The songs, hard and soft, fast and slow, seem better than ever. Lanegan may sound like he’s done everything there is to do, but he’s clearly not done pushing into new territories and getting better.

The merging of the two artists’ sounds feels entirely natural.

Devout isn’t perfect, some tracks are superfluous, but as a defiance of white stereotypes and genre clichés, it’s a remarkable work.

Just Say No… is quite probably the group’s heaviest and most abrasive salvo to date.

The result is his most fully realized album to date, and a reminder after those lower-profile years that Lekman’s voice is a singular and valuable one.

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.

Taken individually, the album’s 10 vignettes suffer slightly from a lack of individual cohesion, their structures incorporating mostly several short, seemingly miscellaneous scraps. Yet over the course of several listens, Toxic City Music does provide some sort of overall flow, its slippery patterns serving as auditory snapshots of dank irradiated zones and heat realm communities quarantined in an airless isolation.

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.

If the album’s second half falls off a bit due to the programming of consecutive slow burners, the orchestral layering we expect from the quartet is still there.

Bardo Pond isn’t so much about evolutionary change as the recurrent invocation of altered states via sound.

Despite the band’s articulate playing, Song of the Rose has shortcomings--regularly, Arbouretum is content to indulge in an all too familiar canon--incognizant of any current trends, their musical DNA arrested in amber.

Despite a 100% turnover in accompanists and recording locations from his William Tyler-produced debut, he doesn’t sound terribly different here. His big, distinctive voice can hold you via sheer volume and timbre even if you don’t listen to a word he says, and his robustly picked electric guitar is a band by itself.

With his piano, classical flourishes and superbly layered production a la E.L.O., it’s out of sync but, when it works, wonderfully so. Whether Lytle’s vocals work for you or not will probably be the main deciding factor as to whether the band itself works for you. Oftentimes he smooths out the edges, but his singing can come across as whiny.

It’s a richly rewarding album that offers a valuable snapshot of an evolving artist.

The simplistic, drone like beats of Borders numb the mind while freeing the body, so that each track is danceable and sedating. Furthermore, the brooding, deep tone of the beats, paired with an added static charge, are sonically rich and beautiful and draw the ear in.

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.

Sweeping, quietly incredible FLOTUS.

It returns to the sly humor, the hypnotic barking aggression, the occasional whiffs of wistful tune-ish-ness slipped in between robotic beats of Divide and Exit and maybe does it one better.

Rather than just a haphazard collection, the eight cathartic pieces that make up Infinite Worlds work as a genuinely affecting singular statement--its idiosyncrasies stitched together by a strong lyrical narrative, improbably forming a cohesive whole.

Higher-end production values and a handful of famous rock guests have little impact upon their fundamental sound, which is a swirl of unfurling guitar lines, massed voices, and clip-clopping percussion. Elwan is not a soundtrack for defeat, but perseverance.

On earlier albums, Egyptrixx proved the possibilities, but Pure, Beyond Reproach doesn’t live up to its predecessors.

Farrar, with his ever-changing band, has been doing this decades, but it seems like by looking back further, he’s found a way to energize himself going forward.

It’s not a bad album, not by a long stretch, but it feels like Miller & company are treading water, revisiting things that worked before.

With Intoxicated Women we don’t get starlets and a known bad boy tussling in the spotlight. We get Harvey and his cast of players dusting off old scripts of prior perversions, delivering them to a world that fancies itself jaded, but is just as confused as ever.

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.

Memories Are Now is a composed but not utterly controlled place, and within that tension, Hoop’s music and message, together, find their highest vibrancy.

Most times, Moon Duo seems to distill whole rock songs into a single measure, refracted into a million repetitions as through a funhouse mirror.“Creepin’” vamps a blues rock riff into oblivion, transforming heat and friction and diesel dust into something otherworldly. Only “White Rose” is given the room to stretch its limbs.

Their latest is just as bright, bold, and bludgeoning as their past work but adds complexity and depth to their sound.

Where on earlier albums, you could sense her thinking about what to do with the sounds she could make, now she seems more fully in control of her set of instruments. Process has slipped into the background, as she gains fluency in an invented language.

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.

Like The Disintegration Loops, A Shadow in Time is not sentimental--it just is. Basinski’s music exists to make us feel, but won’t take the easy route in doing so.

With Hey Mr. Ferryman, Eitzel again distills a brutal, nonsensical world into beauty. It’s a feat worth observing.

If False Readings On proves anything, it’s that Matthew Cooper has again shown just how good he is at making music that’s too engrossing to be just ambient, too pretty to be just noise, too eventful to be just drone (as worthy as those all are as forms) and too individual to be the work of anyone else.

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.

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.

If you flipped over Car Seat Headrest or just harbor a fondness for melodic hiss and fuzz, you’ll like this.

He sings in a voice that makes everything sound like an indecent proposal (and honestly, some of it is). A younger, less whispery Leonard Cohen with a slightly wider range might be the best point of reference.

