Despite the record’s minimal evolution, it’s still a joy to hear, an extension of the promise displayed on More Parts Per Million.

Third is about the potential for being, not being itself. It’s the base chemistry of the Portishead sound, a compound awaiting reaction. Which is up to the listener to produce, like the lightning that brings the Monster to life.

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.

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.

You can’t hear Signals without hearing modern London.

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.

Every sound fits, without sounding in the least bit fussed over or premeditated. It’s more like a living organism than a band, bringing all systems together to sing its song, once again.

Perpetuum Mobile is an album of skeletal songs, many of them little more than percussion, bass, and vocals. What's remarkable is the band's ability to create an effective atmosphere with so little -- and much of the credit must go to Bargeld's ever-astonishing voice.

Though Furling is a fitting title in this regard, in the sense of closing around something, of creating a feeling of being safe and loved, there’s also a sensation of unfurling, of opening out, of expansiveness, of fearless abandon. That’s a rare balance to strike, and one that proves intoxicatingly addictive.

Here on this fourth Cairo Gang album, Kelley works in full-blooded, freak-beated 1960s garage mode--and damn if the change-up doesn’t suit him.

This is wonderful stuff, both as pure entertainment and a document of a vanished era.

Easy on the ears, Film Music’s approachable offerings are compounded by the high recording quality, new transfers made from original half-inch tapes in the Tariverdiev family’s Moscow apartment.

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

Ingenuity and sincerity (two things in which Hayes excels) are priceless, and the sum of the parts is quite a masterpiece indeed.

Mostly, though, these cuts take songs that you probably already know and deliver them slightly transformed by time and personnel and the live setting. They’re old friends, a little older, a little shaggier, but still magic: “Wolves (Song of the Shepherd’s Dog),” “About a Bruise” and “Dearest Forsaken.” If you ever loved them, you should hear them like this, too.

Some vibrate with a ghostly blues — lovely, haunted “This” and the bent note mirage of “June Bug”—while others swagger fancifully like barroom tall tales (“Monkey”). Older songs, like “Abominable Snowman,” first recorded for 1995’s Parsnip Snips, and “Indian Chiefs and Hula Girls” from 1988’s Water Tower, sidle casually into the present moment, sounding well-loved and unbothered by the passage of time. They sit right next to newer songs like “Fava,” with its transfixing twang of guitar.

A tremendously satisfying and thunderous effort, and their finest work to date.

It's certainly not a perfect album, but Hello Everything represents the pinnacle of performance from electronic music's most thoroughly developed mind.

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.

Here chilly, cerebral ideas provide structure for enticing pop, and the sweetness comes with a bit of vertigo.

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

With Special Moves, Mogwai have released a "greatest hits" collection in a sense, but it's indeed more special than that. Dramatic, at turns gentle, majestic and harsh, both old and new songs blend so well that there's no feeling of weak recent material sagging amidst earlier favorites.

High Anxiety is the record that some of us have been waiting for Oozing Wound to make.

Bishop’s elaborate flights celebrate what his instrument can do, and express by example the notion that having an interesting time along the way matters more than where you’re going.

The balance of spoken word and music is well-conceived. .... Less than halfway through, the Coin Coin series is engaging and ever new.

They have always written insanely short, catchy pop songs in the modern idiom, and, for those looking for the one line post mortem, Innings doesn't just not disappoint, it delights.

The more Clark edits, the more she refines, the stronger St. Vincent becomes. At this point, it's just a matter of consistency.

Even when Ejstes and his combo stretch out, they do so in a catchy way. Sometimes they do it the old-fashioned way with a big, memorable melody. Other times it is a cool sound framed just so.

The individual tracks here are no less weighty or patient, but it feels like a fire has been lit under Morgan, moving him to make his point more sharply than any before.

Every song on his debut album is sourced from an old record or field recording, but he and producer William Tyler have gone out of their way to ensure that they don’t sound particularly antique. In fact, while they’ll rest pretty easily upon Americana-tuned ears, they don’t slot too easily into any particular scene.

These songs stick in your head in a way that 15-minute guitar jams never do, while still maintaining a bit of hoary mystery at their core.

Timbrally, this is just another Nels Cline offering with all of its variety and surprise, but musically, it's his most mature and satisfying.

Though perhaps not as unique or groundbreaking as Ugly Side of Love, Beyond Ugly is still a pretty fabulous record by a band mostly alone in a top-shelf niche.

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.

