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

Displaying intensity, versatility and musicality in equal measure, Irreversible Entanglements is an indomitable force. Future Present Past is their best work yet.

Whether this record is a swan song or the beginning of a very late-career renaissance remains to be seen, but, like the band’s previous releases, Sanctions is perfect for the moment and likely to prove another timeless treasure for those perceptive few.

This is a big album with quiet moments, and if you like your alt-country dialed up and unapologetic, go find Brown Horse at your local Total Dive.

Volume three caps off the series on a high note with its refined, layered sound, featuring contributions from a range of musicians including Allison de Groot, Erin Rae, Annie Williams, Oisin Leech, and Rich Ruth.

Gordon’s vocals remain strong, but Play Me is a jittery record. The brevity of the songs captures the nervous mood, flitting from one worry to another, staying sharply focused for a couple minutes before veering into the next disaster.

Perhaps more than any other record the band has issued in the last 20 years, Sunn O))) best recalls the austere glories of The Grimmrobe Demos (1999).

Pine is deft with a bow. She’s also a skilled arranger, layering violin, viola, cello, and bass elements with a photographer’s eye; the depth of field expands and contracts as each piece unfurls.

The density and rushing tempo are balanced by more laidback, acoustic numbers such as “Snow” and “Who We Used To Be.” And there’s also a couple of unexpected cover versions — Neil Young’s “Red Sun” and Lovers’ “How the Story Ends” — that integrate seamlessly into the tracklist.

Heavy stuff, but the music is often not. Cuts like “Erghad Afewo” keen and wail ecstatically, the eerie vocals taking you to other, more triumphant places, the insistent rhythms urging your feet and butt to move. A Tinariwen concert is always a celebration, and since we won’t have access to that, the transporting joys of Hoggar will have to do for now.

The songs start bare and personal, and if they swell with strings or rollick with muted celebration (as in whirling “In Your Ocean”) they never really escape the quiet, contemplative category. Not that this is an entirely bad thing. There are still effortlessly shapely melodies, fitted like skin with perceptive turns of phrase. There are still very lovely arrangements, a little airy this time around, but neither slack nor stuffed nor overly attention hungry. And the musicianship is, as always, excellent.

It conveys the confusion and frustration of living in a 21st-century reality that conspires against the reassuring normalities of everyday life. Hen Ogledd meets this challenge with humor, defiance, and playfulness, resulting in music that’s colorful, chaotic, and occasionally deeply moving.

Here’s an album that gets at the balance between pure, raucous, positive punk energy and the elegiac textures of lush, baroque pop.

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

Shaking Hand demonstrate a cleverness with the reins, balancing looseness and restraint. This is typically found in long-tenured outfits; it’s hard to believe this is their first record.

As Keepnews said in the original liner notes, “There can be room for vast newness within the unhampered framework of this ‘old’ music.” [Ahmed] have continued to mine that sense of discovery with ongoing zeal.

This is the prettiest album Dorji has made so far, though it’s more than that, profound and spirit moving and just what we need at the moment.

In veering so hard and so often, they manage to be that rare thing: interesting. Save for later the development of brand identity and a recognizable aesthetic.

They sound very private, though not uninviting, and, compared to the first album at least, less fanciful and more grounded in everyday events and relationships. Yet while these songs are spare and not at all weighted down, they integrate diverse sounds into the mix. .... The harmonies are what’s lovely here, and a little different from before.

Another essential album in Dry Cleaning’s discography, and the first great album of this young year.

What’s key here is that Winged Wheel is travelling together, as a unit. The eclecticism in mood proves that they’re enjoying the voyage.

At some point, you may, in fact, find yourself hankering for unaccompanied Mods, and to that end, let me direct you to “Megaton” with its loopy, pinging beat, its hammering bass pulse, its artful disdain.

I’m not sure anyone was looking for a doo-wop revival led by a father and three sons, but here it is, and it’s a kick.

The songs on England Screaming sound very much in line with Wreckless Eric’s recent output, brash and tuneful, the words barked out in the artist’s clanging, faintly tremulous tenor, the choruses exploding in swaggering hooks. And they are very good songs, not a real dud in the bunch, and a couple that rank with the artist’s very best.

The vocals on cuts like “The House That Doesn’t Exist” may be soft and high, but the melody slashes forward with determination and force. Even the Nico-esque whisper psyche of “Flowers Turn Into Gold” exudes intention. Daydream soft sonics swirl in clouds around Prochet’s mic, but she, herself, is wide awake and in control.