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

The music’s references doesn’t sound particularly new, but Batoh sounds newly energized and fully in command of his new band.

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.

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.

The result is a fascinating, successful hybrid.

Though the music lulls and comforts, you get the sense that these Lightman sisters harbor a prickly thought or two.

The closer “My Will” is a hymn that induces chills, the choral heights a total wave that subsumes the tom tom trot. Those rhythms make this add up to more than folk + rock. But the ancient rhymes transcend equations.

It’s a majestic, often breathtaking collection of some of the most important electronic music of its time, where Voigt managed the seemingly impossible task of bringing the forest to the disco, or vice versa.

The personal songs, about Choi’s dissatisfactory early education and immigrant family, have a whiff of mythic American meta-story, while the historical ones are deeply felt and eccentric.

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.

Richard Youngs has given us an album that just about anyone can pick up a guitar to play along to, but that doesn’t mean the experience of listening to The Rest is Scenery is an easy one. Fans of his, of course, wouldn’t have it any other way.

Pretty much everything else in Meluch’s body of work can fit somewhere between this LP and Sonnet, but surprisingly these two disparate poles are unified as the best work of his career.

Mandel, of course, steals the show: it’s an eight-track statement for him to make, and he has plenty to say.

It arguably represents some of the sharpest, strongest songwriting of Hersh’s post-Throwing Muses solo career and perhaps some of her best work, period.

It lacks the thrill of seeing Nace stalk the stage, balancing Gordon’s cool command with understated menace, let alone the body English each needs to exercise to procure the sounds that they get out of their guitars. It also lacks the contrasting spectacle of the experimental films that the duo often projects upon the rear wall of the hall. What you get instead is a slightly murky recording that filters their outsize rain of blows and ends up conveying solid representation rather than out-of-body transcendence.

Preserved and proffered in sound, the Parks, both physical and cerebral become a source of solace and wonderment.

The record called E, then, is not exactly what you’d expect from any of them, a volatile concoction of musical ideas and impulses that amplifies their distinctive gifts without sanding off any of the jutting edges.

These tracks are surely less orthodox than starting from the masters (properly name-checked in the liner notes), but even the experiments that don’t quite pay off are worthy listens. And anyone will find more than enough here to make this worth their while.

It's brutal, direct and reflective while struggling for a way both out of and within the dark.

The roughness, the edgy vocals, the cacophonous guitars won’t be for everyone, but this set is a welcome window back through over 20 years of avant-rock.

The abrasiveness that seems to have jumped out of Serpent Music for many seems to me to have a higher purpose of providing a counterpoint to Yves Tumor’s overarching thoughts on love, loss and meaning. For all its quirks, this is a really beautiful album.

Barwick continues to refine and expand her particularly gorgeous and idiosyncratic sound.

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.

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.

N-Space was at best ignorable, but Departed Glories makes a mark. Play it quietly and it shades the atmosphere; play it loudly and you can get lost in its sculpted tones and distilled emotions.

Instead of burning before an audience, here you have them working with other musicians and outboard effects to accomplish a vertical array of sounds that reward deep listening as much as full-body engagement.

“13.6” is where the album takes a noticeable turn and Supersilent finally finds its way.

Overall, Battle of Ages is a genuinely impressive release. More than your standard bro doom, it’s got reach, smarts and heart.

It’s about making art in a capitalistic society, where the artist must cannibalize every part of herself and offer it to a sometimes unwilling and unreceptive audience. It’s all a quest for immortality and staying power among icy cold synths, quiet samples and screaming. Sometimes, Jenny Hval is the vampire, and sometimes she’s the one bleeding.

That contradiction between the wistful and the prickly was one of the really fascinating elements of Green Lanes, and it’s gone now, but weirdly Dusk is none the less for lacking it. In fact, this third outing outdoes the second in an unambiguously soft indie rock embrace.

The songs, then, have a warmth and immediacy, even when they turn to otherworldly topics.

It’s as if the drug and crime infested landscapes of Sicaro were Jóhansson’s underworld, but, unlike Orpheus, he did not look back on his return, absorbing and assimilating his discoveries into his increasingly unified compositional aesthetic.

Any way you look at it, though, it commands and keeps your attention, and that’s something to appreciate in any age.

On Sunergy, Ciani and Smith have created worthwhile, intelligent work, guiding each other, delving into free composition to capture their environment and their influences.

Trouble is a grand survey of deconstructed rock which achieves its greatest highs via the winding routes it travels. Not all those who wander are lost, indeed.

This album sounds vast and intimate at the same time, like keenly recorded sketches.

Hoffman used to be in Ex-Cult. They have the same driving, droning, chanting, intoning attack, and though it’s pitched way up high in a womanly register, it concedes nothing else at all to conventional femininity. Great stuff.