This isn’t Black Eyes, or Public Image Ltd., or even the Mi Ami you knew, and it sure as hell ain’t Bob Marley. This is just a band at their very best pointing a fresh way forward for anyone lucky enough to listen closely.

Fish at first doesn’t come across as the sort of defining, revelatory work that The Resurrection and Revenge of The Clayton Peacock and, to a lesser extent, Pachyderm were, but its pleasures are more subtle, revealing themselves in increments.

The band sound more pleasingly unified than they ever have. By the same token, the album feels less adventurous, at least in terms of stylistic diversity, but the focus on Newman's exuberantly literate power-pop affords it more impact.

Guitar solos are fiery but brief and tethered to the main melodic ideas. Everything has been brightened, amplified and streamlined for immediate appreciation.

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.

Among the remaining eight songs is some of Raposa’s strongest songwriting.

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.

The nostalgia of postmodernity, that backward glance, is apparent in every moment of Parallax Error Beheads You. While it can sometimes seem like a quagmire for the less creative, it’s transformative here.

Impeccably tasteful, Kitty Wells Dresses is no mere museum piece. It deserves to rest in an enthusiast's country collection somewhere among, say, Buck Owens Sings Harlan Howard and Del Shannon Sings Hank Williams.

A schizophrenic mess of maypole folk and motorik drive.

It's bold without making a big stink about it. It's personal without being solipsistic. It's a musical proof of Umberto Eco's thesis.

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

Plastic Eternity is the rare dead serious, head-trippy album that is also a lot of fun. Here’s to Mudhoney for standing on the precipice and laughing.

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

If it weren't all so much fun, CSS would be really objectionable. But if it wasn't so objectionable, it certainly wouldn't be this much fun.

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.

What makes the Constantines appealing, then, is not that they do something totally new but rather that they do something familiar very well.

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

Pile is a challenging band to listen to casually--but its dense, exquisitely crafted bombast pays both immediate and long-term dividends over repeated listens, as the mutated strands of their musical DNA infect and take over.

They’ve created one of the most haunting and terrifying metal albums since the legendary Khanate broke up.

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.

Breakers is a gorgeous oddity, one of the year's most arresting albums of any kind, and "252" hints at the potential for even better material ahead.

Honor Found in Decay, the band's 11th or so studio album, is an organic, humanizing refinement of said retooling, one that is very subtle yet undoubtedly informed by guitarist Steve Von Till and bassist Scott Kelly's forays into the fandom and unadorned tribute exercises regarding the late Townes Van Zandt.

The looping phrases of Reward are carefully considered and joined with the precision of mortise and tenon. Her songs have always been like small rooms, though they are no longer drafty and rustic. This is a record of tidy natural sounds. They are not immediately inviting, yet spending time in these well-mannered spaces becomes a pleasure.

It’s not jazz, not rock and certainly not Fahey-style picking, but vivid and exciting all the same.

Some of beats are a little perfunctory, but the interplay between the grieved and the griever, the subtlety of the writing and beauty of the arrangements on Fall To Pieces haunt long after the needle lifts.

While Breakup Songs is hardly less fractured than Deerhoof's other albums, it's also one of their more coherent efforts.

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.

Having the backstory on Walker’s path to sobriety isn’t necessary to appreciate Course In Fable. There’s enough allure in Walker and guitarist Bill MacKay’s elaborate latticework of glazed melodies and modal chords that call to mind McEntire’s other band The Sea and Cake, and how drummer Ryan Jewell floats through it all with loose, jazzy flourishes.

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

While Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes could have become an exercise in studio-based formalistic noodling, Adebimpe and Malone’s vocals and lyrics give the songs structure and direction.

If you have a weakness for fat synth sounds and sputtering early drum machines committed to reel-to-reel tape, this stuff could set you swooning.

The result is a record is suffused with grief without ever drowning in it (or, for the most part, addressing it directly in the lyrics even when you can parse them out).

In short, it’s a one-off that makes accidental magic, bringing disparate talents into temporary alignment without blunting their differences. If it’s a reality show, then it’s one that works and one in which no one should get voted off the island.

This isn’t the flare and fade of passing fancy, but the kind of deep and considered work that comes from a long-term union that has had time to hone in on its strengths.

Fields, the third release and first full-length album from the Swedish trio Junip, both meets and defies expectations.

As often, Dulli brings the devil into lurid though realistic scenarios of decadence. Sex, drugs, damnation and witchcraft, along with ruminations on lust, aging, memory and oblivion, live in disturbing proximity and maybe account for the daunting scale of In Spades. It’s the right amount of too much.

