Yorkston’s collaboration with the Second Hand Orchestra seems especially fruitful, giving him a jolt, shake them out of his usual tricks and proclivities and opening up new possibilities. If the stories don’t quite scan, the musical more than makes up for it, carrying you past the sense of this music into a restless, moving, non-verbal understanding of what the artists are going for.

It is fractious and difficult and thorny, as always, the rhythms knocked sideways, the parts jutting out at each other in angular, assertive ways. But the singing soothes the rough edges and complicates the punk narrative, weaving a buzzing radiance over minimalist grooves.

The players are so good that even their sketches make for engaging listening. And two songs on the EP are quite good.

The back and forth between playful, pogo-friendly post-punk (“March Day,” “Great Dog”) and more sober and sonically adventurous indie/noise-rock (“Human, for a Minute,” “6/1”) carries Drunk Tank Pink forward with a sense of abandon, while also taking a reflective look back at the carnage such abandon has wrought.

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.

The results are as you might expect from the album title: playful, wide-eyed and occasionally chaotic explorations of intense forces that reach above and beyond human dimensions.

The odd acoustic folk songs are somewhat more of an acquired taste, but Damaged Bug does justice to them as well.

For a songwriter who packs so much into his creations, it’s no surprise that Mercer makes it hard to get a full measure of 5 Dreams’ narrative gist, even after multiple listens. Approach these songs however you choose, and they’re sure to shift evasively, compelling you to follow.

Throughout all of this, Nace’s innate instincts as an improviser couple effectively with Crain’s production mastery resulting in a release that stands apart, while fitting in perfectly with the guitarist’s broad body of work.

Foothills further distills this soft-focus, rueful vision, purifies it and delivers exactly what you expect from this band, only a little prettier and more touching than the last time.

What To Look For In Summer is a terrific career spanning selection of some of their most loved songs the performances of which give lie to the common wisdom about a bunch of fey, romantically challenged, wallflowers. If anoraks just wanna have fun we could do far worse than spending 100 minutes with Stuart Murdoch and company.

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

Despite the intricacy, the provocative joining of primitive and futuristic, you’re left with both too much and too little. The tracks run on for over an hour in their skeletal, restrained way. There’s not so much to think about, and a long time to do it in.

2020 is an album that is always making and unmaking itself, dissolving its constituent parts into radiant pools of slush, then rallying them into tangible structures, then letting them collapse again. Being, becoming, nothingness, it’s all in there.

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.

The songs are fine, the lyrics are striking, but there’s nothing to break your heart.

In short, they pay the best kind of respect to material they love, finding a way to live inside it and change it and make it breathe.

With Forgotten Days, the band don’t so much extend the sprawling prog-laced epics of the previous album as blend them into tighter, more direct tunes that feel very appropriate for the moods of this long, fractious year: at times ornery, restless and deeply sorrowful.

Using simple piano motifs and minor key strings augmented with electronics and voice, some kind of peace is an album of delicate beauty. It is beguiling in the way it shifts focus between the general and specific.

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.

The music is simple, but not easy, adorned with intricate picking that cascades over itself like a waterfall. The lyrics feel like really good haiku, pithy, made of small words, but evoking wonderfully precise natural images. It’s a good album for being alone somewhere calm and beautiful, not engaged with the world but not cut off either and enjoying the quiet.

This is not your parents’ contradance music or your cool older brother’s free improvisation or even your cousin’s slightly over-ripe New Weird Americana, but something else entirely. Amidon learned the old tunes by heart so he could stretch and cut and distort and juxtapose the pieces to make music that resonates and expands.

It is a hazy and misty record, delightfully ambiguous to an extent, pulled together by meandering but highly competent playing tied down by small grooves, at times reminiscent of Sandro Perri.

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.

To anyone enamored with the effortless elegance of Loma’s debut, some of Don’t Shy Away’s more adventurous and synth-heavy production may feel a little jarring. However, surrender to the album’s luscious sound design, emotive vocal performances and smart narrative arc and it can be just as intoxicating. As far as front-to-back album listening experiences go, it’s among the year’s best.