This is a lovely album, its only drawback being its brief running time of barely 30 minutes.

The songs are good, full of fetching turns of melody and surrealist images, but they sound especially excellent bashed out with clanging chords and pounding rhythms and intuitive rock-and-roll energy.

Slater has found a way of collating a raft of familiar guitar tropes and injecting them with fresh energy. He seems to have ideas simply pouring out of him, plus enough of a quality-control filter to stack up an album’s worth of songs that fizz with inspiration.

A number of the record’s best songs sizzle and churn on Miracle Year. The atmospherics of the live setting suit the combination of incisive melody and the chaotic fuzz-and-feedback issuing from Bob Mold’s guitar; check out “If I Told You,” “Powerline” and especially New Day Rising’s title track. .... 1985: The Miracle Year includes another four LP sides of live Hüsker Dü, from various gigs in ’85, and you can hear some serious hard psych: “Chartered Trips” from a show in Switzerland, “Eiffel Tower High” from Salt Lake City, “Sunshine Superman” from Hoboken.

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.

It’s definitely a more expansive palette, and not entirely to my taste, but I’ll defend any artist who takes a chance like this.

Even at their most spacious, these songs are taut and well-crafted pieces of music. Previous Modern Nature outings showed that the band can be expressive and daring; with The Heat Warps, they’ve proved that realism can be just as intriguing.

Daylight Daylight flows easily, likeably, languidly — but at times rather forgettably.

A lot about One Hundredfold reflects its unsettling time and place, with its gleaming technological surfaces, its machine-like precision and its invocation of rot and threat and corruption. If we ever get through this period, we may not want to hear it again, but for now, it’s a mirror to what’s around us.

Touch is a surprisingly coherent album, demonstrating the band’s strengths of agile melodic sensibility, nuanced performances, and immersive production.

Despite the length—and maybe because of it—this one drew me in and kept me there. It’s warm and casual and unstudied, which is not to say that it’s not technically proficient. It’s a campfire where everyone sings and plays preternaturally well, and it’s easy to linger there right through to sunrise.

The album has a gleeful, headlong, nearly slapstick propulsion. .... There are some tranquil, romantic interludes, like the Julee Cruise-ish “Plastered” and the dream-pop, 4AD drift of “The Lady Vanishes,” and that’s all fine, but what this band does best is unpredictability, where you never know who will take the mic next, or where a song will take its latest sharp turn. This time, Bar Italia goes into some satisfyingly dark and noisy places, and cheers to that.

The Besnard Lakes Are the Ghost Nation is another solid addition to a consistently strong discography. It doesn’t quite hit the heights of my personal favorite, Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO, but it certainly comes close.

These are gnarly, inward-focused songs, but if you listen carefully, you can hear how a different sort of delivery—big voice, big drums, slashing guitars—could turn them into a female-centric version of emo-rock. Even if you appreciate the way the music works here, you might still wonder what that larger scale version would sound like.

But whoever’s on board, the sound remains largely cohesive, the agile slither of bass, the slap and clatter of found percussion and the lilt of Latin melody, sung sweetly but with menace. It’s a potent brew, still challenging, but coalescing around songs.

None of Molina’s songs gets an extreme makeover here, and, indeed, one or two wild cards might make the whole collection more interesting. However, it’s telling that so many young, vibrant acts honor the material enough to deliver it straight.

Agriculture comes closer earlier on the record, when “Micah (5:15 am)” commences its final run through the song’s compelling set of tremolo chords and then the massive riff of “The Weight” crashes down. It’s the best part of a good record, excepting perhaps the middle portion of “The Weight,” when the band’s playing reaches an acutely feverish pitch.

Real Warmth, her seventh album and sixth for No Quarter, is an authentically emotive rejoinder to the all too prevalent practice of pretend empathy.

Only “Travel Fox” and “RocMarcable” in the second half come close to the usual Marci in his macking mode. But even they won’t warrant revisiting this EP in a couple of years.

Le Bon’s production approach has shifted her musical universe far from the brittle, guitar-driven sounds of earlier, post-punk indebted records like Crab Day (2016) towards a distinctive sound that seems to reach backwards and forwards simultaneously. This feeling of being held in suspension characterizes many of Michelangelo Dying’s most affecting moments.

Inland See is the kind of record that offers multiple layers of riches: the rich sound of the analog synthesizers, the mellifluous wind instruments, the subtle use of evolving rhythmic elements. It’s an addictive listen that rivals Totality for its elegance and depth.

