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.

Turns out, the news is that Roberts has made the most unabashedly gorgeous record of his career.

Andrews’ band is first rate, particularly organist Daniel Walker, whose weedy, wavering hum imbues these songs with a mournful depth of field. ... What’s new, here, however, is how damned strong she is, how fierce a belter, how indomitable a chronicler of the middle-class struggle.

Even as the album’s often joyful, always human stories unfold and crackle with inspiration, intoxication or love, the haunting sense of irreparable change lingers.

Where earlier tracks tended, endearingly, to drift and wander, these new ones move not faster but with more purpose, as if they have somewhere to get to.

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.

The pulsing, nodding, whisper-y grooves are a kind of accomplishment, too. Subdued, sure, enveloping and lucidly becalmed, you can float on them like warm salt water, no effort required at all.

Yet as disjointed as Nap Eyes’ free-associations can be, they capture a vivid part of life, the drifting area where you’ve acquired adult freedoms but adult focus still dangles out of reach.

Joachim Nordwall, Daniel Fagge Fagerström and Henrik Rylander are enough of a quorum and enough in sync with one another to make a defining closing statement.

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.

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

The record is energetic and often rollicking. Paternoster’s singing and intense guitar antics are center stage, but her longtime bandmates King Mike (bass) and Jarrett Dougherty (drums) are essential to the band’s potent combination of groove and snarl.

The proceedings would be a lot less palatable if they didn’t often achieve a forceful, unhinged immediacy; amid the heavy themes and brash posturing, there’s still room for the band to elbow in some loud, rousing real life.

Sunwatchers II is an enjoyable listen, and its energy and good intentions are admirable; it’s clear that Sunwatchers take the spiritual and political implications of musical ecstasy seriously.

A great deal of well-written, rigorously observed detail.

Freedom’s Goblin is remarkably coherent. Ty Segall may never have to make another album, so definitively does this one capture his art and possibilities, but you know he will.

Tizita, like Lala Belu as a whole, feels like both a victory lap and the beginning of something new. It will be exciting to see what, at 71 years young, Mergia does next.

She hasn’t lost anything, just slipped her message into an unusually sleek, attractive covering where we might not have been looking for it.

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.

The result is a melding of energies that is both fragilely beautiful and extraordinarily resilient.

In Messes, I’m hearing plenty of scrappy, sardonic, guitar-slashing indie rock--“Spotted Gold” stands out--but also other things. Chura’s voice gains clarity and sophistication on the slower songs.

Drones and feedback accumulate, intensify, and the whole thing threatens to collapse or combust. It does neither. ... Menuck’s difficult record is clearly a post-Trump artwork, a soundtrack for outrage fatigue. Its odd power raises questions.

There is definitely a hint of entropy, an intimation that even the most intricately constructed scenarios can and will fall apart under pressure, that wasn’t there before. And that, paradoxically, makes these tracks all the more beautiful. The noise and clicks and hum impend, but haven’t yet overwhelmed; there is order and serenity here for now.

Volume 8 explores some interesting byways of the Bardo Pond sound.

There’s nothing wrong with the playing here--it’s all good and some excellent--but these guys are still looking for their killer song.

The band sounds more at home playing these than they do on the Invisible Hands’ two albums, and the empathetic accompaniment of guitarist Cherif El Masri and organist Adham Zidan contributes immeasurably to this project’s success. Despite being recorded in Cairo and Seattle between 2014 and 2017, they sound more like they were done on the set of a spaghetti western or live in Nashville the day after Bob Dylan recorded Blonde On Blonde.

Full Circle Nightmare gets its kicks constantly. It has more heft than, both narratively and sonically, Craft’s debut, Dolls of Highland. And, thoroughly steeped in a recognizable tradition of backcountry rollick as he is, Craft delivers a decidedly modern approach to a sound first popularized decades ago.

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.

The whole thing is so fascinatingly diverse and upending that even the most open minded listeners may find themselves rebelling.

The songwriting and arrangements are uniformly strong, seemingly effortless and clever.

All of the transitions are perfectly timed, and the whole is a narrative through which minute but thrilling discoveries become regular events as each listen exposes them. This may not be the game changing statement The Ship was almost two years ago, but it demonstrates a fruitful inter-generational relationship in the making.

It’s an odd concoction of fun and confrontation, at once rigorously disciplined and existentially silly. The Official Body is a hard one, toned and taut and not fucking around, except when it is.

Flat Worms doesn’t go anywhere strange or new. You can lose your way in the record’s middle section, where songs become easily exchangeable, one for another. That said, the first three and last two tracks on the record are noisy fun.

Autobahn makes a very recognizable kind of dark, dramatic post-punk-into-new-wave music, and the easy thing would be to dismiss them as a mid-1980s knock-off. But The Moral Crossing is a very enjoyable record from a band that is already pushing the contours of its sound to find its own center.

