The long view is serene, but it boils with nattering subtext. Robert Forster makes lean, minimal, elliptical songs about the struggle against time and self. He makes it look easy, but buried contradictions suggest that it’s not.

Without the contextual anchor that Vo’s art gave to “Deforms,” Girl often gets lost in its own tormented vision. The album plays out like a series of crises, some real, some imaginary, some personal, others global. ... The better angels of Xiu Xiu’s nature are on display in the slow, scraping cello elegy “Amargi ve Moo” and in album closer “Normal Love,” the closest Girl gets to a legitimate pop song.

Frawley has made lemonade, squeezing out the sour juices of life into a lovely, acid-tipped, unassuming but quite refreshing solo record, Undone at 31.

By making a boldly experimental leap in a career already full of them, Dyer and Sanchez have created a surprisingly accessible record that shows off some of their best work to date. Whatever they call themselves, their powerful alchemy shouldn’t be ignored.

Razorwire-sharp and reflexive, Eton Alive sees Sleaford Mods knowingly take the existential dare once more, and mostly win.

When McCombs gets deep into his vision of the world, or maybe a liminal state between ours and his, he’s at his finest on Tip of the Sphere. He needs a lifeline, though, to keep him tethered enough to this one that neither he nor his audience wanders off. He hasn’t gone too far, but the steadiness works better than the spiraling as this disc goes ‘round.

The breathy blur of Pratt’s vocals give these tracks a will of the wisp quality, as you chase after the lyrics only to find yourself becalmed and beatific amid iridescent fog.

If some albums make you lean in, strain to hear, fill in the negative space with your own silent ponderings, this one flattens you like a road roller. Its nightmarish sonic textures reach up out of the disc much as the figures painted in Netflix art-horror disaster Velvet Buzzsaw did, but without the comic relief.

Michael Chapman’s songs are gorgeous, dark-tone places, full of the work of musical collaboration, but also haunted and spare. Lovely stuff.

Fullbrook is quite a good singer, a subtle lyricist and a skillful crafter of melodies, but in Olympic Girls, she pulls all three aptitudes together in an organic way that is more than the sum of its parts.

Presley is an oddball psychedelic pop artist of considerable appeal. He’s also an experimenter in digital minimalism. Larry’s Hawk eats all kinds of stuff, apparently, and you just have to keep feeding him.

Like Bellowing Sun,Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars uses contemporary human tools and voices that refuse to be confined to words to enact sonic ceremonies that celebrate the natural world.

A lighter listen, enjoyable, but without the depth and drama that marks Tyler’s better work.

None of this is so very different from Swervedriver’s catalog, or indeed from the guitar-crashing dream pop of Adam Franklin’s Bolts of Melody, but it is very fine anyway.

His strongest set of songs yet. The guitar work remains effortless and radiant, but it is no longer the dominant thing. Instead the songs, bolstered by strings and vocal harmonies, take precedence. There’s an easy, lovely coherence to this record.

There are really only a couple of tracks mid-album that strike me as too conventionally pop, and they’re the singles, so you have to assume that Van Etten likes them just fine. Plenty else is shadowy, moody and lit by sudden crystalline flights of melody, and a few of the tracks combine eerie beauty with the pulse of four-on-the-floor.

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.

Faithful Fairy Harmonies often sounds like a song hunter’s discovery, a forgotten cache of preindustrial songs left behind on wax cylinders in someone’s dusty attic. Yet there’s something very modern about the idea of Josephine Foster being able to create this work almost entirely on her own and driven solely by her own artistic preferences. An old-fashioned voice singing exactly what it wants is not old fashioned at all.

Hell-On is Case’s most idiosyncratic album, but it’s also her most generous and grounded. It is her strongest--as in it projects strength, the kind that comes with vulnerability.

These songs make no concessions to your serenity. They are prickly and aggressive and a-melodic. In a world geared towards bland, uneventful spotify-core, Mating Surfaces grabs you by the short hairs and shakes you. It will not be entirely pleasant, but it is absolutely necessary.

