The music sometimes meanders as perspectives shift and but Barbieri’s juxtapositions of church and club in which transcendence through music can be both a public and intensely personal experience is never less than transporting.

Each song seems a logical move from the song that preceded it, and no track stands out particularly from the rest. As a distinctive sound, though, as a warm, pulsing vibe, they succeed.

No question that Fohr and her cohorts genuinely like and appreciate the thumpy, cheesy Eurodisco that shimmers through these songs, but they put an unusual spin on it. There’s a warmth in these plastic grooves, an experimental inquiry in these hands-in-the-air raves, a spiritual striving amid hip-jutting, butt-swaying ecstasies.

Get beyond the Phil Collins-into-Peter Gabriel style clarity, and the songs start to take hold.

Sonic Nurse is the happy medium they've been craving. The songs, despite being mostly over five minutes long, are all to the point without feeling meandering.... The balance between noise and melody is right, with each emerging and vanishing at just the right point.

With Asleep On the Floodplain, Chasny returns not just to his personal roots, but also to the roots of popular music itself.

Fussell is still a captivating figure singing by himself with a guitar; I wouldn’t want to see his front porch abandoned. However, this album’s changes in approach and material invariably work. These and the talents of his collaborators help When I’m Called to be one of Fussell’s strongest recordings to date.

Despite what appears to be a decided attempt to branch out musically, Prekop returns with a slight variation on the same theme that has seemed to follow him around since birth. Luckily, for fans of Prekop's work, progress and self-redefinition has hardly been the point.

Situated between his production for Common’s Electric Circus and Champion Sound with Madlib, the record scripts Dilla’s now triumphant escape from the majors and represents the more mercurial facet of his vision.

The real measure of Knoxville's success is that it always feels it has ended too soon.

Kowton’s clarity of vision after eight songs and 41 minutes leaves no doubt at the intent of its creator. You’d be a fool to argue with the results.

There’s something very moving about Pupul’s attempt to understand his mother by vacuuming up the sights and sounds of Hong Kong and fitting them carefully into his Western-style DJ art. It works on a human level — we can all relate to losing people that we love — but also as music. Letter to Yu is poignant and powerful.

The songwriting and production are sharper and the scope is decidedly larger, capturing the band’s conflicting urge to play the introspective balladeer and the pub-crawling mod-rocker.

On Shook, Franklin James Fisher, Lee Tesche, Ryan Mahan and Matt Tong sound refreshed, energized by collaboration and completely confident in their identity.

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.

All in all, Metalmania is a lovely little album.

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.

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.

For the people who love this band, their sound, and Hitchcock's songwriting, this album will definitely not disappoint.

Here Hayes gives every instrument space to breathe, while creating a beautiful group sound that moves with all the lithe grace of ‘70s soul sides.

The result is a sound that remains accessible, even sing-along worthy, as it wrestles with the most perplexing existential questions.

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

The title of nature morte might reference death, but this music is frightfully, joyfully and overwhelmingly alive.

Third Time to Harm is a visceral pleasure, celebrating brawn over brains and shout-along choruses (“What pretty parasites!”) over songwriting complexity.

While some may scoff at the gentler side of the Animal Collective (especially when contrasted with the fully electric assault of last year's studio release), Sung Tongs easily stands alone as a crowning achievement in their eclectic discography, one that finds the group fully in control of their musical prowess and all the better for it.

Little about the album feels predictable, neither the musical texture nor the oblique and sometimes imagistic lyrics. Gordon can be startling at times, and she does it all with a cool (a non-commercial, unreproducible cool, that is) that, as much as anything, makes No Home Record so particular to Gordon.

Oneida have never sounded more ambitious, yet they’ve kept their proggy impulses on a short leash; the flourishes serve the music, not vice versa.

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky distills everything Gira has ever done. It's a shockingly dense record, the Gira experience in 45 minutes or less. All killer, no filler, for real.