The late Steve Lacy arguably attained the deepest degree of intimacy and prolificacy with the pianist’s songbook, but others like German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach have made substantial strides as well. Smith’s set fits confidently in their company in its balance of original and interpretive material.

Arguing Frisell’s stature as a national treasure is nearly effortless with albums like this one.

Eighty minutes after Bajas Fresh started, it eases back into silence: a long album to be sure, but only exactly as long as it needs to be--no more, no less.

Maybe Xiu Xiu are sometimes ridiculous, but human beings are ridiculous creatures; that’s why these songs feel so real.

A potent mix of performance art, avant-garde tactics and imagined folk practices, O’Dwyer’s music feels adventurous yet also personal, as if she is examining not her own self but her body and its (temporary) presence in space.

He’s a better photographer than he is a musician, but Eggleston’s passion and restless, searching creativity shine through here. And as with his finest images, these deceptively simple pieces can conjure a range of emotions and narratives for more complex and rich than what an initial impression might hold.

Jones remains emotive yet controlled, her artistry enhancing the warmth of her delivery, taking a sound from the past and making it still new and still vibrant. This one is a time machine of sorts, but it looks back to push forward, fulfilling the persistent vision of Soul of a Woman and Sharon Jones.

This is cold, lonely stuff, in other words, high on harsh and gloomy textures, low on solacing gestures.

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.

A series of alternate takes, compilation tracks and previously unreleased songs that hail, aesthetically, from the Burn Your Fire and before era. Which is to say, they are pared back, emotionally lacerating and carried by Olsen’s eerie country soprano, which wobbles and flutters in a high lonesome style somewhere between Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison.

Out of Range is serene and difficult, trippy and literate, loosely countrified and footnote-ably dense and referential, a zone-out record with a library card. Not many albums simultaneously slow down your pulse rate and rev up your brain, but this one does.

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.

Lotta Sea Lice avoids the potential flippancy of a side-project, using well considered song selection and quality lyricism to drive a singular but, we hope, not a single collaboration.

Hallelujah Anyhow is the group’s third. And it’s a neatly balanced work: intimate in certain moments and larger in scale at others. What makes this album work, ultimately, and what makes much of Hiss Golden Messenger’s music work on a larger scale, is the use of implicit contradictions that run through it.

Her performance reinforces the thrust towards freedom that shows up in the other songs. She isn’t just playing with the women and men in the band; she’s rising above them, flying high and alone in the blue.

Visuals is probably the most ‘simple’ Mew has been since Frengers (albeit without that album’s jet engine roar), but if it never quite reaches the twisty heights of +--it remains endearing nonetheless.

The words, as always, tap into the subconscious, making different kinds of sense depending on when you hear them, though that meaning may be more a matter of you than the words themselves.

Her narrative sees all, experiences all, but keeps a remove in the dry, mechanical beats, the tamped down drama of synthetic accompaniment, the vocal lines that only once and a while slip past a murmur into wilder swoops and yelps. This is a cerebral, abstracted album about the physical, one that deals in potentialities and implied trajectories, rather than the immediacy of pulse and sweat and organ functions.

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.

Elements jostle together with the pitch and roll of the walk home after last call, the songs themselves are beautifully put together, with striking images that fit the melody exactly, shine for instant and then are tossed away.

Tense and uncertain, The Weather Station will keep you tuning in.

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.”

If the joy of the album is tracking Ranaldo through his worldly interests, his hippie mode, his indie-rocking, then the struggle is never feeling at home because the record never quite finds its sweet spot.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor still has a place in this flattened landscape despite its familiarity, its flaws, its limitations. Luciferian Towers is testament to the group’s staying power, an unexpected but welcome declaration of defiance.

The remarkable thing about Kelley Stoltz up to now has been how seamlessly he absorbs his influences, finds their essences and out of that irreducable core makes songs that are entirely fresh and new.

The second half of the album mixes up longer, quieter intervals of unreality (“The Healer,” “Walking Again” “I Can Still See”) with more bangers (“Swampland” “Red Eyes”), and packs less of a wallop than the onset. Yet there is no question that 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo is more like Ubu’s earliest material than anything Thomas has put out in years

Very few other bands are working at the level of aggression, precision, intensity and intelligence that Protomartyr musters. Relatives in Descent is yet another record from this outfit that you can’t afford to miss.

The album does lose focus somewhere around the halfway mark, unfortunately, the playful titles (“Cockblocker Blues,” “This is Mister Bigg. How you doing Mister Bigg”) not reflected in barely-formed tracks that disappear into the haze of their own making.

Music for the Age of Miracles is rather beautifully arranged by MacLean and long-time drummer Mark Keen, scored by Chris Taylor with the strings and brass conducted by Anthony Harmer.

There are songs that seamlessly slip onto your mental shelf for Ted Leo and the Pharmacists--the music-hall-nodding “Can’t Go Back,” moody, politically-aware “William Weld in the 21st Century,” Lizzy-raising “Run to the City,” nostalgic, Billy-Bragg-ish “Lonsdale Avenue” (which first surfaced via The Both, Leo’s project with Aimee Mann)--but there are also some very interesting diversions.

