The album gains strength as it goes on, getting harder and more abrasive in its second half. And yet even as it rages, it has an elegiac tone.

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.

This is, in other words, still serious music, yet it is not necessarily somber. Probably not coincidentally, When the Roses Come Again provides the perfect soundtrack for a drive through a land of woods, farms, and small towns dotted with Dollar General stores and cell towers.

On this album, she both reminds the listener of her strengths as a songwriter and subtly redefines the ground on which her music rests.

As the album advances, you get the sense that Clark is finally accomplishing what he claims to have been doing all along: making a techno record.

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky distills everything Gira has ever done. It's a shockingly dense record, the Gira experience in 45 minutes or less. All killer, no filler, for real.

Looping State of Mind is a bold attempt at fusing The Field's emotive tendencies with something more aggressive, and for the most part, Willner strikes the perfect balance.

The applause will only grow louder with the release of The Bright Mississippi. It’s quite simply one of the best albums we’ll hear in 2009.

There is palpable excitement in both the songwriting and the performance. And this energy prevents what might have been some late-stage lulls, where the riffs seem retread but the songs still feel new.

Ugly is Screaming Female's Steve Albini record, an inevitability for a group like this, and the trio brings its "A" game to the project.

Tangents’ post-everything mode of working is embracing rather than exclusionary; they don’t seem to be trying to shut off their music from all precedents and influences so much as creating such a rich blend (and with such talented performers) that the result creates something intoxicatingly new.

It affords Van Etten the space to really lean into the role of frontwoman, at times reaching into an almost operatic register. It’s a dramatic and unexpected new chapter for an artist who is rarely less than compelling.

The wide variation in music and the uneven results (all of it, perhaps, evidence of the record’s conceptual ambitions and smarts) prevent Dose Your Dreams from being a uniformly pleasurable record. But, man, is it full of ideas and aesthetic vitality.

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.

Game Theory turns out to be The Roots’ finest record to date.

While providing an exciting document of this stage of the band, We Rose From Your Bed… offers a tantalizing hint at what's to come.

It certainly makes for a more expansive work, but loses some of the immediacy that defined Stott’s music as recently as on Drop the Vowels.

Van Etten’s born-loser character could have been a bore were it not for her disciplined musicianship (her early years included classical music and multiple instruments) and her painful but enduring singing. It never stops sounding like real hurt.

Cotton Crown is built from the same raw materials as their debut but feels more fleet-footed and robustly constructed. The band have refined all the qualities of their addictive sound, and these nine songs fly by in half an hour, nary a moment wasted.

True to its title, Playing Favorites is still, despite the varied palette, obviously a Sheer Mag album and not without its share of more or less straightforward, beat-up-leather-jacket rockers. More or less, because even these often push the band’s sonic parameters.

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

There's nothing of substance lacking in the least compelling moments of Queen Mary, and the mix of rousing wildness and reckless wisdom in its brightest points is at once inspiring, promising, and terrifically entertaining.

It's not as gratifyingly raw as 1983 or as paradigm-shifting as Los Angeles or as self-important as Cosmogramma, but it's more expansive and refined taken in one sitting.

While the overall sound here isn't exactly unrecognizable from the band on Leave Home, there's definitely way more going on in terms of range and risk-taking.

This is what jamming econo means to kids whose horizon isn't classic rock and hardcore, but grunge and post-hardcore. It sounds really good.

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.

It’s austere, minimal, and starkly beautiful, but incorporates some of Hidden’s pounding rhythmic heft on “A Season in Hell” and “Wild Fields.”

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.

In forgoing the lifeblood of dynamic and passion, the creative minds behind the project fall to maximize its potential, however agreeable their compositions may be.

When the Mekons are operating at full strength, their music’s undeniable vitality is somehow in tune with the struggle and suffering they sing about. Not every song on Deserted achieves that level of intense commitment to an emotion or an idea. But most of the songs do, to menacing or to magisterial effects.

Like the last two Damien Jurado albums, this one takes a while to sink in, and it’s backloaded, so you have to get all the way through for the payoff. And yet, if you’ve taken the other two Maraqopa journeys, it is remarkable how this third installment augments and complements them.

With this revised version of the band, that role has evolved. There are more reflective pieces characterized by subdued piano accompaniment, and occasional touches that make the rock music distinctive.

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.

Though he’s not in any hurry, he’s also showing no signs of slowing down. There are 11 songs on The Time of the Foxgloves, some jokily lighthearted (“Blondes and Redheads”), others hauntingly spare and beautiful (“Se Fue En Noche,” “Jacob’s Ladder”).