At just five tracks, Orcutt Shelley Miller is lean but still intense. It’s a record that burns hot and fast and benefits from multiple listens.

He never makes an overt argument that these things belong together, or are parts of a whole (even a whole as nebulous and encompassing as the human experience), or should be taken as equally important, or that all the good and bad therein are equally a vital part of life. He simply does it, and for another 43 minutes the world feels like it makes a little more sense.

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.

The Beths are bigger, better and more complicated than they’ve ever been. This is the record to beat from now on.

For an album with such a grandiose title, Big Thief’s Double Infinity is bafflingly mediocre — especially since it arrives on the back of a string of good-to-great albums.

It’s such a blessed relief that I Wonder When They’re Going to Destroy Your Face is not just extremely good, but that it is so in the way that Prolapse has always been great. Steelyard and Derrick are in classic form.

The Welsh guitarist hammers at her instrument, unleashing a percussive rain of notes that fray and change as they linger. She plays fast and hard and with assurance, whether in the blue-grassy “Cattywomp” or the mystic drone of “Jack Parsons Blues.” And then, just for the beauty of it, she dips into languid lyricism for “Dreams of Rhiannon’s Birds,” letting the notes drip like warm honey, catching the light as they go.

At 16 songs over 74 minutes, Interior Live Oak is surprisingly low on filler for an artist who seems to take mischievous glee in tripping up listeners.

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.

DJ Haram is all jaded Brooklyn sophistication and all wide-eyed exotic transcendance, all at the same time, and it’s wonderful.

“Is it making you feel something?” the band asks, in the song of the same name, and yes, yes, yes, all kinds of things. That’s what’s so great about it.

With Trampled by Turtles is indeed closer in the sense that these are verse/chorus/verse songs largely performed by acoustic instruments. Anyone familiar with the sometimes-bluegrass, wide-reaching folk band Trampled by Turtles might guess, though, it still doesn’t sound much like Low. And the record is better for that.

There are no singers here or elsewhere, but Gunn has nonetheless found a distinctive voice.

Even after listening to this album on repeat for the past month or so, it still feels like there’s plenty of corners to explore and riches to uncover.

Here’s an album to keep you strong as the lights go out everywhere.

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.

One of outsider DIY’s best beloved primitives is backed up by a very capable band, for a curious mix of goofy, giddy but locked in grooves. .... The highlight here is languid, lyrical “Lemonade Sunset,” a still clambering, still clanging, still ranting ditty that has somehow been soothed into romance.

There’s not a lot of sand or struggle in these tracks. The vocals never crack. The orchestra never misses a note. .... Only the late album cut “Rust and Steel” has much of a growl in it, and, no coincidence, it’s the track that hits hardest and stays longest. .... It reminds you that even the slickest quiet storm soul needs some fire in it. How about some more of that next time?

More droning tracks like the shuddering, radiant “Silos” or the enveloping “Ash Clouds” feel like you’re in the midst of something potentially perilous. Elsewhere a ghostly horn-like element over the patient cadence of “Spark” or traces of piano dancing above the diffuse background of “Candling” provide the faint relief of a way through the murky surroundings.

Halo on the Inside may be yet another temporary expedition or truly be a metamorphosis of Circuit des Yeux’s aesthetic. Either way, Fohr’s songwriting is as strong as ever and her singing voice is singular. Recommended.

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

Responses to Tyler’s previous release, Stratosphere (Merge, 2023), were mixed (more accurately, pretty much everyone liked it but me), but Time Indefinite is so deeply engaging and flat-out beautiful that pretty much anyone with even a mildly adventurous taste in music will be playing it all summer.

What’s exciting about her music, and about this album in particular, is how she slips loose from those guidelines and finds a sound that’s fierce and primitive but also modern.

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.

It’s another album from Tropical Fu*k Storm, a good one edging into great.

In these songs, to steal a line from the other Go-Between, “Love Goes On,” and he’s got the chops and faith to make me believe it.

With 15 short tracks stacked tightly into 37 minutes, 2 doesn’t always cohere, but it’s certainly playful, freewheeling, and occasionally inspired.

It’s austere, minimal, and starkly beautiful, but incorporates some of Hidden’s pounding rhythmic heft on “A Season in Hell” and “Wild Fields.”

This is a wonderful album keeps its tender heart up close and its ravaged noise at a remove, but both of them are beautiful.