Even the most contemplative cuts move with purpose and vigor and carefully plotted complexity. Long-time listeners might well miss the fizzing, popping, overload of good feelings that Eyes and A Certain Feeling brought on, but quieter, darker tunes have a value, too.

They’re almost what you expect, but not exactly, and that disconnect takes you into a strange and lovely little world.

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.

Its tracks are elliptical and abstract even as they stretch towards forming actual grooves. But in that respect it’s close to being the most rewarding for those who can stomach this strange, out-of-sync universe.

Dreaming in the Non-Dream is different. To the best that mostly instrumental music can articulate non-musical experience, it sonically renders the business of hunkering down and figuring out who has your back.

For all its formal and conceptual experimentation, there is a visceral, emotionally unsettling core at the heart of Lack 惊蛰.

Beast Epic is a good album. In some senses, it’s satisfying. It just doesn’t get to the concreteness, to the creation that makes it something more.

Tempting as it is to try, given the linear nature of both the album’s first half and the journeys it references, Raft resists being poured into any one narrative container.

Each taken singly can easily be appreciated, as they’re all gorgeous. But Mellow Waves as a whole is ultimately difficult to recall. Cornelius has certainly achieved the waves he was after, but the mellow winds up needing something more.

Despite there being a wealth of moods and stylistic flourishes on Distractions, it nevertheless coalesces into a forceful and homogenous whole.

It’s beautiful and playful and spiritual and full of soul, like their earlier work was. If you miss the aughts-era AC’s handcrafted, bitter-sweet-sour jamborees at all, you’ll want to check Eucalyptus out.

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

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.

These 40 minutes for maybe the most well-rounded Los Campesinos! record yet.

The Underside of Power is even more powerful than Algiers’ debut, starker, more violent and yet leavened with an uplifting surge of gospel.

On this LP, Orcutt spells out what he does, and exercises sufficient restraint while doing so that he’ll reach people put off by the treble overload of his live performances or the ultra-raw presentation of records like Gerty or A New Way to Pay Old Debts.

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

World Eater is simultaneously his brightest and darkest album yet, full of walls of noise that could seem forbiddingly remote if not for the way Power consistently brings things back to the human experience.

It’s all a challenge, and it doesn’t always work in Morby’s vision. ... Morby might be digging through a city’s musical landscape, but he’s reaching for something that persists, and the people to persist with him.

Jones and Taylor were only recent regulars in Monk’s orbit, but both align well with his designs and the drummer’s hard-driving sticks goose the music repeatedly. The leader plays with his usual marriage of advanced angularity and idiosyncratic energy, balancing the occasional ensemble uncertainties with a string of strong solo detours to which the band gladly defers. ... Nearly any Monk is Monk of note, but “new” Monk of this nature deserves the encomia it’s sure to engender.

On seminal albums like Monster Movie and Tago Mago the songs flow and breathe in a very different way than the shortened pieces here. Those unfamiliar with Can would be wise to start with the albums, then come to this collection and enjoy the peculiar window it offers, which is full of fun surprises and brief snippets of Can’s genius. Fans, though, needn’t think about it before snapping up this necessary release.

House of Land makes for a strange old-timey listen. It doesn’t stretch as far from its foundation as some of its referents might suggest, yet it continually pushes at something slightly alien. ... That intelligent play between various traditions makes for a listen at least as captivating as it is new-fangled.

Back in the mid-1970s Faust asserted both ownership and ironic distance with the song “Krautrock;” here, they show that they can still wax motorik if the situation requires it.

Backed by a chorus of backing singers clearly having the time of their lives and giving her further wings, Sangaré is poet and storyteller, moral guide and denouncer of injustice all wrapped up in one singular, beautiful voice.

Without being especially political, the album is resolutely female in the strongest, most self-asserting way.

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

It’s dark and brooding, fiercely sparse at times and blindingly dense at others. Footwork is no longer an appropriate descriptor for this music. With Black Origami, Jlin has transcended her roots to build a language all of her own. And simply put, it’s brilliant.

Play What They Want is his densest, most elaborately arranged Man Forever album yet. But even so, the rhythm forms a spine, winding and punching and scatter-shooting in continuous, fascinating Rube Goldberg-machine motion, as meditative layers of vocals, keyboards, harps, brass and guitar billow fog over the intricate, interlocking works.

Even the wordless tracks on Arca are among the producer’s most powerful vignettes.

Some of the finest, yet frustratingly overlooked folk rock of the era.

Halo distinguishes itself in its startling moments of suspension and sparseness.

Not all of the songs here find their mark, but it’s a fun ride nonetheless.

The music offered here constitutes the expected fluid mixture of rhetoric and instrumentation.

They don’t shy from their strengths, but they don’t struggle to feature them either, creating an album that never feels like a flippant one-off. Big Walnuts Yonder might be doing a whole bunch of things, but it’s largely an album about making those things cohere.