The ingredients that make up Dark Crawler are a tasty mix, and Danjah could do worse than keep cooking with this recipe.

The result is a strong collection of the sort of rock songs at which No Age excels: swiftly paced, inventively layered and riffy, simultaneously caustic and gauzy.

Barely a moment passes without her voice proudly standing front and center, leading the listener through bittersweet songs that surrender to the ebb and flow of how it feels to be a twenty-something woman in twenty-first-century America.

Magnificently noisy in some places, forebodingly quiet in others and at all times distended from full cognizance, Dream Weapon is a balanced, well executed step firmly away from Genghis Tron’s former selves. Call it their Year Zero.

The fact that Untouchable gets in and gets out in a little over a half hour adds to its classic rock ’n’ roll charms--the accomplished playing, engaging production and dizzying variety of mid-tempo reveries, adolescent rushes and inconsolable ballads boosting its overall appeal.

With Mind Bokeh Bibio recognizes that our happiest, hands-in-the-air, hedonistic moments are shadowed with memory. A bit of hiss, crackle or distortion can evoke the sadness under the celebration.

Now two albums on, she’s found a way to transcend and expand upon it and open her solitary music to include us all.

A bit of guitar jangle pushes up under her voice, a subliminal rumble of bass, but mostly, notes are allowed to ripen, carry and decay slowly, on their own terms. On a record that runs a flag of hedonism over brainy complications, here is the real thing, swooning, wordless and headily scented.

This is a fun summer record, and just as bitter and conflicted as any fun summer record could be. There is still an art to misanthropy, and Free Energy has it down to a science.

This album is very aptly titled, since it is nearly always evoking a kind of nameless, non-verbal good feeling that sometimes lofts us up and out of our tediously tick-tocking lives. Are Euphoria bubbles up and out of the mundane and time-tethered into unreal, glowing landscapes of altered experience.

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

All Tense Now Lax at times evokes luminaries like Coil or early Current 93, but ultimately exists as its own beast, one that is never predictable, always challenging and achieves that oh-so-rare feat in rock music now: it turns the genre inside out and pulls the remains into a brave new form of noise.

They turn their wit into complex sentiments, making for an album that encompasses more than it delineates, even as the writing stays specific. Two voices don’t make for a proper community center, but they do make for something potent in a potentially bleak context.

It’s a lot less singular than its predecessor, but that makes it a more directly exhilarating experience.

Clearly steeped in the great tradition of the British folk song, yet able to combine its structure and ethos with rock rebellion from both classic psych and more recent guitar rock, Erland & The Carnival's Nightingale is a distinctive exemplar of folk revivalism for the age of indie.

One of the best things about Balf Quarry is the way it builds on the game-changing craftsmanship that Magik Markers brought to Boss.

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.

There's a freedom in her voice and a joy that is apparent.

Five albums in, Roberts seems to have only scratched the surface of the folk song repertoire and his contributions to its curation, performance, and preservation. Recommended.

There is an aura of immanence, of something more than banjo, bass and drums, that infuses these mystic tracks. Many things are possible, too, when you put together three such capable player and give them time and space to transcend themselves.

The result is a fascinating, successful hybrid.

There's nothing self-consciously modern or calculated about You Are Not Alone, no visible strain from trying to mold Staples' style into something she's not. It's just her, as she is at her best, and Tweedy deserves credit for bringing that out.

Over its 23 songs, Iron & Wine’s sound changes, from scratchy sparseness to well-appointed sparseness and through to the jittery clamor that marked The Shepherd’s Dog, but the underlying world doesn’t.

Refuge clocks in at over an hour, an hour in which, as stated earlier, not a whole lot of stuff happens. And yet maybe it takes that long to clear out the buzz and chatter, to slow down, to focus on one sound at a time and to find a stillness. It’s too long, it’s too slow, it’s too eventless until it’s not, and then you’re there.

The band does what it does best, which is couch surreal oddity in unstoppable catchiness.

The ratio is fixed, and any intimations of possible ineptitude is eradicated in a batch of songs that transition from anthem to chaos with ease.

I like this relatively blunt, unadorned Tracey Thorn – not that she was ever forced or florid in her expression, but Love and its Opposite offers her most complete disarmament yet.

Thanks to Sherwood’s production, all nine songs on Rainford are engaging on the macro level; you won’t have to work hard to enjoy them, and you’ll remember how they go later, and the micro; they are, in the classic dub tradition, rich with bizarre surprises.

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

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

The recondite spirit remains, but the sense of restlessness has disappeared, and with it much of the impertinent energy that propelled "Gone Ain’t Gone." What we gain in its place, though, is more rewarding: a closer look at the mechanics of Fite’s itchy-legs sophistry, the nature of his controlled eccentricity.

V may be more intimate and introverted than Ancestral Star or Lost in the Glare, but it is no less cinematic. It’s a remarkable return to the fore for Porras and Caminiti.