Though Good Sad Happy Bad do outstay their welcome across these 40 minutes, there’s plenty here to enjoy if you like sing-song sweetness that’s bent lysergic and girded with a sneering, switchblade edge.

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.

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

It’s a wonderfully rich sound palette, and one that plays to the strengths of both musicians.

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

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.

SUMAC’s evocative and powerful playing hits you in the gut, as a physical experience, even as it motivates an intensely meditative mode. This is terrific music, in all relevant senses of that term.

Shame’s standout songs combine the band’s ugly intensities with inspired bursts of melodic riffing.

If you like your Sufjan Stevens in neon electronic mode, armed to the teeth with abrasive drum sounds, dive right in — and keep swimming. For anyone more enamored with his folk and chamber-pop records, it may feel like a rude assault to the senses.

Anjimile has come a long way since the last album, but you sense a journey still in progress, an evolution still finding its own best shape.

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.

Some of beats are a little perfunctory, but the interplay between the grieved and the griever, the subtlety of the writing and beauty of the arrangements on Fall To Pieces haunt long after the needle lifts.

Twelfth stands out even in their strong discography.

Like most bands, Girl Friday has never been crazy about genre labels, and if you asked them whether they were pop or punk or indie, they’d very likely just say yes. By sliding continually between categories, though, this band creates a very absorbing tension between what they are right now and what they might become in a measure or two. You have to pay attention. You can’t take these songs for granted.

Despite coming up against a couple of creative cul-de-sacs, Comma largely succeeds in blending the most appealing elements of ambient, kosmische and electro into a heady brew.

Gold Record is honest in its own fanciful way, proving that not everything has to be literal fact to be true, and not everything needs to have a physical presence to be real.

O’Rourke sails these turbulent seas deftly, making small gestures laden with significance. It’s agonising and hypnotic, the kind of art that demands commitment to spend time with. Yet, while you’re immersed in it, it feels inescapable.

With Eno Axis, McEntire again connects to her very particular world, without retreading where she’s been, flourishing in rootedness even as she expands her scope.

You may have all the Pentangle you need, and all the Fairport Convention you could ever want to listen to. The Making of You won’t replace any of these favorites, but it can definitely carve a space out on the shelf next to them. Make some room. This stuff is good.

A buzzing, humming distillation of time and melodic idea that drifts by in sighs and stares and one paragraph written all day and wondering if there’s anything in the refrigerator. It is very much like 2020 in the bunker, hard to see from the road but pulsing with shimmering life inside.

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.

Pyramid is well worth scaling.

There is a sense of every note being where it should be, glowingly back-lit and carefully arranged. It’s far from the note-bending frenzy that Polizze often indulges in — and let’s not give up on more of that and soon — but it is very beautiful in its own way and captures this endless, featureless, daydreaming summer about as well as any music I’ve heard so far.

Though they’ve yet to release a subpar record, the sarcastically titled Ultimate Success Today laser-focuses both their song writing and sound into what may be their defining statement to date, especially apposite for these grim times.

While they sacrifice a little of the propulsive excitement of their debut, the tweaks to their sound deepen the emotional impact of this new set of songs.

It isn’t always as loud or as exultant as her band’s output, but it is rivetingly intense, whether at full rock strength, in dance-ish, trance-ish electronic mode or at a whisper backed by a small orchestra. ... The album is simply what it is, take it or leave it, but take it. It’s magnificent.

A whole range of influences are apparent at essentially any point in the album, yet it never feels like a cumbersome effort made of separate parts pasted together. Room from the Moon is involved and fluid, it’s the work of an artist channeling parts larger than herself.

Because of the language barrier and the unfamiliar cultural references, you’ll probably miss some of the subtleties, but that makes this album all the more fascinating. More than most records, it’s a journey through a strange, dreamlike landscape that resembles what you know only tangentially. Mystery, indeed, but an intriguing one.

His creative arc reaches its most carefully detailed and elegantly pastoral on this new album.

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.

Brave Faces Everyone doesn’t have a bunch of easy answers either — it’s more a record of solidarity and mutual support than it is anything more prescriptive.