With Stranger Fruit he’s gone even further than that; he’s made something powerful, something that amid all the ritual and esoteric language and bloody events foregrounds the humanity of these imaginary, unnamed people and their real world brothers and sisters in a way that’s far more effective and unforgettable than most metal bands will manage to be on any subject.

Even more striking is the way she folds all this talent into her songs, keeping all the bits distinct while shaping them into a complicated, intricate whole that breathes like a living creature. Nicely done.

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

Holtkamp finds a beatific atmosphere somewhere between the first BEAST recordings and his earlier work.

Wham! Bang! Pow!, with its extravagant punctuation, is as brilliantly self-absorbed, as needlessly clever, as tightly wound and tautly played as the mid-aughts debut.

The more faithfully you capture these songs, the worse they sound. The Lillywhite Sessions may be DMB’s darkest, most dangerous material, but it is still slick as hell. No question, though, that Walker approached these songs out of love, and for that, you have to give some credit.

10 unassuming but gem-like songs that live up to their past work.

The mix of instruments is fascinating, but the reason this music lingers is that it is just so beautiful. If you’ve enjoyed either artist in the past, prepare to love everything you loved before and add a little extra.

No matter how smoothly the songwriting flows, nothing’s easy on Interstate Gospel. Lambert, Monroe, and Presley know that, yet they take on an array of hard topics and reel off one-liners and hooks as if that’s enough to get us through, which it just might be.

It’s an interesting artifact. Better, though, it’s another strong album from the young singer. Wall’s voice alone would carry these songs, but they’re each well crafted for the coherence of the larger picture.

No posthumous album can be heard without a sense of loss and absence. No matter how much you enjoy these tracks, you must also acknowledge as you listen that the world will go on without this singular talent.

The sound on Darkness Rains is in line with 2016’s Glow in the Dark but seems to have sharpened and gained force in the intervening years.

Here his final collection of songs is both grand and ghostly, sweeping and solitary, and you do not have to know how the story ends to sense a profound melancholy.

Hippo Lite is a genuine collaboration. Aside from a few glimmers, Cate and Tim’s own distinct sounds are less detectable. They’ve ended up with a batch of songs that are physical in an elementally curious way.

Despite the confrontational title, Broken Politics caresses like a lost Sade album. Cherry has done a most unexpected thing: soundtracked the Trump era in quiet storm soul.

Like Masana Temples as a whole, “Dripping Sun” is fun but uneven, too ambitious stylistically and not quite ambitious enough sonically.

Like grief and its ghostly aftermath, Konoyo is enveloping, disorienting, even voluptuous, resistant to narrative and rich in sensation, and is one of 2018’s most vital records.

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.

Escovedo and Don Antonio play with that search through country, rock, cool jazz, and more, reflecting chaotic but exciting sensory experiences. The Crossing, with its big scope and questionable coherence, can be a bit much, but it’s a welcome and valuable statement from an artist capable of pulling it off.

The work is too much for casual listening, and it refuses to be background music. And so, perhaps live performance is the most appropriate setting. This double disc captures both the awkwardness of performing such inward-looking material and the communion this sort of sharing carves out. Elverum’s lyrics are searing in their specificity.

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.

There’s something off in the way that the euphoria attaches to the chillier depths of his songs. It’s unsettling enough to suggest that it maybe could be interesting if it worked, but it doesn’t quite.

Emanon moves through dimensions and times with a surprising fluidity. That the album includes three discs and a graphic novel gives it unusual heft, but Shorter’s construction of the segments provides insight into his recent era, particularly stemming from 2013’s Without a Net.

Someday Everything Will Be Fine is a wrecked and wreckless antidote to a world that most definitely is not.

The result is that rarest of prizes for a band that’s hit 25 years old: a record that stands not only as a genuine step forward in their body of work but also as one of their very best, an album as harrowing and transportive as anything else they’ve done.

Exuberantly weird ... The opening songs feel a bit thin, returning to trippy terrain that GT Ultra had already adequately investigated. ... The album’s second half, however, is terrific. The mix thickens with idiosyncrasy, glimmering electronic flotsam and some assured singing from Carlson. She doesn’t have enormous range, but she conjures compelling presence.