Callahan’s set may have erred on the heavy side of recent material (as much of this tour did), but he was even-handed in what he cut and ruthless in how he ordered what was left; only opener “First Bird” is left untouched in its original place. He would’ve been fine leaving the sequence as he played it, frankly, but Resuscitate! sharpens Callahan’s considerate cowboy demeanor even whilst songs expand in length and narrative moments stretch out in relatively small spaces, extending into stories that meander, convoluted and beautiful as any bedtime story.

Revelator is an exhausting listen in the best sense of the term. Skip at your own risk: Far from hip-hop homework, Elucid’s Revelator is a port of call in this storm, a howling document from the edge, muons in which we are all tomographers.

Orange is another worthy and replayable stack of oddball tunefulness.

This isn’t a case of trying to reinvent the wheel so much as it is reveling in just how very good you’ve gotten a making wheels in the first place.

Lisbon is, for The Walkmen, a reinforcement rather than a reinvention - but for those listeners already fond of their sound, or of melancholy rock stripped down to its essentials in general, that makes for a rewarding listen.

Burial doesn’t step into the spotlight particularly masterfully. For the first time, his rhythmic choices get a bit lost, and some of the cuts to silence are more clumsy than disorienting.

Their attempt to weld the cerebral and physical is not always smooth but part of the attraction is to sit in on a work in progress, to hear the musicians grasping at handholds and swinging for the next ledge, fearless in the vulnerability of thought and action.

The tales they tell are, while gruesome, well told. And they’ve never sounded better; not only has the time off done no damage to their brash, south-of-the-Ohio harmonies, but the band has taken on the challenge of sounding bigger than ever before and come out triumphant.

[The National] turned a corner with 2005’s Alligator, fusing the moments of mania and quietude from their initial releases into a grandiose adult angst that resulted in at least two more great albums. With Beyondless, Iceage seems to have crossed a similar threshold.

Grinderman 2's variety and complexity never feels like a reach, and doesn't keep the album from cohering beautifully.

While some may scoff at the gentler side of the Animal Collective (especially when contrasted with the fully electric assault of last year's studio release), Sung Tongs easily stands alone as a crowning achievement in their eclectic discography, one that finds the group fully in control of their musical prowess and all the better for it.

This is a more varied album than The Moon and Antarctica (which did seem to have only one speed), and with the return of original member Dan Gallucci, Brock appears to have revived the heavy lead guitar playing of their early work.

That global element isn’t as prominent on his fourth proper CD, Uproot, but it peaks out in samples and vocal tracks. Indeed, not much on Uproot achieves the outward intensity of a "club banger," but perhaps that’s a reflection of the current state of bass and break culture.

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

Eyes on the Lines is summer’s quintessential pleasure, the unmapped excursion through sunlit spaces, the unhurried but never static interval for reflection, the road trip that goes everywhere and ends up exactly where it started. It’s an album to get lost in, every time you listen to it.

House of Land makes for a strange old-timey listen. It doesn’t stretch as far from its foundation as some of its referents might suggest, yet it continually pushes at something slightly alien. ... That intelligent play between various traditions makes for a listen at least as captivating as it is new-fangled.

Welshpool Frillies digs right back into the basics. It slaps in the most elemental way, on clanging power chords and thumping rhythms and Pollard’s bright absurdities cranked to top volume.

Displaying intensity, versatility and musicality in equal measure, Irreversible Entanglements is an indomitable force. Future Present Past is their best work yet.

Playing any of these three records on home speakers while choring through the day, their subtle modulations will melt away, their wispy chimeras passing unnoticed. An immersion through headphones, or at pane-rattling volumes, provides the magnification that these cataclysmic environments call for.

Overall, though, the mood on Fear Fun is consistent in its constant fluctuations; it's eerie when it needs to be and just familiar enough to lure in the listener.

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.

All I did was press fast-forward, track after track. When that expectation of emotional articulation wasn't met, it brought up that feeling of outrage, as if somehow Superchunk let me down.

The most heartening thing to be said about Music for Shut-Ins is that it reflects the opposite ethos, a go-for-broke glut of great songs in or around house music’s orbit.

While there are no lyrical revelations to be found, the non-specific words suit the “What Has Happened” may be the perfect gateway into Petunia’s intoxicating sound world, but it’s far from the only magic trick the White brothers pull off.

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.

Throughout Megafaun, the balance between expectation and surprise is maintained neatly.

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.

The whole album is vastly enjoyable, but it finishes in an especially strong way in a sequence that starts with exuberant, pop-buzzing “Happy Unhappy,” continues into the gorgeous, lushly harmonized, anthemic “River Run Lvl 1” and ends in that “Whatever” version gushed over two paragraphs above.

When Shining go technical, they do so with a flourish, but often seem too eager to return to the simpler crowd-pleasing verses and choruses that make up the meat of the album.

