It all just flows, never exploding but never falling into a stupor, either.

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

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.

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.

The Body, the Blood, the Machine reveals a band that's a bit older, a step slower, and startlingly sardonic.

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.

Inches functions in the best way a retrospective of its kind can: the more primitive songs don't seem like missteps so much as enlightening diagrams of how the band arrived at such convincing current ones.

There probably won't be many albums in 2003 that will combine images, sounds and deepfelt emotions as well as The Violet Hour.

It does contain some beautiful songs. Its deficiencies won’t miff his indulgent cult (at least not any more than they’ve been miffed previously). But it doesn’t quite hold together.

The Mancy of Sound and its predecessor are straight-up essential listening, and gloriously exciting music. The pulse quickens each time I put this one on.

Ultimately, this album manages to sound like all and none of these, making Barn Owl a band that's becoming harder to pin down and easier to appreciate.

The ghosts in Monolake's latest creation are more subtle -- bubbling, evasive presences that unsettle the equilibrium of each track without derailing it.

It seems like a humble accomplishment, but it is richly rewarding.

Pye Corner Audio's latest [is] the marquee example of Ghost Box at their most distilled, their most essential: reaching beyond by reaching within.

For illumination on this particular sect of techno’s journey over the past few years, it’s hard to think of an album more deserving of the limelight than Incubation.

It’s as classy and unassumingly smart as you’d expect.

If you have a weakness for fat synth sounds and sputtering early drum machines committed to reel-to-reel tape, this stuff could set you swooning.

Solar Motel is Forsyth’s most traditional album in recent memory.

Every song on his debut album is sourced from an old record or field recording, but he and producer William Tyler have gone out of their way to ensure that they don’t sound particularly antique. In fact, while they’ll rest pretty easily upon Americana-tuned ears, they don’t slot too easily into any particular scene.

It’s easy to forgive Gnod such self-indulgence, however, even if it means Infinity Machines just about fails to maintain interest throughout, because this album sounds like very little out there, at least from a rock perspective.

That link underlines that Red River Dialect’s pensive, acoustic incarnation is not incompatible with the wilder, louder more forceful material before it, that indeed, it funnels the same intensity through quieter, more melancholy channels. Tender Gold and Gentle Blue is a softer album but no less true.

This record doesn’t want to be anyone’s friend, but if you’re ready to feel, it’s real.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Thematically, with three songs inspired by a graphic novel, one inspired by a tv show, one re-recorded deep cut and two covers, What Heaven Is Like is a bit scattered. Sonically, however, What Heaven Is Like is Wussy’s most cohesive, best sounding album to date.