The songcraft has gotten notably sharper in just two years as well, making this very much a band to enjoy now but also one to keep an eye on for later.

It’s hard to think of 7 as anything other than an extension of Beach House’s sound, incorporating slightly different, smaller ideas but all easily applied to their own syntax.

It should be stressed as bluntly as possible, then, that Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton haven’t “just” made a good album for a couple of teenagers; I’m All Ears is pretty damn good for Rambo.

Like a great short story, Body is well worth revisiting, even after you know the plot twist, to savor details and subtleties you missed the first (or second or third) time around.

Despite some rather simple melodies (and even simpler lyrics), or maybe even because of them, I’m Terry hits the mark.

Coding emotional experience into sound is what this stuff is all about, and Jones nails it again and again.

He’s been moving this way the whole time, though you may not have connected the dots before, and now with Deafman Glance, he’s arrived.

It remains a little bit of all its influences, at times more like soul, at times almost straight country (particularly on “Here Is Where the Loving Is At”), but more often the proverbial blender mix.

Familiar as aftermath, the sounds sit at the edge of memory, providing a different intoxication than the vivid hits of adolescence. It’s a specific perspective that often has the clearest view of a movement. This scrappy album finds yet another future for old futurism.

There is machinery working even in the greenest corners of this sonic garden, whooshing and clicking and percolating in the interstices to make everything look a little brighter and more colorful than life.

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.

Both musicians are good enough at this genre that Joy is never a total drag (if not quite a Joy either), but also both of them have been better, and Segall has been better this year, so caveat emptor.

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.

Have You Considered Punk Music deconstructs punk music so thoroughly that it seems like something else again; it sounds more like the abstracted post-punk of the early aughts band Wilderness than anything you’d hear right now.

These are not reproductions, but rather meditations that breathe and exist on their own terms.

Kill the Lights, his second full-length, follows 2016’s largely acoustic Confront the Truth and 2014’s moderately more abrasive Dissed and Dismissed and amps up the voltage somewhat, especially in the anthemic “Jasper’s Theme,” site of this disc’s best electric guitar licks.

The Bachman you know is in here but submerged deep in the unfamiliar; it is not really until the two gorgeous “Song for the Setting Sun” cuts that you get an unobstructed view of the man and his guitar.

Tru is a juggernaut, wreaking Mascis-style mayhem with a bubblegum heart.

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.

Lloyd, the Marvels, and Williams cover an array of emotions while remaining well focused in sound (with the exception of “Monk’s Mood,” pretty enough for inclusion anyhow). It’s an impressive take by a roster of stars given over to the bigger idea.

There are no failures, but the back half of Kidjo’s Remain in Light feels too safe. Kidjo’s Remain in Light doesn’t surpass its predecessor, but at its best, it’s an equally thrilling examination of the still relevant questions that drove Byrne and company almost 40 years ago.

The soundtrack is a continual blurring of boundaries. It is semi-static throughout, like much of Faure’s Requiem, severely troubled even beneath seemingly placid surfaces. This renders those points of eruption and cataclysm exponentially more powerful.

The point is that new stuff is added without compromise or dilution. And listening here, you realize that change is good and maybe even necessary, no matter how much you like how Protomartyr has always sounded.

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.

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.

Thematically, with three songs inspired by a graphic novel, one inspired by a tv show, one re-recorded deep cut and two covers, What Heaven Is Like is a bit scattered. Sonically, however, What Heaven Is Like is Wussy’s most cohesive, best sounding album to date.

Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois pits Lanois’ laconic style against Funk’s frenzy until the contradictions between them are heightened and collapse, resulting in a deeply weird and captivating album.

With The Alligator Bride, more than previous Howlin’ Rain albums, the breadth of the band’s scope shines in streaming color.

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.

Even as you nod indulgently to Jordan’s assertion (on “Pristine”) that she’ll never fall in love again (of course you will), even as you worry (in “Golden”) about her a little confronting an ex- by blurting out “I’m not wasted anymore” (are you sure?), there’s an integrity and authenticity to her perspective that commands respect.

Hundreds of Days is proof that Lattimore has come into her own as a composer and that her career is taking on the contours of one of her pieces: from stark beginnings something rich and wondrous has emerged.

