He is comfortable enough with the sounds and effects we associate with Sonic Youth to replicate them without the intervening distance of reference, but he is also ready to push these sounds into other more conventionally tuneful byways.

Tizita, like Lala Belu as a whole, feels like both a victory lap and the beginning of something new. It will be exciting to see what, at 71 years young, Mergia does next.

A dozen listens later, I'm still not sure if there's a beautiful core here that's half-obscured by the wrapping or whether it's the wrapping itself that's beautiful. Either way, it's a remarkable finish to a very promising album.

There’s nothing bombastic about it, but it’s large in a way that folk-picking seldom is, and it fills every inch of a sonic landscape.

Eleventh Dream Day are living in the moment, and they have never sounded madder than they do on Works for Tomorrow. They also sound, on their own terms, quite superb, and not at all like they’re trying to keep the past alive.

So is Patton a charlatan or a genius? While Suspended Animation doesn’t exactly settle the question, it’s shitloads of fun trying to find out.

[The songs are] skeletal, bittersweet and exquisitely quiet--open enough to make the most of what her cohorts could offer, firm enough to have a semi-personal punch.

Its greatest strengths are more memorable: the songwriting is strong, even if the album is a little top heavy, and it’s a lot of fun to watch Aaron Funk go way out on a limb without a safety net in sight.

While I’ll miss how amusingly unpredictable TA could be, I can’t complain about their first long-player that works, front to back.

At its best, A U R O R A is an exhilarating work, propulsive and contemplative, able to allow for moments of searing volume and elegant beauty.

Lost Time is a spiritual statement, executed through but not limited by drum kits, and it works towards revelation.

If Oh Me Oh My is Banhart’s most fantastic record and Rejoicing In The Hands his most focused, Nino Rojo is the singer at his most inclusive.

With Ones and Sixes they’ve pulled together many of their disparate sides in a masterful survey of what makes them one of the great rock bands of their era.

The magic of I’ve Got Me comes in the way that brutal sentiment comes dancing in on skittery melody and how coruscating lines conform so neatly to classic song structure. Joanna Sternberg makes tales of betrayal and non-conformity sound like tunes from 1930s black and white musicals, and that’s an accomplishment.

It’s an impressive display of the sort of catchy and fun (natch) music that Newman can make, even without the substantial talents of his usual collaborators.

Lamar has once more asserted a great and formidable talent, and good kid is triumphantly and unmistakably his, but the artists that stick around longest are the ones who let us make their art our own.

Functional Arrhythmias moves briskly through these terse, but usually quite rich pieces.

1,000 Years, Tucker's solo debut, shows a remarkable amount of growth both as a songwriter and a performer from the loud guitar maelstrom that punctuated Sleater-Kinney some years back.

Rachel’s can effortlessly create beauty, but what saves the record from saccharine blandness are the arrangements that almost distrust the group’s strengths, refusing to leave beautiful passages uncomplicated by dissonance or some kind of sonic distraction.

2020 is an album that is always making and unmaking itself, dissolving its constituent parts into radiant pools of slush, then rallying them into tangible structures, then letting them collapse again. Being, becoming, nothingness, it’s all in there.

The whole thing is so fascinatingly diverse and upending that even the most open minded listeners may find themselves rebelling.

Arkhon is a distinctive and consistently winning album. It is a departure, but one that still manages to be an addition to Danilova’s catalogue that complements her other releases. Some of the best singles of 2022 reside here.

If April demonstrates Kozelek’s predilection for reaching backwards, in places it also finds him broadening his range.

Emmaar’s reassuring familiarity in the face of the forces of war and commerce is at once reassuring and a bit concerning. On the one hand, it’s great to see that the group remains incorruptible and in touch with its essence; on the other, a bit of buffing and shining aside, if you know the band’s sound, you already know this record.

They’re still nodding to early Pop synthesizer proponents (The Human League, Fad Gadget, A Broken Frame era Depeche Mode), and now mixing in a beefed-up, contemporary EDM blast with the je ne sais quoi that the group infuses into everything it touches.

They weave their instruments around each other deftly, with nobody stomping on toes. ... The anger and the grief are broken up by moments of beauty. ... These moments of respite from the darkness, where Springtime lets the sunshine part the clouds, are where they are the most powerful.

Presley works quickly--he says he went into the studio with more than 100 possible songs--and without much intermediation between idea and finished piece. This process seems to allow him to absorb many different influences (1960s psych, freak folk, children’s stories, his life), filter them through some subconscious prism, splitting them out as almost but not quite recognizable rainbow colors

It hops around from elliptical soundscapes to bright pop songs to surfy psychedelia to brashly incisive rock, just as its progenitor does, and it’s an engaging if discontinuous ride.