Sleep on the Wing is quite pleasant, but so soothing and gentle that it’s hard to focus on.

A ragged, gnarly listen, Future Teenage Cave Artists is, fittingly, one of the band’s most experimental offerings in years, offering short bursts of breakneck, catchy garage rock, counterbalanced by plenty of reverb-drenched dissonance and eerie atmospherics. Just as it feels like it may be settling into something approaching conventional songcraft, the band chucks in a blast of competing ideas that sound like they’re eating each other alive, desperately scrambling for survival.

These are rather beautiful ambient sound worlds, however she created them, full of dread, anticipation, joy and peace. Perhaps it’s best if you can’t see the wires and knobs and plugs that make them possible.

Ka got something from an autodidact street preacher. For more resonating effect he puts together street common wisdoms and Biblical allegories.

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.

Hit to Hit has the same kind of variety and possibly the same sort of underlying cohesiveness [as Bee Thousand] that will reveal itself over lots of plays. I look forward, anyway, to trying. You couldn’t ask for a better summer record.

The Mother Stone sounds like a flowering of long gestated creativity but the over gilded lily looms heavy over the bed and smothers the delicacy of his songs. For all the admirable experimentation, the breadth of his vision and the pristine production, Jones takes his leave before an audience overawed and enervated by sensory overload.

When RVG get it right, the results are deeply affecting. ... The weaker moments — “Little Sharky & The White Pointer,” “Prima Donna” and “The Baby & The Bottle” — could easily have been excised for a sharper listen. It’s not that anything here is cringe-inducing, it’s just that because the band’s sound is so straightforward, the songs need a little spark to make them stand out.

Together, they drag luminous shards of melody out of a boiling murk of possibility, then let it slip back down into chaotic potential. It’s an uneasy, fascinating mix of energies, sometimes beautiful but never entirely at rest.

Songs for Pierre Chuvin, whatever its origin story, would stand on its own as a regular album, melding retro sounds and recent writing, with its spontaneity driving its melodies and structures. It’s a treasure for fans, full of references and idiosyncratic meaning. Even if probably won’t serve as the best starting point for newcomers to the band, it’s not strictly an insider’s work.

It’s strange to encounter an album that is so deeply weird and disjointed, and yet feels polished and made with the utmost craft. The result is otherworldly, and plays like a soundtrack to a moody and impressionistic film.

For this 15th solo album, the songwriter beefs up his arrangements a tad, though only compared to the last album, not the lush psychedelic swirl of his Richard Swift-abetted Mariqopa records. Yet the songs remain plain and beautiful, their clean lines unfettered by too much volume or density, delivered in a voice that creaks sometimes but doesn’t falter as it runs up effortlessly into near falsetto range.

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.

No question that Fohr and her cohorts genuinely like and appreciate the thumpy, cheesy Eurodisco that shimmers through these songs, but they put an unusual spin on it. There’s a warmth in these plastic grooves, an experimental inquiry in these hands-in-the-air raves, a spiritual striving amid hip-jutting, butt-swaying ecstasies.

Knuckleball Express is the best Howling Hex album since Nightclub Version of the Eternal.

The sound is harder, more precise and altogether more of a sock in the gut.

On their 21st album, Three, their usual album-length evolution is divided into three 20-minute acts, much like 2006’s excellent Chemist.

Far Enough is the first of this band’s albums to get a wide U.S. release, and it’s a doozy, no question. ... This is no over-earnest diatribe. It’s a series of party anthems about stuff that matters. One drum flattening call to arms insists that “Anger’s Not Enough,” and that’s right, there’s a lot more here. But it’s a really good place to start.

It’s this balance between distortion and purity, between chaos and clarity, that makes Red Sun Through Smoke a compelling listen. There’s urgency behind these compositions, reflected in both the intensity of IWC’s vocal delivery and the severity of signal degradation applied via his tape machines

Their nearly ten-year core pivots rhythmic and tonal ideas athletically, and their ability to pull elements from anywhere and everywhere is seemingly more fluid with each record. With The Common Task, Horse Lords simultaneously stay within their own signature pocket and poach outside elements, expanding how large that pocket seems.

