The whole thing is so fascinatingly diverse and upending that even the most open minded listeners may find themselves rebelling.

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 April demonstrates Kozelek’s predilection for reaching backwards, in places it also finds him broadening his range.

Emmaar’s reassuring familiarity in the face of the forces of war and commerce is at once reassuring and a bit concerning. On the one hand, it’s great to see that the group remains incorruptible and in touch with its essence; on the other, a bit of buffing and shining aside, if you know the band’s sound, you already know this record.

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.

They weave their instruments around each other deftly, with nobody stomping on toes. ... The anger and the grief are broken up by moments of beauty. ... These moments of respite from the darkness, where Springtime lets the sunshine part the clouds, are where they are the most powerful.

Presley works quickly--he says he went into the studio with more than 100 possible songs--and without much intermediation between idea and finished piece. This process seems to allow him to absorb many different influences (1960s psych, freak folk, children’s stories, his life), filter them through some subconscious prism, splitting them out as almost but not quite recognizable rainbow colors

It hops around from elliptical soundscapes to bright pop songs to surfy psychedelia to brashly incisive rock, just as its progenitor does, and it’s an engaging if discontinuous ride.

If the DFA medium/message commands one groove rattling under a nation, Less Than Human is evidence enough that bot-genius Maclean is just the half-man needed to bang up the plumbing so that all faucets drip lightning bolts.

Andrews’ band is first rate, particularly organist Daniel Walker, whose weedy, wavering hum imbues these songs with a mournful depth of field. ... What’s new, here, however, is how damned strong she is, how fierce a belter, how indomitable a chronicler of the middle-class struggle.

There’s a calmness, a baroque beauty perhaps, to this mode of singing, but on Paperwork, it’s enmeshed within swiftly moving song structures.

I Know I’m Funny Haha is not so very different from this last album from Webster, but it feels more assured and confident, and the subject matter is more upbeat.

What’s exciting about her music, and about this album in particular, is how she slips loose from those guidelines and finds a sound that’s fierce and primitive but also modern.

The End is Near employs much of fans found so pleasant about Bedhead, particularly the impressive build-up of two and three bar melodies.

The songs on England Screaming sound very much in line with Wreckless Eric’s recent output, brash and tuneful, the words barked out in the artist’s clanging, faintly tremulous tenor, the choruses exploding in swaggering hooks. And they are very good songs, not a real dud in the bunch, and a couple that rank with the artist’s very best.

It’s a very good set of songs, sleek and wrenching at the same time.

Responses to Tyler’s previous release, Stratosphere (Merge, 2023), were mixed (more accurately, pretty much everyone liked it but me), but Time Indefinite is so deeply engaging and flat-out beautiful that pretty much anyone with even a mildly adventurous taste in music will be playing it all summer.

This time, she and Wells seems intent on demonstrating that members of even the shaggiest rock outfits have a pop side, too. If you’ve been waiting to see someone try to splice together Carol King and Karen Dalton--and more or less pull it off--this is your record.

Unlike your average grime productions, these tracks are rarely propulsive or tailored for the dancefloor, but rather shift and shake convulsively under the weight of stark, metronomic beats, swathes of sub-bass and icy synth swirls. Listen carefully, and there is a certain melodicism nestled in the heart of this album, but its tone is despairing and subdued, glimmers of light in a dark and uncaring world.

The band, headed by guitarist and singer/songwriter Aaron Dowdy, has never sounded better, marshaling a wall of rustic sound built of three guitars (one pedal steel), a bass, fiddle, piano and drums. These are desolate tales set in dying communities, sung in a vibrato-tinged tenor with a little bit of cry in it. Yet the mood is never wholly dark, since the arrangements are triumphant and even the direst lyrical scenarios are buoyed by connection and community.

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.

The very real pleasure of this collection of songs comes in how the love of tradition collides with raucous rule-breaking energy. You’ve got your outlaw country, sure, but did any of those guys write a song called “Motherfucker” and carry it off? Shook does. Not every song stomps. Some are plaintive and yearning, like the lovely “Jane Doe,” others full of anthemic slow-rocking swirl like “Nightingale.” But all insist on direct emotional engagement and brutal honesty and acceptance of a very specific point of view.

Anderson is a skilled, idiosyncratic guitar player, but what sets Cloud Corner apart from the records of her skilled, idiosyncratic peers is that she hasn’t lost sight of the power of music to speak to the individual, not just about them. With their modest run times, understated playing, and emotional honesty, the pieces on Cloud Corner feel like they’re inviting you to share in, not just observe, their joy and grief.

The late Steve Lacy arguably attained the deepest degree of intimacy and prolificacy with the pianist’s songbook, but others like German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach have made substantial strides as well. Smith’s set fits confidently in their company in its balance of original and interpretive material.

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.

On Lambchop's more ambitiously simple albums, such as Mr. M, that darkness is all the more affecting.

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.

What's more remarkable than her fascinating biography is her bold music. Like her life story, there's hardly anything like it.

Stepping gingerly and keeping balanced in precarious places, Wald is a cat. It’s as pleasing as a purr.

