[Fade's songs] blur and fade like old memories, but leave a meaningful impression.

Tourist in This Town is sharply written, revealing a mordant, humorous understanding of Crutchfield herself and the people around her. There’s a vulnerability in these tunes that lives alongside the cleverness, so that we feel her angst, even as we appreciate her cleverness.

“Everybody’s Song” features the melodic discipline, barely contained anguish and cryptic lyrical finger-wagging that marked the last few Posies records. “Just Stand Back” (“I’m gonna turn on you so fast”) is a hateful little bon-bon that could stand tall on a Sugar record. And yet, The Great Destroyer remains too rickety and pristine to be anyone’s baby but Low’s.

Frozen Orange might as well have simplicity, directness, and melody stamped like a mantra throughout the liner notes.

They walk a fine line between startlingly fresh songs and caricatured styles that don’t mix well.

While it makes no effort to conceal its intellect, it solicits an under-the-table emotional connection the Seas and Cakes of the indiesphere simply will not allow.

Lost Wisdom is not a long album--clocking in at just under 25 minutes--nor is it especially elaborate. Most of the songs rely on voice and guitar alone to make their case. And yet, how splendid they are, layered and looped in madrigals rounds and descants ('Voice in Headphones') or nakedly unadorned ('Flaming Home').

Ripely Pine is overloaded with sound, lurching with sudden dynamic shifts, swiveling from one melodic idea to another, trembling with strings, gleaming with brass, fractured into colored shards of bright feeling.

Such clear chemistry and inspired interplay will hopefully lead to future releases in the same vein. Anyone with a penchant for classic-sounding ambient electronica with a kosmische bent will find plenty to nod along to here.

It amounts to a frustrating end to a frustrating record, one where some great sounds and ideas aren’t fully worked through into wholly successful songs.

Egyptrixx avoids the brittle tastelessness of modern electro and Fool's Gold party-starting by allowing a touch of that cold, spacious futurism to creep in.

Vampire Weekend is an exemplar of contemporary establishment indie rock, sandblasted clean but striking a dirty pose nonetheless.

You hear none of that struggle here. She has labored and sweated and stressed to make a record that is completely devoid of these characteristics. It might have reared up out of a clam shell like Botticelli’s Venus.

It sounds a bit like the Weakerthans did on their debut, that is, looking one way at singer-songwriter work and another at politically charged punk and trying to gauge just where they should fall between those two poles.

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.

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

In 2018 few singers could convincingly build a career as the next great crooner and William’s gambit to do that sometimes sacrifices the effectiveness of the songs, especially on those that serve his voice over craft. But when songwriting matches the talent of his voice the songs coalesce, and the results are spectacular.

Odds Against Tomorrow simply sounds a lot like [the album] Bill Orcutt. The new album’s original tunes evoke the same sense of Americana wrung dry of phony sentiment as its predecessor’s covers. ... The stuttering is gone because Orcutt is ready to show us straight up what he thinks matters.

It's a slight little album about fascinations, and a product of them, too, which, whether you share those fascinations or find them boring, is perfectly fine.

A weird aura of nostalgia hangs over Jet Plane, the longing you might feel for a Buckeroo Banzai future that never quite happened. And yet, most of these tracks are very urgent, very present, very right now.

Despite a few good moments, this isn’t a record where you feel rewarded by sitting down and sitting through the whole thing. Let’s hope that next time they exercise a little more discipline in putting together a finished record.

The result is an album that can stand easily with Slowdive’s other heights and that manages the extremely tricky feat of sounding like the band that fans love and missed while at the same time marking a new step forward. The

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.

Whatever a given listener’s quibbles or preferences around the two versions of the album, there’s another thing that points to a core truth about Terror Twilight: both versions still ultimately sound pretty damn good.

I Know I’m Funny Haha is not so very different from this last album from Webster, but it feels more assured and confident, and the subject matter is more upbeat.

Black Times succeeds on its own terms and not as an artifact.

Honeys, like Hope for Men, has some dead spots in the middle, but this time it doesn’t lessen the impact of the whole record, or the underlying fear of sinking back into office park anonymity.

An album of pristine folk-pop backed by whispery wall-of-sound back-up vocals, crisp guitar figures, and some of the best pop songwriting this side of the Shins.

at you have here is the exact opposite of a period piece: it's new but it feels old, it's here but it's nowhere, it's now but it's forever. Whatever, wherever, and whenever it is, though, it's lovely.

Nothing terribly exciting here, but as it comes from a guy who made his bones as one of the most genuinely fucked-up-sounding people in music, it may be a welcome relief to hear him act like an adult.

There are innovative and fresh beats and voices, and the record rarely falters.

The patient deployment of new resources is one of Rotations’ greatest strengths.

