Preserved and proffered in sound, the Parks, both physical and cerebral become a source of solace and wonderment.

There’s something very moving about Pupul’s attempt to understand his mother by vacuuming up the sights and sounds of Hong Kong and fitting them carefully into his Western-style DJ art. It works on a human level — we can all relate to losing people that we love — but also as music. Letter to Yu is poignant and powerful.

The result is his most fully realized album to date, and a reminder after those lower-profile years that Lekman’s voice is a singular and valuable one.

Infinite Dissolution paints with the boldest of rockist strokes and then tears them all down again.

Though the harsh synth textures and borderline-disjointed edits from the EPs remain, the record as a whole is simultaneously hazier and more distinct: more fine detail in the cavernous reverb, more impact with every tumbling, hypercompressed stack of drum samples.

She swoops and swoons and growls like Kristin Hersh but more country, and it’s worth a listen just to hear what she’ll do next.

Despite its music-geek-pleasing period references and psychedelic density, this is ultimately a frothy pop record full of hopeful love songs.

For those unfamiliar with this exemplary quintet and its composer, there's no better place to begin.

The organic feel and sense of Shabaka’s humility and vulnerability makes Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace a moving and impressive album.

Throughout Boy, the action recedes into a murky distance from which disembodied details reach out like the tiny malevolent creatures that hide under the staircase in your nightmares.

This is a relatively brief album but one so rich and with such a definite sense of itself that it’s hard to feel shortchanged; Demen gives us a rapturously enchanting world to live in, but one you could imagine becoming too much.

It’s full of sharp edges and rough noises, but it’s also kind of like a pillow. How do they do both things at once? That’s a mystery, one that makes for one of the best rock records of 2021.

Viewfinder works because of the way it sounds, at times bright and harsh as neon, at others soft and ambiguous and elusive. You may not be able to discern exactly what it means, but the colors are bright, the edges sharp and the turns often surprising.

The quality of the songwriting hasn’t diminished, but the setting has changed.

Teen Dream’s best material comes up front (“Zebra,” “Silver Soul,” “Norway” “Walk in the Park”) , and there’s a bit of a sag in the middle (“Lover of Mine,” “Better Times”), with songs that are pretty enough, but without any big payoffs.

When the mood allows, and there's time to let it all sink in, an album like ( ) is indispensable nearly from beginning to end.

Sugar and spice and everything twisted, Daniel continues to write music for people who like to think about why they like something and can appreciate creative, sincere homage.

Throughout, Mirah picks her soft, knowing way through songs that soothe even as they challenge. Her melodies curl gently up into question marks, as she asks you to make sense of life and love and loss.

It is at once too ambitious (in the recording process and change of milieu) and not ambitious enough (in its failure to push Bergsman’s music to unexpected and truly experimental places).

With Shattered, he isn’t just showing today’s garage-rock young guns he’s still got it. He’s showing them how it’s done.

There are moments here that feel like being carried aloft by a parade, and moments that feel like the jail doors shutting. There are pools of calm and surges of impossible triumph.

Thirty minutes of METZ feels more like hard work than fun playtimes, and the sameness of the venture underscores the futility of whatever it is they're trying to accomplish, which falls somewhere between "artist defending bowel movement on a gallery floor" and "third demo tape by an up-and-coming new band."

Barely out of her teen years herself, Marling explores a whole spectrum of female experience with empathy and intelligence.

The end result is as fascinating as Silent Servant has ever been.

She embodies strength and resilience, mustering loudness when necessary and fluttering a little with vibrato and emotion, but never giving in to it. The quieter songs as equally powerful.

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.

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 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.

You can hear both elements jostling for precedence, the celebratory euphoria of live performance filtering through the doubts and uncertainties and complications of extended time in one’s own head. It’s the combination that’s so thrilling here, in a sound that swirls and envelopes and jitters but remains just out of reach, like the dream of a dream of a dream of life before.

Despite their darkest moments and constant shifts in tempo, tone and style Being Dead sound totally in control. The kitchen sink maybe threatened with an unmooring but Where Horses Would Run is greater than its many parts, held together by sheer joy of music making and the commitment of the trio to give free rein to their instincts.

Eiko Ishibashi’s soundtrack skilfully and subtly complements the film’s themes, capturing stillness, beauty, sorrow and uncertainty in such a way that the album succeeds on its own terms as a nuanced listening experience.

In veering so hard and so often, they manage to be that rare thing: interesting. Save for later the development of brand identity and a recognizable aesthetic.

Epic pulls from more corners. The voice at the center isn't arresting, exactly, but in the end that's unimportant. You'll want to stay.

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.

Without hearing it in alongside the images that accompany it, it’s hard to pass judgment on Cave and Ellis’s music.

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.