This second Quade album is lovely and strange, fed by crystalline streams of rustic sound but not limited to them, and indeed, reaching into post-rock and symphonic art rock with its haunted melodies.

Hval is unafraid to experiment and let the chips fall where they may. The results on Iris Silver Mist are variable but always intriguing.

One of Deerhoof’s finest albums, something we should have been prepared for, even this far into the rockers’ career.

The spell is strong enough that you can’t help but follow.

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 might flash back to 1990s Primal Scream or the Madchester grooves of a couple years prior, to certain Spiritualized cuts or even, in the flurry of woodwinds, a bit of Sun Ra. It’s quite good if you can get beyond wishing it were really Clinic. It’s maybe the next best thing.

Some feature Morteza Rezâei on dohool (cylinder drum). Heydarian’s playing is so full and out front in the mix that it is difficult to distinguish the two instruments, though sometimes, as on “Nishtemân,” their interplay is heard clearly and to great effect. The longish tracks, ranging from four to 11 minutes, give Heydarian ample space to develop his ideas.

There are still songs here with all the hallmarks of a classic Sandwell cut (“Self-Initiate” thumps mercilessly with its UFO synth pulses and “Restless” could slip right in the middle of a live set), but they are the exception rather than the rule.

These songs come on strong, and if you’re not in the mood may seem to push a bit too hard. But when was too much ever a bad thing? The best way to interact with Wasteland is to let its music roll in like a tidal surge and sweep you under, coming up gasping when it’s done.

While I liked it immediately, it took a long time to settle on favorite tracks; there are no obvious bangers. Still settle in, and it’s like having coffee with an old friend, familiar but occasionally surprising, kind but full of raucous humor and very, very real.

The album’s consistent tempo and tone end up making Jellywish feel strangely longer than its concise 34-minute runtime. But, when the band cuts loose a little, such as the lead guitar breaks on “This Was A Gift” and “All the Same Light,” it’s tantalizing to imagine where Jellywish may have ventured given more of a loose rein and a sense of adventure.

Holley finds the direct line between his own, relatively recent suffering and the longer narrative of black people in America. Funky, percussion driven “We Was Kings in the Jungle, Slaves in the Field,” is one of the album’s best cuts, rumbling forward on syncopated drumming, fired by blares of brass and winds, lit by ghostly patterns of marimba.

Stirring stuff.

Ishibashi arrives at points of repose on “Nothing As” and the closing title track, leaving behind the more challenging arrangements to focus on piano and a yearning vocal melody. It’s these moments of immediacy and unassuming beauty that leave the strongest impression.

The spareness of the arrangements give these cuts an astonishing emotional directness. .... It quiets the clatter and stills the swell around one of Africa’s most beautiful voices and allows us to experience the spectral essence of this extraordinary artist straight on.

It’s confident, focused, and consistently strong enough that it feels like the right place for newcomers to start paying attention.

The songs may not fit into pre-existing boxes, but they work very well on their own terms, whether in the pounding, galloping “Crying Game” (a Laughing Clowns tune), the loose-jointed but lyrical “Ruins” (which hails from Kuepper’s 2015 solo album Lost Cities) or the off-kilter anthemry of “Demolition” (from the 2013 solo record Jean Lee and the Yellow Dog).

The band, headed by guitarist and singer/songwriter Aaron Dowdy, has never sounded better, marshaling a wall of rustic sound built of three guitars (one pedal steel), a bass, fiddle, piano and drums. These are desolate tales set in dying communities, sung in a vibrato-tinged tenor with a little bit of cry in it. Yet the mood is never wholly dark, since the arrangements are triumphant and even the direst lyrical scenarios are buoyed by connection and community.

Doing retro soul without sounding redundant remains a challenge, but the Caldwells sound fresh, mainly because they sound so energized at every moment. Even when “Don’t You Hear Me Calling” drops the tempo way down, the group maintains its passion while locking into its message.

The quality of the songwriting hasn’t diminished, but the setting has changed.

Cotton Crown is built from the same raw materials as their debut but feels more fleet-footed and robustly constructed. The band have refined all the qualities of their addictive sound, and these nine songs fly by in half an hour, nary a moment wasted.

Ultimately, the songs have a provisional quality, provocatively lovely but elusive and unfinished. If you love shoegaze or the Drop Nineteens or both, though, this is well worth checking out.

Downstate is far more varied [than 2023's Upstate] and the songs make their point and get on with it — a definite improvement.