The result is a collection that transports you to place and time you’d probably never get to otherwise, rocks your body, feeds your curiosity and makes you feel at home. Well done, I’d say.

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.

Raspberry Moon is continuing evidence that instead of Swervedriver, we should be thinking of Semisonic. And as any good karaoke night out can confirm decades on from a release, there’s no shame in embracing the earworm. Right now, few rock bands are better equipped to offer one.

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

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

It’s an eminently listenable album, but there’s no need for unchecked evangelism. Just enjoy the damn thing.

If metal evokes power, and punk evokes weakness, this record is a dive down a well of powerlessness, sinking deeper than they’ve gone before. It goes down swinging blades.

For those, like me, who previously dismissed Aloe Blacc, Good Things warrants our reconsideration. Blacc's changed his tune. We probably should, too

As pleasant as Gunn is a guitarist, he’s an equally low-key vocalist, his flat delivery and barbiturate baritone unobtrusive and lackadaisical — just kind of there, often, buried slightly beneath Trucinski’s and well below his own gently spiraling guitar in the mix. It’s kind of a shame, actually, as Gunn’s Impressionist vignettes are quite interesting on close listen, showcasing Gunn’s marked maturity as a songwriter.

Callahan can give us no answers. But some of us find the struggle, the ride, much more interesting when the answers are lacking.

Xe is a refreshing glimpse of a band captured in its most primordial state, and for all their clinical musical intellectualism, the album also offers snippets of Zs’ odd sense of humour, not to mention each player’s unique talents and virtuosity.

Sylva might be Snarky Puppy’s most conceptually complicated album, but it’s easily penetrable as a listen. The album could make more demands and it isn’t as stunning in its individual moments as previous recordings, but those ideas would resist League’s compositional intent.

Piteous Gate is an absorbing listen front to back.

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.

The tunes tend to unfold at mid-tempo and with the logic of a short story as, once more, Jones composes and performs, with seeming effortlessness, a set of memorable melodies that reward repeated listening.

A Trip to Bolatanga is on strong ground. The combination of nyabinghi hand drumming, booming kick drum, funky guitar, house-ready piano accents and bobbing clarinet on “Accra Electronica” sounding simultaneously of this time and timeless, and there’s no denying the beats’ substantial bang, which both demands and rewards volume deals.

The melting pot metaphor has fallen out of favor lately, but it’s alive and well in this breezy, engaging mixture of smooth sounds. The music wafts and flutters in a warm air current, landing lightly on syncopated rhythms and percussive bursts of keyboard, but it dances, never settling for long.

More often than not, Slave Ambient offers a sound that's equally familiar and new, simultaneously meeting expectations and evading them. It's an album whose immediate accessibility cloaks a deeper, subtler series of rewards.

What makes the band so great isn’t just their utterly compelling sound; it’s that on this, their finest record, they’re not so much going for “fucking epic” as for emotional heaviness.

As a literally small record, the EP can seem like a diversion. But it is an immensely enjoyable one.

Not Even Happiness is a work of intimate loveliness, surely one of the most flat-out beautiful songwriter albums of a year that is just getting going.

I Love People is over-the-top in a completely different way to Western Cum. It’s less freewheeling, and leaves an uncomfortable feeling, like a Todd Solondz movie soundtracked by Randy Newman.

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.

It’s clearly the best Young Widows record.

These songs are massive, yet also bent and personal in a way that lets you in even as they blow you back against the wall.

Adore Life is a great set of songs. Savages have created an equal-but-different follow-up to Silence Yourself. While it can’t have the surprise of their debut, Adore Life demonstrates evolution and exploration that Savages will hopefully continue to embrace in the future.

Their joint compositions are undeniably atmospheric, evoking south of the border drama on “Pray For Rain” and surging apprehension on “Something Will Come.” But they’re also as rigorously structured as any popular entry in a hymnal or hit parade. If you like for your tunes to tell you what they’re going to say, say it, and then tell you what they said, the soothing “Life And Casualty” and the white-knuckled “Hurricane Light” are equally at your service, and they’re not alone.

This isn’t so much the first AMC record in awhile as the sturdiest, most bottom-heavy Eitzel record in awhile.

At the end, Wyatt takes the For the Ghosts Within's over-riding mushiness, runs with it, and it makes it totally work.

The music never changes, but with each new listen The Kid seems to deepen and expand as new details emerge, marking in reality a kind of growth on our part as listeners.

At their best, the New Pornographers effortlessly dress down emotional defenses and bestow, for at least a moment, simple joy.

The Stage Names is raucous, rambunctious and occasionally quite funny.

The object of his lamentations is conveniently out of reach, hence the constant cat-and-mouse game between enunciation and melisma. When Blake sees fit to loop a phrase or attempt a chorus, the undertaking breaks down under its own weight.