New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges is an album of somber beauty, its flashes of color existing amidst a broad spectrum of grays.

This third full-length, written around the birth of his first son, takes that bouncy castle exuberance to even greater lengths, channeling the euphoria of sleep-short early parenthood into woozy, optimistic grooves.

I do know that there’s a lot to love about Cutouts, and it’s certainly a more substantive release than its title might suggest — that these are the cutting room–floor tracks from the Wall of Eyes sessions. Far from it: overall, this is a more colorful and dynamic record.

Throughout this often incoherent hodgepodge of tunes, Baroness has mostly abandoned the contrast that made its previous records work so well.

Ultimately, it's hard to embrace Sepalcure. The record has received some critical acclaim, and as far as stateside bass music goes, Sepalcure deserve the attention. But something is missing...risk.

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.

The lyrics on Red Devil Dawn are some of his most poetic to date.

Blacklisted rings with lost voices and strange journeys, and does a better job of balancing hope, innocence, and darkness than just about anything I’ve heard in a while.

The album is set in a place that’s warm and brightly illuminated. But it’s there, just outside the circle of light, just out of sight, and it makes Oldham’s place even more lovely for the respite it brings.

You end up thinking, well, of course, a band this ruthlessly observant and unflinching is going to be mad a lot of the time, but how great that they bring the same intensity to love.

Hit Parade is such a pleasure, well made and artfully played, deeply felt but never mushy.

Luminiferous burns hard, but it’s searching for an attitude adjustment that could make the flames grow higher.

Another record by the Bevis Frond, and another long, acid-fried blues? That’s a gift.

The Body and Uniform seem to have found kindred spirits in one another’s daring and ferocious dispositions. The result is an excellent record, innovative and exciting, antically entertaining and deadly serious. Play it often and very, very loud.

Overall, the album has an over technical, over clean vibe. All three musicians play very well, and they’ve obviously gotten more intuitive and engaged with one another. But it’s too much skill and too little viscera for my taste. Despite a continuous onslaught of face melting solos, Anthropocosmic Nest feels a little cold.

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.

Not quite folk songs or noise experiments or vocal soundscapes or really anything you can pin down by category, they are nonetheless very beautiful and as quietly striking as any music you’ll hear this year.

Holley finds the direct line between his own, relatively recent suffering and the longer narrative of black people in America. Funky, percussion driven “We Was Kings in the Jungle, Slaves in the Field,” is one of the album’s best cuts, rumbling forward on syncopated drumming, fired by blares of brass and winds, lit by ghostly patterns of marimba.

It’s another landmark release for this deceptively versatile and forward-thinking artist, and perhaps, just perhaps, his most effective album to date.

They sound very private, though not uninviting, and, compared to the first album at least, less fanciful and more grounded in everyday events and relationships. Yet while these songs are spare and not at all weighted down, they integrate diverse sounds into the mix. .... The harmonies are what’s lovely here, and a little different from before.

Polymer is a summation of everything that puts Plaid rightfully on the same level of their innovative peers like Autechre, Boards of Canada and Two Lone Swordsmen. Creating worlds at once hermetic and immersive, Plaid’s music ticks along at a human level and envelops you in a protective, provocative cocoon.

This album is loud, obnoxious, personal, and a hell of a lot of fun.

Whether your favorite power trio is the Minutemen or ZZ Top, part of what makes 'em great is their ability to simultaneously exploit the format's simplicity and transcend its limitations. These guys do both. Each knows exactly what is required of his instrument.

In some ways The Waiting Room is remarkable for hitting a number of classic Tindersticks checkmarks without ever feeling like it’s, well, going down a list checking them off.

The songwriting [on 2019's Weeping Choir] found increasingly complex ways to channel the band’s inexhaustible energy and potent sonic outrage. Garden of Burning Apparitions forges further along that general trajectory, but this new record also bares the band’s turbulent, tumultuous teeth with renewed ferocity. It’s pretty great.

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

Watson captures (or enhances) sounds in three dimensions, and the way he arranges them invites both immersion and reflection.

Quarter Turns Over a Living Line is neither an easy, nor comforting listening, and absorbing the entire album can occasionally leave the listener gasping for air. However, as a portrait of a dystopian 21st century musical landscape, there is little better than this brand of pure British blackness.

If Oh Me Oh My is Banhart’s most fantastic record and Rejoicing In The Hands his most focused, Nino Rojo is the singer at his most inclusive.

Whether it’s the soaring psychedelia of “Paper Fog” and “Pigs,” the more straightforwardly folky “Bird of Paradise” and “Vegas Knights,” or even the delayed fuzz-guitar squall of “Another Story From the Center of the Earth,” the pedal steel is there, and so is a songwriting sensibility that does feel very personal and emotionally powerful even though there’s not a lot of comprehensible narrative.

