Their attempt to weld the cerebral and physical is not always smooth but part of the attraction is to sit in on a work in progress, to hear the musicians grasping at handholds and swinging for the next ledge, fearless in the vulnerability of thought and action.

The tales they tell are, while gruesome, well told. And they’ve never sounded better; not only has the time off done no damage to their brash, south-of-the-Ohio harmonies, but the band has taken on the challenge of sounding bigger than ever before and come out triumphant.

[The National] turned a corner with 2005’s Alligator, fusing the moments of mania and quietude from their initial releases into a grandiose adult angst that resulted in at least two more great albums. With Beyondless, Iceage seems to have crossed a similar threshold.

Grinderman 2's variety and complexity never feels like a reach, and doesn't keep the album from cohering beautifully.

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.

This is a more varied album than The Moon and Antarctica (which did seem to have only one speed), and with the return of original member Dan Gallucci, Brock appears to have revived the heavy lead guitar playing of their early work.

That global element isn’t as prominent on his fourth proper CD, Uproot, but it peaks out in samples and vocal tracks. Indeed, not much on Uproot achieves the outward intensity of a "club banger," but perhaps that’s a reflection of the current state of bass and break culture.

Compared to the negation-for-negation's-sake attitude of their debut, "Beat Pyramid," Hidden sounds serious, holistic, exacting and expensive.

Eyes on the Lines is summer’s quintessential pleasure, the unmapped excursion through sunlit spaces, the unhurried but never static interval for reflection, the road trip that goes everywhere and ends up exactly where it started. It’s an album to get lost in, every time you listen to it.

House of Land makes for a strange old-timey listen. It doesn’t stretch as far from its foundation as some of its referents might suggest, yet it continually pushes at something slightly alien. ... That intelligent play between various traditions makes for a listen at least as captivating as it is new-fangled.

Welshpool Frillies digs right back into the basics. It slaps in the most elemental way, on clanging power chords and thumping rhythms and Pollard’s bright absurdities cranked to top volume.

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

Playing any of these three records on home speakers while choring through the day, their subtle modulations will melt away, their wispy chimeras passing unnoticed. An immersion through headphones, or at pane-rattling volumes, provides the magnification that these cataclysmic environments call for.

Overall, though, the mood on Fear Fun is consistent in its constant fluctuations; it's eerie when it needs to be and just familiar enough to lure in the listener.

The atmosphere is lovely—it refracts the light like the last traces of fog in sunlight—but there are songs here underneath, good ones, and that makes all the difference.

All I did was press fast-forward, track after track. When that expectation of emotional articulation wasn't met, it brought up that feeling of outrage, as if somehow Superchunk let me down.

The most heartening thing to be said about Music for Shut-Ins is that it reflects the opposite ethos, a go-for-broke glut of great songs in or around house music’s orbit.

While there are no lyrical revelations to be found, the non-specific words suit the “What Has Happened” may be the perfect gateway into Petunia’s intoxicating sound world, but it’s far from the only magic trick the White brothers pull off.

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.

Throughout Megafaun, the balance between expectation and surprise is maintained neatly.

In the end, Wiltzie and O'Halloran's collaboration stands as an impressive album on its own merits and one of the strongest efforts in the world of Stars of the Lid offshoots.

The whole album is vastly enjoyable, but it finishes in an especially strong way in a sequence that starts with exuberant, pop-buzzing “Happy Unhappy,” continues into the gorgeous, lushly harmonized, anthemic “River Run Lvl 1” and ends in that “Whatever” version gushed over two paragraphs above.

When Shining go technical, they do so with a flourish, but often seem too eager to return to the simpler crowd-pleasing verses and choruses that make up the meat of the album.

There are messages in Wild Flag's music, but there are also challenges to the listener, and to the rest of rock music in general: This band built its own sound out of stock rock 'n' roll parts to make one of the best albums of this year.

Swim sets the more developed tunecraft that Snaith has practiced on recent records to his first set of dance grooves in half a dozen years. When it works, it speaks more accessibly than anything else he's done, and also attests to his growing ability to snag your attention without throwing all of the kitchen sink's contents at you.

An album that blooms slowly over time and repeated listening.

It is perhaps Oldham’s best work yet, and somewhat ironically, his most accessible as well.

The in-the-moment experience of Fernow’s music is all physical; the aftershock is almost all intellectual, the specifics of the apparent transformation provided entirely by the listener, who is left standing not so much accused as self-implicated.