“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?

Past Life Martyred Saints sounds as if it's trying to save rock, but without any winks or nods.

There’s no question that Where You Go I Go Too is one of the year’s most coherent, craftily executed albums.

Alligator's biggest missteps are the moments when the music joins in the apprehension, rendering the coyness in Berninger's lyrics unreadable.

Keys isn’t a flashy album. Its songs tend towards the quiet end of things, and they make their impact in an unassuming way that never shakes you by the shoulder. It’s just two people playing two instruments, alike but different, listening to the way they align and contrast with one another and taking the tune to another place.

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.

It's powerful, it's supremely accessible, and, in a kinder, more playful world, it could be NPR button music--or at least a life-changing stocking-stuffer for scores of Panda Bear fans.

It's one of the best live albums released by a modern "mainstream" act that I can think of. No exaggeration.

La Forêt isn't nearly as overtly poppy as Fabulous Muscles was, but it's just as well written.

Suffice to say Impossible Spaces itself is a journey, and one of the more all-encompassing ones I've had the pleasure of taking this year.

Mostly as enjoyable as it is edifying from start to finish, the program repeatedly underscores that without artistry of expression, associative anger and the demonizing of one's enemy, however righteous, rarely lead to lasting empowerment for a person or a people.

The whole thing takes only thirty-one minutes--but it’s a transportive half hour. The album cover’s crayon mountainscape suggests just the kind of escape the duo’s music provides: easy and innocent, a land somehow fuller of plenty and wonder than the reality it momentarily suspends.

Like Endless Boogie, Birds of Maya knows how to wring every sweaty drop out of a heavy groove. The basic foundation, thunderous drums, a gut-checking oscillation of bass notes, picks up various other elements as it goes on — mumbled spoken word, eruptive guitar solos, flailing drum fills. It is always the same but always changing, and you can get lost in it.

Still Life seems mostly solid, presenting evidence of talent, taste and potential, but not quite pushing things over the top.

Couple Tracks seizes on these dichotomies and captures Fucked Up in all of its multi-faceted glory.

While Wakin On A Pretty Daze may not be an anthemic leap forward, it is in many ways even stronger for its existence as example of a craft being so finely honed.

On the whole, this is the best album yet from Ty Segall, as joy-ride thrilling as the debut, as clearly delivered as Lemons, but with stronger, more varied writing.

Chapman may be tying off a loose end by making this record, but he doesn’t sound like he thinks he’s at the end of the road yet.

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.

I'm more than happy to take this album as it is, blemishes and all.

All four members of Black Midi are extremely young, wildly competent, knowledgeable about all sorts of music (classical, jazz, free improv, etc.) and willing to go way out on a limb. Schlagenheim is a really exciting start, which could lead in any number of directions.

Interestingly, the presence of the source music doesn't detract from the spooky, remote quality that characterizes The Caretaker.

Like the best songs on Front Row Seat to Earth, “Seven Words” would be completely at home in the soft rock seventies, downer sensitivities playing out against expert studio arrangements. Despite these contrasts, listening to her latest work next to her underground phase the melodic ideas and the stately power of her singing is consistent.

Unfortunately, The Elephant Man’s Bones is a step back for both the artist and the producer. ... A generic Alchemist production makes for a generic Marciano verse. In short, there is no chemistry between The Alchemist and Marciano. ... The Elephant Man’s Bones sparks hope in the middle with “Quantum Leap” and “Bubble Bath” but after that it regresses again into a second rate lounge-y Marciano.

Moor Mother and SUMAC are all adept improvisers, uncannily able to gather impulses and sounds that verge on chaos into aesthetic forms that feel saturated with meaning and intent.

It’s a fitting overview of everything that’s always worked for Sonic Youth in the past.

This is a heavily flawed album, at times frustratingly so. It can feel painfully sentimental: full of sweeping string arrangements, dramatic instrumental surges, and celestial soundscapes.

It’s Blitz isn’t FTT, and may not be remembered as highly (particularly by those who never give it a chance), but it is a logical progression.

It is a very direct, very intimate half-hour of songs.

There are so many things here that shouldn’t mix, but the brute force of Cherry’s personality smooths them.

Sound is bright and immediate, even on tracks extracted from less than optimal vinyl sources.

Listening to Souvenir, I can’t help but think of Stuck, the Chicago post-punk-into-no-wave outfits that sometimes refers to itself as “evil Omni.” .... Comparing the two, you might begin to wonder if there’s anything solid behind Omni’s detached cleverness, it’s super clean, super manicured attack. Maybe regular Omni could benefit from a touch of evil.

There is Love in You, his first solo full-length in half a decade, is rooted in beat music, but perambulates all of those former infatuations in an expected but enjoyable way.