Ex Models are not afraid of the gaps created by their minimal approach; they use the silence to contrast the unholy racket they can make.

“The Song Before the Song Comes Out” seems to be Keenan sketching a possibility with her voice and whatever device she had at hand. This kind of intimacy is evident on a number of the collection’s tracks.

The album has a gleeful, headlong, nearly slapstick propulsion. .... There are some tranquil, romantic interludes, like the Julee Cruise-ish “Plastered” and the dream-pop, 4AD drift of “The Lady Vanishes,” and that’s all fine, but what this band does best is unpredictability, where you never know who will take the mic next, or where a song will take its latest sharp turn. This time, Bar Italia goes into some satisfyingly dark and noisy places, and cheers to that.

Amid the brightness and snark of another consistently entertaining Fujiya & Miyagi record, it’s a reminder that even our modern Lucifers have many dimensions to them.

The New Pornographers’’ songs have always been swift, busy little things for the most part, that’s a large part of their joy, and even if some of the more overt ebullience has been toned down here, the richly arpeggioed repetitions and steady melodic sense on display here means that, “bubblegum Krautrock” or no, this is still heady, catchy stuff.

It's not a return to form so much as a complete reinvention, this is an album that highlights a particularly buoyant Animal Collective, one that’s managed to expand their sound in surprising ways while still retaining the same basic creative impulses that made them such a joy to watch develop over the past decade

A pure, dream-like quality hovers around these tunes. The subject matter is, perhaps, a touch more mature than it was. Friendships gone fallow, loved ones missing, roads not taken, the bittersweet recognition that life is what it is now and will likely continue that way—the songs consider midlife with clarity and a little sadness but not much turmoil.

It is in the spaces between words and drums, and in the general structures of the songs... that El-P most clearly exhibits growth. And it is these points on the album that make I’ll Sleep an intriguing release.

Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline is a return to the same blissful twilight as before, virtually unpaused.

Their charisma lets them make a few risky moves (such as the African percussion on the extended closer "Church") and yield massive returns.

Continue as a Guest sounds exactly like a New Pornographers record. It’s energetic, insanely catchy and occasionally thrilling pop music. The compositions are dense and clever and complex, but not too much for their own good.

It’s clear that she’s going for something beyond mere sonic anxiety. What this record succeeds so well in doing is bringing you into a very particular feeling of emotional velocity.

Each piece is seemingly quite simple in terms of overall construction, with sustained atmospheric tones juxtaposed with spare melodies traced out in the foreground. However, pop on your best headphones, focus on the interplay between the layers of these richly detailed mixes, and you’ll find plenty of instrumental texture that’ll raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

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.

Who knew we needed a brace of medieval Christmas carols to get through our current morass? Not me, but Brokaw and Donnelly did somehow.

Jurado’s records are always slow burners, but this minimalist one takes an especially long time to catch fire. It sounds like less than it is for half a dozen spins and then suddenly rears up, fully-formed and out of hiding. It may not be as mesmerizing as the Richard Swift triad, but The Monster That Hated Pennsylvania is its own odd, quiet, disconcerting triumph.

The lightness of PUNK isn’t toothless escapism. Rather, it’s a challenge to find sweetness, joy and individuality in a world that trends toward cynical conformity.

Venom Prison makes songs that are just as musically violent as the stuff their deathgrind peers churn out, often thrillingly so. But the Welsh band lifts the subgenre out of the thematic gutter. ... This is a terrific record.

You could miss whole philosophies by following the guitar line too closely…and forgo featherbeds of tuneful pleasures by worrying too much about the words. And yet, ride the line just right, and meaning floods translucently simple songs, lighting them up from inside and transforming them.

It isn't as succint, and heart-wrenching, as Someday... and it may not have the slicing modernity of HNIA's earlier works, but the idea of the project propels it still.

Their sound--two guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, vox--is basic and elemental, drawing on rock, country and sometimes soul, though Among the Ghosts has less of the Memphis horn sound than previous albums. Still the force and authenticity of these tunes is undeniable.

In the end, Giving is a more than satisfying swan song for this lineup.

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.

That emptiness tempts a listener in, and puts you in its place--you, in a sense, step into the record’s point of view. This invitation to intimacy is a powerful move that most club music is simply incapable of.

No Keys again has no indelible riffs, but it doesn’t seem to be missing them anymore. Instead Dommengang goes deep into the abyss of buzz and croon and humming mystery and finds something beautiful, maybe what they were looking for the whole time.

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

You can really feel that extra decade-plus in the structures, songwriting, and sonics of All Hell, but the polish and compositional sophistication here don’t belie a lack of fire.

These cuts have a lively, volatile energy that reflects the fact that they were improvised and captured mostly in single takes with minimal overdubs. You can hear the two musicians thinking about how their instruments can sound and work and reflect on each other in the moment, untethered by conventional expectations for guitar and drums.

Grey Tickles and Black Pressure is furiously funny, intelligent and confrontational even as it heads to an upbeat ending.

