

Seed of a Seed is a pretty record, and you can get lost in that but not for long. Heynderickx is always pulling you up short, interposing a clever line or a surprising sonic texture that upends expectations. A lot of folky, singer-songwriter records provide a bit of respite, but Seed of a Seed is too prickly and interesting for that.

The songs are reliably mid-tempo and catchy, although they certainly lack the heedless rush that made the first Superchunk albums such models of indie rock.

The track [“A Study in Vastness”] initiates a string of four pretty flawless songs at the heart of this album that do very little very well. Single ideas unfurl across five, six, seven minutes at a time, never feeling like they need to go anywhere other than patiently exploring exactly where they are.

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.

A schizophrenic mess of maypole folk and motorik drive.

Appealing and slyly catchy.

Sweeping, quietly incredible FLOTUS.

School of the Flower easily ranks as Ben Chasny's best work thus far.

The Bug can still shock, and with so many highlights here, it’s hard to complain.

The songs punch and swerve and sway like organic beings, structured in a way that amplifies rather than hems in emotional resonance.

There’s quite a lot of music here, some tracks abstract and open-end, others more conventionally song structured, all of it rather good.

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.

Although lacking an ear-grabbing single or a truly hummable hook, the New Amerykah Part Two does something that current R&B seemed incapable of: it charms.

The Australian trio feedtime's 1980s recordings, which are collected on The Abberant Years box set, prove them to be traditionalists of the best sort.

Here’s an album that gets at the balance between pure, raucous, positive punk energy and the elegiac textures of lush, baroque pop.

Whether it’s the lengthier, arpeggiating climaxes of “Gene Pool” or the shorter, more reflective burbles of “Burst of Laughter,” it feels like they haven’t lost a step.