LUMP, a collaboration between Tunng founder Mike Lindsay and Laura Marling, is cool and enveloping, a mesh of luminous electronic textures and subtly placed instruments, all arranged around Marling’s silvery voice, often doubled or overlapping in harmony.

Where on earlier releases Black Moth Super Rainbow seemed to be the gleeful expression of a twisted, sun-baked parallel world, the last two albums sound increasingly burned out on it. Panic Blooms, rather than reaching for the sticky pop highs of its predecessor, sounds like a purer expression of this emotional drift.

The album, produced by Chris Funk of the Decemberists, manages to be both weird and relevant, experimental and comfortable. Malkmus’s grounded surrealism makes for a series of songs that offer connection within a skewed take on life. The music, in any track’s given mode, encourages persistent resistance of the way things are without being heavy-handed. It bridges worlds wonderfully and shows Malkmus to be as vital as ever.

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.

Wooden Shjips’ pleasant but toothless music feels insubstantial, if not insipid, in relation to the demands of our unforgiving present.

If you don’t already have this material and you have any interest in either Miles or Coltrane, you will not be bummed if you unwrap this set at your next birthday. But that first if is a big one. Between outright bootlegs and Scandinavian labels that have had no problems getting their wares into American record stores during decades where there were a lot more of them around, the bulk of this set has been heard before.

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

Intricate and unpredictable, Deeper Woods isn’t primitive at all. It’s wild.

Though the length of each successive Grouper album wastes away, at only 22 minutes Grid of Points provides such compelling sketches that the lost minutes only manifest after the music has stopped. Harris’ sound has always been haunting, but by investigating absence on Grid of Points she haunts herself, capturing a restlessness that has returned to make sense of its ending.

With I Have Fought Against It, but I Can’t Any Longer, the Body have generated a record of power electronics, descending at times into harsh noise, punctuated at points by mournful passages of ambient beauty.

The Horizon Just Laughed is less showy than the Maraqopa trilogy, but in its quiet way just as visionary and odd.

[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.

The Tree of Forgiveness, ten breezy songs and thirty-three minutes long, is slight, but its brevity fits. The Tree of Forgiveness doesn’t rage against the dying of the light. Instead, it’s funny and it’s sad. It’s complicated. It’s over before you know it.

Phair mobilized and rearranged some tunes from her Girly-Sound tapes. Almost all of them improve with Guyville’s studio polish, but a couple are better in their original form ... Exile in Guyville remains her most visible and memorable record, but it’s more than a time capsule of early-nineties indie rock. Its most compelling songs (and there are a bunch of them) still generate tensions, among a voice and its bodily contours and the public’s articulations of femininity.

With its powerfully cohesive sonic topography and motley cast of rat smashers, ill-fated squires and cigarette eaters, Space Gun is a robust marriage between the band’s rugged past and more polished present. Further, it’s a reminder that, ultimately, Bob Pollard’s best character is himself.

Ultimately, Conquistador contains few surprises, but its stark beauty and understated textural depth prove that Carlson is still finding new and engaging ways of repeating himself.

There are spoken words buried in these machine-like architectures, only the tone, not the sense of them coming through the music. It is a rather lovely space that Hopkins creates, lyrical but inhabited, precise and well-lighted and buoyant.

Dupuis’ reference may run more to punk and indie, rather than disco/R&B, but the effect is eerily similar: gender studies inquiries encased in the kind of music that once looked uncritically at female disempowerment. Yet while it’s serious stuff, it’s also fun, with big bashing choruses and somersaulting strings of words that surprise and entertain.

It’s the earnest balance Morris strikes between brokenness and openness--his willingness to savor the condition of being broken open--that makes the experience of this music so deeply sustaining.

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.

On the Tylers’ third and best album, The Ox and the Ax, there is no obscuring the harsh world conjured by these songs with elaborate instrumentation, overwrought singing or dance tempos. Recorded in crystalline clarity, the instrumental accompaniments are usually little more than guitar or banjo, and while they’re skillfully played, it is the Tylers’ voices, unadorned and rich, that are the center of this record.