There are messages in Wild Flag's music, but there are also challenges to the listener, and to the rest of rock music in general: This band built its own sound out of stock rock 'n' roll parts to make one of the best albums of this year.

Swim sets the more developed tunecraft that Snaith has practiced on recent records to his first set of dance grooves in half a dozen years. When it works, it speaks more accessibly than anything else he's done, and also attests to his growing ability to snag your attention without throwing all of the kitchen sink's contents at you.

An album that blooms slowly over time and repeated listening.

It is perhaps Oldham’s best work yet, and somewhat ironically, his most accessible as well.

The in-the-moment experience of Fernow’s music is all physical; the aftershock is almost all intellectual, the specifics of the apparent transformation provided entirely by the listener, who is left standing not so much accused as self-implicated.

By the time “Civil Weather” floats to a halt, it’s hard not to want more from Oneida and Rhys Chatham, either separately or, on the basis of this LP, together.

There’s a lot to enjoy on Year of the Horse.

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.

Grinderman is as refreshing, bracing and absurd as the Birthday Party were when they blew onto the scene with their Old Testament zeal.

Hopelessness has occasional flaws. Not all the songs conclude satisfyingly, and some of the lyrics are vaguely trite. But despite them, it is a missive from an artist who has never ceased to evolve and now asserts herself with gusto and unflinching purpose.

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.

Thankfully, the rest of Black Noise manages to maintain an elegant balance of the concrete and the ephemeral.

Protomartyr has raised the bar high enough for any bands to follow, so high that most won’t even know it’s there.

While there might be a sketchy blueprint here, Prince took R&B to unknown places both musically and by integrating a bizarre personal philosophy that tried to make sense of God, sex, life, and death, but mostly sex.

Even given all those evocations and tonal shifts, Old Star feels cohesive. That’s down to the assured musicianship and the precisely engineered sound the band has mastered.

Maybe it takes a band of Hot Chip’s experience and sonic skill to have both pain and love that are as hard-won and effecting as it is on A Bath Full of Ecstasy; expanding their palette or not, big stars or not, it’s a joy to have them back.

The result is deep, it's broadly imaginative, it's tightly focused, and it's utterly essential.

Clearly, John Darnielle has a life story that’s inspiring as more than just the tale of an unconventional indie rock hero. Now that he’s making his best music, I think we can all be glad that he’s finally telling it.

Compared to its predecessor, Wall of Eyes can’t help but come across as transitional. While there are some undeniably great moments, the overall experience feels a little low-stakes and disappointing.

The songs are more cohesive now and Walker’s focus has narrowed, honed to a sharper edge on shorter time and the steel of SunnO)))’s contributions, but some of the posts, beams and plumbing still show through its exterior. Those little gaps in the facade help Soused sound more approachable.

The performances are some of the most articulate and explosive in the band’s enviable catalogue, while also making room for moments of exquisite tenderness. ... The album in Deerhoof’s discography that Miracle-Level is closest to in feel is probably 2008’s Offend Maggie, where the band effectively balances ferocity with sweetness, dissonance with anthemic melody. At this stage in their career it feels miraculous that Deerhoof keep on releasing music that’s quite this vital and inventive.

They have earned, through the force of their creativity and sweat, access to new places and social spaces. But even as some of their songs explore what’s newly possible in those spaces, the Mods remain deeply interested in the places from which they came.

The Danish four-piece tapped Spaceman 3’s Sonic Boom for production on this uncharacteristically uplifting endeavor, and you can see the uneasy alliance of the bright colors of Peter Kember’s recent work mixing into the half melted, slushy desolation of Iceage’s aesthetic.

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

Whatever we think of Jung’s psychoanalysis, it’s interesting to hear a hardcore record driven by such relatively hifalutin concepts. And it’s excellent to have more music from Gel, a band that continues to grow and make some of the best punk of the decade thus far.

Front to back, it’s classic Jack Rose, and while the themes and tones may still be the same, his playing is more assured than ever, summoning a power and immediacy heretofore unseen in his previous work.

Clouds and Tornadoes ricochets back and forth between these three levels: the familiar, the unfamiliar but recognizable, and the unfamiliar and unrecognizable, and like Maddin and Katchor, it’s this tripartite feeling that gives the music its uniqueness while still feeling like an unearthed artifact.

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.

At just five tracks, Orcutt Shelley Miller is lean but still intense. It’s a record that burns hot and fast and benefits from multiple listens.

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.

It may be an unexpectedly traditional and conservative album, but it’s also an unexpectedly beautiful one.

Dizzying and beautiful at once, it is unlike anything else from 2009.

V for five, V for victory and V for very much what you want from the Budos Band.

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.

When the energy is present, 23 is a strong, pleasant album that connects a number of dots in a way that belongs almost exclusively to Blonde Redhead.