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

Return to the Sea reins in its eccentricities successfully enough to illustrate that the most understated risks can be the most rewarding.

You may not need to be a Fugazi fan to appreciate Messthetics, though anyone can draw lines from the fiery complexities of Instrument to these explosive compositions. The nervy aggression of post-punk joins with jazz-rock’s virtuosity here, and it’s good stuff all the way through.

The merging of the two artists’ sounds feels entirely natural.

Toledo’s first full band record, his first record with a producer, with a sound that is ragged but clean, emotionally raw but cleverly structured. It’s a record that engages heart and mind and viscera all at once, and if some of the songs go on longer than pop usually does, it’s because they have more to say.

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.

The guitar throughout the album has an unusual approach which certainly helps PGMG stand out from the crowd.

Antibalas is charging ahead, poised for continued recognition and celebration among Afrobeat devotees, as well as first discovery by world music dabblers.

Despite the generalization that they “sound more like themselves” than ever, it’s worth noting that this isn’t a watered-down performance--all parties involved perform with the conviction necessary to sell an increasingly rarified brand of big-room rock.

His two band mates this time, Erik Walters of Globe and Silver Torches plus NW session drummer Sean Lane (who has played with Bazan solo and Silver Torches and many other artists), have never been associated with Pedro the Lion before. However, with Bazan on bass, they make a sound that is deeply familiar, rough-hewn and rambunctious with big bright guitar chords that punctuate moody, sharply observed narratives.

The Trip is casual, low-stakes pop that is easy to live with.

The Comeback Kid, is full of shimmering, ultra fanciful castles of guitar-based sound, but it’s also kind of an experimental pop gem, like Deerhoof after a month of Guitar Hero or like OOIOO any time, really.

The songs, hard and soft, fast and slow, seem better than ever. Lanegan may sound like he’s done everything there is to do, but he’s clearly not done pushing into new territories and getting better.

Everything glows with a wonderfully forgiving warmth and subtle fortitude, generating the kind of intimate, reassuring atmosphere that feels unique to well-executed folk music.

The balance is the thing, and on Here and Nowhere Else, the balance is very, very good.

But whoever’s on board, the sound remains largely cohesive, the agile slither of bass, the slap and clatter of found percussion and the lilt of Latin melody, sung sweetly but with menace. It’s a potent brew, still challenging, but coalescing around songs.

Admonitions is a weighty work, long and heavy and inscrutable, but full of contradictions. It’s an impressive studio document of a band that has always seemed to be largely a live enterprise.

Even though two thirds of the songs here land somewhere between the 7th and 8th minute in length, they practically feel like pop songs in comparison. By the time the gently shimmering “Afterlight” winds down Saariselka’s first record it’s clear that even in relatively accessible form this is lovely, head-spinning stuff, perfect for contemplating the night stars.

Both weird and wonderful, Pick a Day to Die manages to boil down the immensity of Sunburned’s oeuvre into a manageable morsel that is digestible by both neophytes and long haulers alike.

It’s the steady pacing of Trouble, the band’s commitment to the thoughtful lyrics and the permission given to influences and early passions that guide Hospitality towards a sound that is recognizable, only richer, deeper and closer what they were aiming for all along.

Stylistically, this collaboration veers from intimate in scope to blown-out and dancefloor-ready. And yet, it holds together neatly, shifting from style to style without really losing cohesion.

“Equivalents 5,” a four-note sequence shifts pitches and timbres amidst constantly changing atmospheres. The tune itself never changes, but it doesn’t have to keep the listener engaged. It’s the qualities of the sounds, such as the swelling bass and swirling high end of its predecessor, “Equivalents 6,” that count. Just as Stieglitz’s images of clouds became things in themselves, the tones cease to be means and become ends in themselves.

It's like Fiery Furnaces with more heart and less irony...and that's not a bad thing at all.

In the end, Wiltzie and O'Halloran's collaboration stands as an impressive album on its own merits and one of the strongest efforts in the world of Stars of the Lid offshoots.

Bubblegum Graveyard is sophisticated when it needs to be sophisticated, funny when it wants to be funny, and its plodding beat lends itself perfectly to that excellent Osmonds guitar move where they bob their head upwards and tap their foot on each count.

Deeper than Sky is just as much a thrill ride [as Disfear’s Live the Storm], coming from the opposite angle--confident that the growling will balance the ornate structures, it hits plainly no matter how intricately it jumps from measure to measure.

The songs here have lost none of the lonely strength of their earlier material, and the band’s performances are no less gorgeous; but the new strength of Gem Club is that their music is capable of being just as joyous as it is devastated, and the result is powerful.

With Held in Splendor, this group discovers their influences, then surrounds and deconstructs them. At its best, the album achieves bliss and demands attention.

All of the sounds seem a little brighter, a little more spiritually charged than their real-world counterparts would be, especially the voices, which float untethered to narrative but imbued with boundless optimism and uplift.

If you want to make good, solid, loud rock music in the new millennium, this is your blue print.