Here is a pretty, pleasant record; and maybe that would be enough if Teenage Fanclub had never done more, wedding angst and bliss in a way that few other bands ever did. ... Teenage Fanclub seems to have swallowed the Serenity Prayer whole, accepting a lot and changing little, and it’s hard to say whether that’s wisdom or stasis.

Bullish and forceful, The Disco’s of Imhotep is also a work of considerable intricacy and mystery. Jamal Moss aims high and rarely overreaches, making the album not only ambitious, but a welcome blast of modern house that would live up any club night.

Even though this is Blackburn and Hartley’s first record as Higher Authorities, they’ve had this psychedelic, dubby feel nailed down for years now. Making it more prominent is just a nice touch.

If Craig can manage to maintain his unique delicacy of sound, while pushing his melodic capabilities, he could achieve something special. Yet, if he allows pop elements to take over, instead of remaining as hints and references, he risks becoming simply another producer penning groovy, soulless hits for electro-pop scenesters. In order to remain distinctive, Craig will need to keep the balance he’s struck here firmly in mind.

This crew has figured out how to make it work as a quartet.

The whole album feels like catharsis, as slow dirge-y openings give way to extended instrumental crescendo, as Zedek views from a position of calm, weathered experience, distance, the roil and mess and hurt of human existence.

At nearly two hours, these two discs are an embarrassment of riches for the 65daysofstatic devotee and most likely sufficient for anyone casually interested in the band behind No Man’s Sky.

The orchestra’s nearly perfect. Cline’s selections are non-traditional but trustworthy and intelligent. The album keeps a persistent mood even as it reflects on the mood. But 80 minutes of it requires patient listening, and there aren’t enough moments to really grab here.

The energy, from the opening whistles and stomps that kick off “Driving School” to the final crazed, surf-guitar-on-two-wheels of the “Batman” cover, is anything but studio; it is immediate, volatile and contagious.

Future albums will reveal whether this is as much of an offshoot as Mogwai’s other soundtracks, but this understated, solid effort reveals a lot more imagination and prowess than most bands that have been around over 20 years.

Rhyton is never quite that simple. Here it becomes a vehicle for pretty much all of Shuford’s obsessions, sometimes two or three on top of each other at once, and honestly, it works pretty well.

Tooth, with its sharp title, minimalist drum attacks and hauntological synth textures, represents the antithesis of such plurality, reducing dance to its most antagonistic and unflinchingly bare-boned aesthetic and coming up with a new language from familiar idioms, sometimes from other genres.

When there are fewer tracks, Anderson contrasts foreground sharpness with distant background. “House of the Setting Sun” and “Chimes” present fatigued leads pushed along by hazy, distant clouds of tone. What the new climate hasn’t changed is Anderson’s persistent restlessness, wandering off the road to find unusual details. Into the Light heads into the desert, knowing it’s hardly a deserted place.

If the consistently lovely Piano is radical at all, it’s in a subtle and contextual way, serving partly as a space for Taylor to investigate several of his own previously released compositions and a few covers with a quiet kind of focus, and partly as a sustained exercise in mood.

While Pythagorean Dream serves the practical end of giving Chatham something that he can tour from town to town without having to school a new set of musicians for each performance, it’s not a compromise or even a reduction. It’s just one more chance to let him show what’s inside a sound.

The Triad has no standouts and doesn’t even stand out in the Pantha du Prince catalog. What it does do well is provide a consistent listening experience, blending all of Hendrik Weber’s strongest proclivities into a 10-song, 63-minute album best thought of as a mix.

It may have taken a while, but the rewards of this belated collaboration are exquisite.

There are times when Lenker approaches Marissa Nadler’s eerie otherworldliness, though not for long. ... Couple that with a really good, dense, aggressive musical attack, led by Meek, but supported by bassist Max Oleartchik and drummer James Krivchenia, and you’ve got something special, especially in the more rock-oriented tunes like “Masterpiece,” “Humans” and, especially “Paul.”

While albums and concerts get to end, the knowledge that real lives carry on scarred by real-life tragedies like the one related make The Glowing Man a fraught record to hear.

It’s all attitude, baby, and on their second album Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic, it’s out in spades, for everyone who remembers when rock music rocked, politics and punk could live together without cancelling one another out (or making one more about the other), and bands could dig into a specific influence without being too obvious about it.

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.

Unlike your average grime productions, these tracks are rarely propulsive or tailored for the dancefloor, but rather shift and shake convulsively under the weight of stark, metronomic beats, swathes of sub-bass and icy synth swirls. Listen carefully, and there is a certain melodicism nestled in the heart of this album, but its tone is despairing and subdued, glimmers of light in a dark and uncaring world.

Nadler can’t be pinned down, and all of Strangers is an indication of that new challenge she both creates and meets.

Allen writes like a painter, renewing familiar material--in this case, poorly behaved men and resourceful hookers with Spanish names--via quirks of perspective and peculiar taste in details.