Aware of the vastness but alive to the myriad small beauties that flit in and out of view, seemingly oblivious but alert to the potential threat of your presence. Carmen Villain captures these delicate balances in her music and invites the listener to ponder their passivity and question their gaze.

Grinderman is as refreshing, bracing and absurd as the Birthday Party were when they blew onto the scene with their Old Testament zeal.

Hopelessness has occasional flaws. Not all the songs conclude satisfyingly, and some of the lyrics are vaguely trite. But despite them, it is a missive from an artist who has never ceased to evolve and now asserts herself with gusto and unflinching purpose.

The Beths took the path of being exactly who they’ve always been, but more intensely and immediately. Given the interruptions, they waste no time in getting going.

Thankfully, the rest of Black Noise manages to maintain an elegant balance of the concrete and the ephemeral.

Protomartyr has raised the bar high enough for any bands to follow, so high that most won’t even know it’s there.

While there might be a sketchy blueprint here, Prince took R&B to unknown places both musically and by integrating a bizarre personal philosophy that tried to make sense of God, sex, life, and death, but mostly sex.

Even given all those evocations and tonal shifts, Old Star feels cohesive. That’s down to the assured musicianship and the precisely engineered sound the band has mastered.

Maybe it takes a band of Hot Chip’s experience and sonic skill to have both pain and love that are as hard-won and effecting as it is on A Bath Full of Ecstasy; expanding their palette or not, big stars or not, it’s a joy to have them back.

The result is deep, it's broadly imaginative, it's tightly focused, and it's utterly essential.

Clearly, John Darnielle has a life story that’s inspiring as more than just the tale of an unconventional indie rock hero. Now that he’s making his best music, I think we can all be glad that he’s finally telling it.

Compared to its predecessor, Wall of Eyes can’t help but come across as transitional. While there are some undeniably great moments, the overall experience feels a little low-stakes and disappointing.

The songs are more cohesive now and Walker’s focus has narrowed, honed to a sharper edge on shorter time and the steel of SunnO)))’s contributions, but some of the posts, beams and plumbing still show through its exterior. Those little gaps in the facade help Soused sound more approachable.

The performances are some of the most articulate and explosive in the band’s enviable catalogue, while also making room for moments of exquisite tenderness. ... The album in Deerhoof’s discography that Miracle-Level is closest to in feel is probably 2008’s Offend Maggie, where the band effectively balances ferocity with sweetness, dissonance with anthemic melody. At this stage in their career it feels miraculous that Deerhoof keep on releasing music that’s quite this vital and inventive.

They have earned, through the force of their creativity and sweat, access to new places and social spaces. But even as some of their songs explore what’s newly possible in those spaces, the Mods remain deeply interested in the places from which they came.

The Danish four-piece tapped Spaceman 3’s Sonic Boom for production on this uncharacteristically uplifting endeavor, and you can see the uneasy alliance of the bright colors of Peter Kember’s recent work mixing into the half melted, slushy desolation of Iceage’s aesthetic.

An enjoyable, at times provocative companion piece, this one's a satisfying musical bath.

Whatever we think of Jung’s psychoanalysis, it’s interesting to hear a hardcore record driven by such relatively hifalutin concepts. And it’s excellent to have more music from Gel, a band that continues to grow and make some of the best punk of the decade thus far.

Front to back, it’s classic Jack Rose, and while the themes and tones may still be the same, his playing is more assured than ever, summoning a power and immediacy heretofore unseen in his previous work.

Clouds and Tornadoes ricochets back and forth between these three levels: the familiar, the unfamiliar but recognizable, and the unfamiliar and unrecognizable, and like Maddin and Katchor, it’s this tripartite feeling that gives the music its uniqueness while still feeling like an unearthed artifact.

The hooks are strong, and the harmonies sweetly hypnotic, but in between the choruses, you can still catch a firehose blast of pure guitar that will knock you back flat if you’re not braced properly.

At just five tracks, Orcutt Shelley Miller is lean but still intense. It’s a record that burns hot and fast and benefits from multiple listens.

Two Ribbons is neither the sound of Hollingworth and Watson paralyzed by these varying levels of grief, anger, loneliness and guilt nor them pretending like everything was or is okay. It’s almost incidental that this is also their best album and one of the best synth pop records of the year. ... Two Ribbons is the kind of great record that you kind of wish the artists never had to make.

It may be an unexpectedly traditional and conservative album, but it’s also an unexpectedly beautiful one.

Dizzying and beautiful at once, it is unlike anything else from 2009.

V for five, V for victory and V for very much what you want from the Budos Band.

Admonitions is a weighty work, long and heavy and inscrutable, but full of contradictions. It’s an impressive studio document of a band that has always seemed to be largely a live enterprise.

When the energy is present, 23 is a strong, pleasant album that connects a number of dots in a way that belongs almost exclusively to Blonde Redhead.