If you’re seeking a dose of danceable, retro futurist fun, Vanishing Twin are a good bet. Though far from original, Ookii Gekkou offers plenty of upbeat, colorful and likeable tunes.

While Carlson and company continue to explore new influences (much has been made over the band's recent declaration of affection for Pentangle and Fairport Convention), Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 sounds to me like a different manifestation of the same sound they've been exploring for some time now.

Regardless of the art-school pretentions offered up-front, Yamantaka // Sonic Titan deliver the goods.

It's full of complexity and contradictions, and trying to grasp it is impossible. But what a joy to attempt.

The music on Burning the Threshold is simply good--easy and reassuring, maybe, but masterful and in many places downright gorgeous, too.

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.

Parts of Litany were pretty but kind of dull, and The Glass Bead Game is similarly afflicted. Blackshaw’s easy development seems to have reached a plateau.

While Teenage Hate sits squarely in the flamey-shirt scene of the '90s, even the greaser version of Jay knew how to bust up cliches.

You can’t hear Signals without hearing modern London.

And this one, too, is as sardonic and soulful, as hilariously outraged and superbly tuneful as any rock-pop record you’ll hear in 2018.

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

Thee Oh Sees continue to mutate in fascinating ways.

Now Only is a messy record, brimming with musical ideas that often drop out before resolving, and with lyrics so factual as to sometimes verge on dull. But in the name of progress, this messiness feels hard-won. You can learn from death, and Elverum proves again that you can make art from it.

The album certainly leaves you with a sense of dislocation and déjà vu, as if hearing musical avenues open, meander deliciously, then abruptly slam shut. It’s disorientating, surprising, at times deeply funky, and often very beautiful.

Parquet Courts needs an extra injection of grandiosity (as 2014’s towering “Instant Disassembly”) when they slow things down, and they don’t always provide it on the songs that need it the most.

Even incoherent and excessively long, Frozen Niagara Falls shows that, like John Wiese with his recent--and more rewarding--masterpiece Deviate From Balance, Fernow is pulling apart the clichés of noise and looking at where it goes from here.

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.

It doesn’t hurt that they’ve made their most pleasing record yet. It’s slick but not stupid, the results of a traditional rock band working closely with a producer of electronic music, one which merges the clean lines of dance music with the grandeur of a crack studio band well-heeled in ’70s pop and ’90s indie rock.

8,000,000 Stories provides ample room for the duo to connect and shine, and showcase Blueprint in his brilliant role as narrator.

You Are Free almost has two disparate styles, and that would be the criticism here. Yet that's the result of her particular mania: stand up, shout then quickly retreat to your seat and hide your face.

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.

It’s a record by a mature band, setting itself to a serious task. The fact that it’s so effective--that Our Raw Heart can move you from one mood to another, and leave you feeling larger--is testament to the earnestness of their art.

These New Puritans are still thinking the same off-kilter, rhythmically intricate thoughts, but filtering them through a whole different music making process. Either way, it’s impressive and quite lovely. Nicely done.

It’s that prickliness that makes this record intriguing, and durable enough to reward repeat listens.

Limbo could have passed as a follow-up to this year's excellent Mr. Impossible, and likely would have met with the same acclaim.

While Antiphonals can’t help but seem like a comparatively minor release next to Cantus, Descant’s 80 minutes, it shares many qualities with previous Davachi highlight, 2018’s Let Night Come On Bells End The Day: refined, reflective, and uniquely moving.

A delicate, quietly ruminative collection of songs that she herself arranged and recorded on computer. It sounds, one supposes, exactly as Bunyan intended.

Pole’s technique still relies heavily on the minimal, but Steingarten is garnished with a sonic density lacking on his first three full-lengths.

It's compelling from the start, particularly insofar as they not only avoid genre clichés but also cheap drama. Instead, they play emotionally ambiguous stuff--shifting modes and dynamics, or rather simply smashing them together until the edges are indistinct.

At 69 minutes, I Was Real is a lot to take in. Newcomers are advised to start with W/M/P/P/R/R, the concise, big band counterpart to I Was Real’s occasionally meandering chamber music. Still, I Was Real is sure to puzzle and please whether your devotion to rock and roll and its antecedents is intellectual or physical.

Some of the songs work atmospherically; other take shape as more conventional songs. Yet it all proceeds like a pastel colored daydream, faint sounds swirling into mirage-ish structures then melting away into mist. The words are so buried in the mix that you’ll need a lyric sheet to parse them; like the music, they teeter on the boundary between pastoral calm and 21st century angst. They cling to subtle melodies like a fresh coat of dew.

With the exception of the somewhat dull “Dormant Love,” I’m altogether satisfied.