What’s surprising about ONoffON is how different it sounds from those previous two records, and yet how well it follows their lead.

Fall Be Kind really mines the depths of the b-bin: musical theater + jam band + Putumayo. Liking it feels goofy, even though it’s pretty good.

For the most part, Birgy’s excitability lends the album an infectious charm. Ultimately, Mega Bog deserves to be appreciated alongside similarly talented proponents of the absurd, such as Aldous Harding and Cate le Bon. Dolphine is a strange and affecting listen; the sound of a free-wheeling afternoon in the sun curdling into early-evening shadows.

A whole range of influences are apparent at essentially any point in the album, yet it never feels like a cumbersome effort made of separate parts pasted together. Room from the Moon is involved and fluid, it’s the work of an artist channeling parts larger than herself.

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.

So refined at times it borders on the insipid.

At little over the half hour it is a snapshot, but any recording of this Quartet contains multitudes to explore, marvel at and enjoy.

A colorful, evocative dream-pop record.

Bird Songs is unpretentious and as good a "mainstream" jazz record as you're likely to hear these days.

The old version violently rejected oppression, the new one quietly totes up the damages. Both are valid approaches, and both are musically satisfying.

Like a great short story, Body is well worth revisiting, even after you know the plot twist, to savor details and subtleties you missed the first (or second or third) time around.

There’s a solid, heartening release to be found in Countless Branches. It’s a shame that Fay and Dead Oceans didn’t take the opportunity to tease it out.

The good news is that Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is Spoon's best record in a while - if you liked "Gimme Fiction," you'll probably like this too.

There is a sense of every note being where it should be, glowingly back-lit and carefully arranged. It’s far from the note-bending frenzy that Polizze often indulges in — and let’s not give up on more of that and soon — but it is very beautiful in its own way and captures this endless, featureless, daydreaming summer about as well as any music I’ve heard so far.

The breathy blur of Pratt’s vocals give these tracks a will of the wisp quality, as you chase after the lyrics only to find yourself becalmed and beatific amid iridescent fog.

It remains to be seen whether Nomad reveals Bombino to be an artist of limited means or one who is making the occasional misstep on the way to something great.

An ambitious, wrenching, majestic album.

Burn Your Fire is a minefield in the best possible way, studded even in its quietest moments with subterranean threat.

Skeleton Closet is like a good novel, full of implications and shadowy contradictions and complexities. It’s pop craftsmanship with a touch of vertigo, an uneasy sense that something dangerous resides underneath.

There are spoken words buried in these machine-like architectures, only the tone, not the sense of them coming through the music. It is a rather lovely space that Hopkins creates, lyrical but inhabited, precise and well-lighted and buoyant.

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

The album, produced by Chris Funk of the Decemberists, manages to be both weird and relevant, experimental and comfortable. Malkmus’s grounded surrealism makes for a series of songs that offer connection within a skewed take on life. The music, in any track’s given mode, encourages persistent resistance of the way things are without being heavy-handed. It bridges worlds wonderfully and shows Malkmus to be as vital as ever.

The results are quietly remarkable.

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.

HEY WHAT is equally thrilling for the way they now sound impressively eloquent using it. If last time was learning and pushing towards a necessary change, HEY WHAT simply is living a different way, channeling the disarray of their noises and our world into something beautiful and moving, all the stronger for any fractures, cracks and fuzz.

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

Camera Obscura’s comeback album is a thing of real beauty. Campbell writes movingly about memory and friendship. Looking at what was rather than regretting what might have been with an honesty that goes directly to the heart of things. Look to the East, Look to the West is one of the most poignant albums of the year so far.

The whole affair feels a little slighter, a little less important.