Compared to the negation-for-negation's-sake attitude of their debut, "Beat Pyramid," Hidden sounds serious, holistic, exacting and expensive.

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

It feels like we are in the privileged position of witnessing a great guitarist running ideas out of his head and onto his fretboard.

It’s weird (great album art), lush, hypnotic and impossible to grasp, a dreamlike futuristic soundtrack that only exists in the combined imagination of those willing to follow Steve Hauschildt’s gently commanding vision.

A series of songs that are seriously well-constructed and complicated - yet deeply, deeply odd.

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.

There is little time wasted in this record's nine songs, and that Mesirow packs so many wonderful sounds into it without really complicating the chord progressions or basic melodies is perhaps the truest testament to her talent.

The Body’s use of nearly-subsonic bass and samples puts these now commonplace building blocks of electronic dance music to their most infernal purposes. If there is something unsettling about an extended, windshield-rattling electronic kick drum, The Body has found it and perfected it.

Hinds and Co. have dispensed with the neanderthal growls and screams of past records, which might have robbed Crack the Skye of its surprising grace and pushed it closer to the nu-metal end of the spectrum.

Quicksand / Cradlesnakes is a fine display of what they're capable of, and should please anyone in the mood for roots music that's a bit unrooted for a change.

You could hardly spend a pleasanter half an hour than drifting to these slackly tuneful, drivingly rock rhythmed, 1960s-esque songs.

The most astounding thing about Lord Quas is not Madlib going against the grain, but that it’s basically The Unseen 2005, completely devoid of hits, and still ultimately compelling.

Though much of the album is aggressive in its tempos, the mood continues to circle around to the pensive, moving from catharsis to solemnity and back again. Or, to put it another way, it’s a map of a mind that doesn’t feel self-indulgent.

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.

Stone Breaker is undeniably a Mark E product, propulsive disco-house clouded by his trademark ambient haze, with terrific builds and releases. It's easily one of the better dance music albums that will come out this year.

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

It contains everything that makes Eyehategod the unique proposition that they are. It’s an Eyehategod album in excelsis, if you like.

The rehearsal takes are probably the real draw (aside from the customary production corrections and sonic scrub all reissues get) for those already tuned to the album’s contrary wavelength, and they do not disappoint.

It often feels vast, tracking the curvature of the Earth, but it never forgets that music is made by people, and that there is real intimacy in the consort of two individuals relating to each other through simple gestures like singing, or brushing against six guitar strings.

An enjoyable, at times provocative companion piece, this one's a satisfying musical bath.

It's a body of work that begs deep listening, the better to divine the wild kindness at its core.

The band's grasp of dynamics, both musical and emotional, has deepened, resulting in Long Knives, their most nuanced album yet, with a much more understated approach than on past efforts.

The Belbury Tales can be a potent experience at the high points I've just described, but it spends some time at lower altitudes, too, without ever unambiguously erring.

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.

In Hex’s 34 minutes Mckiel ventures far and wide, but always brings you back to the strangeness of seeing something familiar in a new light, wondering at the possibilities.

Romantiq is a strong addition to Popp’s compendious catalog, one that unifies certain sound selections and approaches while providing ample variety.

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.

With The Red River, his best yet, richer, more fluid arrangements tip his songs from straight folk blues into gospel, soul and even hints of R&B.

As an accidental, definitive document of time and place, Vee Vee is up there with Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, No Pocky For Kitty and the Polvo records, strong enough even to offset the hideous cover art.

The narrator’s desire for transformation reveals a hopeful, but tenuous ending to an emotionally fraught and musically ironclad journey. One wishes more concept albums were so authentic.

Don’t Weigh Down the Light is a precise, meditative work, and one that can be rewarding with each successive listen.

I Am Not Afraid Of You is a one-stop jukebox.

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.

Bardo Pond's self-titled is a massive, monumental piece of work, proving once again that this long-running outfit can still crank the heavy, mind-numbing psych that it's always been known for.

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.

Just thrill to how rock music this relentlessly complex and irregular (“No Condition”), this shamelessly, gloriously over-the-top (“Do the Method,” a distant cousin to the speedier version of “Radio Free Europe” and the fellas’ own would’ve-been dance craze), this stylistically reckless (“Bleeding,” which almost sounds like a completely derailed club cut) and this gleefully repetitive and obnoxious (“Rang-a-Tang”) can still sound so anthemic and galvanizing.

The Welsh guitarist hammers at her instrument, unleashing a percussive rain of notes that fray and change as they linger. She plays fast and hard and with assurance, whether in the blue-grassy “Cattywomp” or the mystic drone of “Jack Parsons Blues.” And then, just for the beauty of it, she dips into languid lyricism for “Dreams of Rhiannon’s Birds,” letting the notes drip like warm honey, catching the light as they go.

Though there’s no question that this is a wrenching record, Gibbons and co-producer James Ford have rendered a three-dimensional listening experience that is as immersive as it is forbidding.

On Sunergy, Ciani and Smith have created worthwhile, intelligent work, guiding each other, delving into free composition to capture their environment and their influences.