What's emerged here is more unpredictable, a transitional record that still feels complete.

Thee Oh Sees continue to mutate in fascinating ways.

This is clearly a departure point, unexpected but more than welcome.

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

Trapist isn't experimenting anymore; the trio is using the tools they know best to subvert nostalgia and keep you ill at ease.

If it was a foregone conclusion that the long-awaited Iron & Wine/Calexico team-up wouldn't result in anything revelatory (or incendiary, as it were), it was almost as inevitable that it would be rewarding all the same; safe, not sorry, sad and elegant as ever.

One of the great pleasures of The House at Sea is that you can enjoy it without thinking about it, on a purely sensual, intuitive level, without feeling that there's nothing there to consider.

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.

Nosdam is most similar to the New Jersey trio Dälek, although Nosdam's beats tend to be a bit bulkier and he seems to approach his music with a psychedelic sense of wonder rather than with Dälek's anger.

Shaking Hand demonstrate a cleverness with the reins, balancing looseness and restraint. This is typically found in long-tenured outfits; it’s hard to believe this is their first record.

Whether she’s howling about airport security machines, falling in and out of love or lust with someone or turning a jaundiced eye on the past, these are as solid, anthemic and moving a set of songs as any Against Me! have put out.

Who Is the Sender? has a gently melancholy, a resigned aura that looks lovingly on this world but also speculates on the next. Both elements, the careful observation of what is and the restless querying about what may be, meld into a wise and spiritually resonant whole.

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

The Hypnogogue is anything but minimalist. It starts with a big concept, adds dramatic, room-filling rock arrangements and extends for over an hour. And yet, there are very few intervals where you wonder if things might have been better if they were shorter or more pared back. The Church is going out with a bang, not a whimper, and we’re lucky to be here to hear it.

For post-apocalyptic strains of electronic music, there's no one better at the moment than Andy Stott. Luxury Problems makes for one hell of a calling card.

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

Even now, with this seventh album, the old thumping insouciance remains, while the subject matter becomes increasingly morose. These are the kind of songs that could easily, in the live setting, lead to sweaty euphoria; you realize almost as an afterthought that they are all about death.

Going Places is a monolith, the cacophonous capstone to a career that never settled for less. It’s two guys arriving at their musical endpoint, culminating nearly a decade of work with one final refinement.

Cold Showers uses that cavalier attitude behind such a simple bedrock of references--Joy Division (a song called "New Dawn" all but writes a countermelody to "Insight"), The Church, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Strokes, Interpol--that creates a level of tension across Love and Regret that sustains them far better than any of their peers.

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

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

At 44 minutes, Life, and Another is lengthy compared to many new albums, but its 16 diverse tracks all earn their inclusion, each piece of the tapestry finely crafted and lovingly stitched into place. Few albums released so far this year have felt quite so magical and transportive, carried along by a mischievous dream-like narrative.

It’s atmospheric, infectious and enjoyable.

The entire panoply of sounds from past recordings is brought to the forefront and depleted prejudicially. Sonic serpent rattle, centrifugal drones, cottony flashes and fizzes, dog-whistle squelch, electronic hives freed of their bees – the whole lot's here, and it's incrementally larger and more agitated than prior show-'n'-tell sessions.

Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest is a quiet album that will tell you about the succession of small, resonant moments that make up a day, a month, a life. Sit still for that, soak it in and let it breathe, and you start to see the glow behind the ordinary, not just in Callahan’s album, but in the world itself.

We Cater to Cowards is a satisfying and sometimes thrilling record. Particularly in its final third, it finds a snarling, crunching groove that slots alongside the general feeling of our current socio-political conjuncture.

While Diaper Island doesn't represent a significant break from VanGaalen's existing body of work, it ultimately haunts and endures in just the right amount--making this one of the strongest entries in an already consistent discography.

Throughout, Moore’s light touch and heavy sustain and Gunn’s fingerpicking complement each other perfectly. ... Let’s also hope that Gunn and Moore release more music soon.

Finders Keepers has managed to extract another handful of diamonds from a shaft seemingly unsafe for further exploration.

While bubblegum’s reliance on the hook has afforded Collins the opportunity to write some of the catchiest songs of his career, Ooey Gooey Chewy Ka-Blooey!’s strongest selling point is its extraordinary attention to detail.

These songs are gently, buoyantly lovely, littered with domestic imagery but canted into strange angles.

Doing retro soul without sounding redundant remains a challenge, but the Caldwells sound fresh, mainly because they sound so energized at every moment. Even when “Don’t You Hear Me Calling” drops the tempo way down, the group maintains its passion while locking into its message.

It is really a much more modern album than the Americana tag would at first suggest, and the songs are as instantaneous and memorable as the best pop music.

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

Even at its most abstract and cerebral, Fluorescent Black is made irresistibly catchy by its wildly eclectic tracks (courtesy of unsung genius Earl Blaze), at once the smartest and most ig’nant windshield-rattlers out.

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