Mirror II finds The Goon Sax deep in the lovely, perplexing mess of life, embracing the pain and pleasure, savoring the taste of change, finding inner strength and the consolations of a collective that allows individuality to flourish and supports it with an empathy which seems so sorely lacking in our world.

Now that we've all gotten past the question of whether or not their latest album is the true reincarnation of Daydream Nation, it's nice to be able to just bask in the variegated textures and layers of sound.

This album will doubtlessly appeal to a broader audience than previous outings, but that's not to say it lacks the inventive, leftfield sensibility that has permeated Warren's other records.

A little older and a little more experienced, the sound of Claro here is slower in BPM but more graceful as a result.

Ethos is a different and a more complex matter. If you put out your own records and sing about leftist issues, does that make you punk? Maybe they’re trying to do something more essential, to find a version of rock that’s conscious of its History at that same time that it grounds us in the Now. Sheer Mag’s songs do that, again and again. And you’ll want to listen to them, again and again.

Beauty & Ruin is Bob Mould’s catchiest, most tuneful album since Copper Blue, full of ear-wormy melodies and bouncy hooks.

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.

There’s maybe a bit less of the clever wordplay here than on previous albums, but the words, like the music, are sturdy, not over-crowded, unexpected and right. There’s not a cliché on the disc, but the lines lead exactly where they need to go, slipping sideways into standards that are off center enough to matter.

Despite the up-tempo spunkiness of half the album’s songs, the prevailing tone seems to be that of a musical android--equal portions ukulele and digital distortion.

Therein lies the power of this understatedly great debut – in avoiding a simple homage to sounds that came and went a couple of decades ago, Gonzalez managed to imbue her music with a greater historical perspective.

Looks Like Rain, 'Frisco Mabel Joy and Heaven Help the Child--represent an outre high-water mark of sorts in the country singer-songwriter era.

It's as though she's taken the lesson of The Trip--that you can get over the most extreme pain--and used it to come back to her musical home.

Bootleggers will tell you that there are better versions of almost anything Neil Young puts out, and maybe they’re right, but that doesn’t matter much when this record’s playing. Because nude, even if you see some flaws, you’re not going to care because they’re dressed just right for love. You might love them even more for imperfections like the disarmingly stoned giggle at the start of “Hawaii.”

Polizze has escaped the weight of history, the whole of the Hiss persona reaching the higher plain that the guitar has occupied from day one.

The new record is less political than its predecessor, but seems to share the same, more expansive perspective.

Young Enough is a big pop influenced record that rings authentic and hits every mark both lyrically and musically--an album to dance the pain away.

The greatest appeal of this record is how little acting takes place, how little consideration has been given to "fully realizing the sound." Because when it comes time to take it or leave it, I'll take the whole thing without any regrets.

Axes works as an hour-long piece of tension, dread, and release, with little room for interpretation, demanding to be listened to as a whole.

Garden Party is full of good feeling. Put it on and you can smell cut grass and barbecue. You can hear the pop of the can on your first outdoor beer of the spring. There are bluegrass-y runs and two-stepping rambles, all blurred on a microdose that makes everything brighter and more beautiful.

The familiarity of their sound and the ordinariness of their suburban laments do not breed contempt. They know how it is, and so do we, and we’re all in it together for as long as the record lasts. The Feelies may tell small tales and play like they’re living in them, but it all rings true.

Arab Strap successfully juxtaposes songs that deal with the fallacy of human interaction, while maintaining a singular Scottish sound and mindset.

The songs’ stoner shoegaze impact can be appreciated even if you miss the line that tells you our narrator is an asteroid miner. But if you do lean into meditating on its themes, the phantasmagorical desolation that is Dissolution Wave’s intended setting makes the songs hit even harder.

The recording’s sessions were done in a few days, and the final product retains a fetching immediacy and intimacy. A fundamental lightness of affect pervades the recording, even when it delves into heavy or sad topics.

What makes the piece, and much of the album, so interesting is how the players just hold things in particular spaces of tension and release. It’s not done at the expense of those imperceptible transformations that characterize the band’s work overall; it’s more like a different, less certain but possibly more engaging way of realizing them.

This is exquisitely made, moodily complicated stuff, and if it doesn’t fit into the current landscape, that’s more our problem than theirs.

Bertucci’s work continues to develop. Of Shadow and Substance presents two facets of “drone, dissonance, and dynamics” that speak with eloquence, treading lightly but palpably on extra-musical concerns.

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.