The main issue with this Arbouretum album is that it sticks stubbornly in a mid-tempo calm. There are no big, ripping guitar solos and few instrumental crescendos. The one big exception comes late in the album with “Let It All In.”

Rose Golden Doorways is an astonishing experience, uncompromising in its willingness to map extremes of ethereal quiet and the physicality of sound, played without fear by musicians drilling deep into an ugly core to extract beauty and return to share their findings with those who would care to listen.

Islet have lovingly crafted their own kaleidoscopic little world. It’s easy to step inside and get lost there for a while among the colorful flora and fauna.

While there are plenty of thrilling moments, Dungen Live feels less like a coherent journey and more like channel-surfing between chase sequences and zoned-out psychedelic visuals, steam corkscrewing out of the top of the TV. Each of these flights of fancy probably made perfect sense at the time, as instrumental interludes between the songs, but recontextualizing them in this way has made the playing feel somewhat aimless at times.

The busted up and agonizing forms that result accumulate into a hell of a record. Put on your black boots and stomp around in it awhile.

The songs are good. Both musicians are pros. The execution is offhandedly excellent, like they’re not even trying but nailing it anyway. But you never get the sense that these songs matter all that much to either principal. It’s a parlor trick, a juggling act that they could do all day without dropping anything, but the stakes don’t seem to be very high.

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.

Two side-long compositions make up this tranquil, contemplative album, each divided into three A, B, and C tracks. ... Consider it more a tribute to filling in the quiet spaces that have arisen unexpectedly out of chaos and disappointment, but which are, themselves, very peaceful and beautiful.

And indeed, kabong it does. Fun stuff.

Companion Rises is straight-down-the-middle Six Organs, not as loud and abrasive as the first Hexadic disc, not as reticently wisp-y as the older folk-derived records. It tucks its wilder, more distorted guitar forays into the interstices of verses, so that the steady jangle of acoustic guitar runs into tempestuous squalls of sound.

McCraven lays down a lush musical backdrop that allows Scott-Heron’s words to have emotional impact.

That Allen is able to continue to do this 45 years on from when he first introduced us to Sailor, Spanish Alice, Jabo, and Chick is as moving and mystifying as that big Texas sky.

While it doesn’t wield the heft of a Hop Along release, Likewise demonstrates Quinlan’s adept melodic sensibility and enviable vocal delivery. It’s a short, sweet collection, easily digestible and ripe for revisiting.

Your response to Be Up A Hello will depend on your tolerance for Squarepusher’s virtuosic onslaughts. It can be as exhausting as it’s exhilarating. If there’s a sameness to the BPM readings of the up-tempo tracks a deeper listen reveals the layers that are buried beneath the frenzy and show Squarepusher has lost none of his edge.

“Why is this happening,” a listener might wonder as the music jumps from one notion to the next? “Why not? Now hold on,” would be the response, if anyone were of a mind to put such matters into words. ... Sometimes the music coheres into a tight, catchy chant or a propulsive passage, but these moments end before you’re ready. Perhaps the freedom not to keep doing what you’re doing, and not to have to make sense while you’re doing it, is the point?

Mind Hive is concise yet full of restless intelligence, musical ideas and willingness to push boundaries. Taut, tense, not a wasted note, moments of great beauty, 35 minutes of Wire contains enough to fuel a multitude of pretenders.

Have We Met is Destroyer at its inscrutable, poetic best, its elegance poised on a rip-tide of violence.

If Fisher and co feel wrung out at times it’s not through lack of commitment or creativity. No one said fighting the good fight would be easy and There Is No Year lands enough punches to win at least a TKO decision.

Modest reservations aside, this is more top-drawer stuff from Shauf, as we’ve come to expect. Drink deep.

It’s all very nice and a bit surprisingly, like your grandma’s favorite stew with some unexpected new spices in it. For an impromptu gathering of talents, Bonny Light Horseman feels very lived in. Here’s hoping it’s not a one-off.

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

There’s a solid, heartening release to be found in Countless Branches. It’s a shame that Fay and Dead Oceans didn’t take the opportunity to tease it out.