They nail the curves and changeups so well that you only notice the complexity in retrospect. While it’s happening, it seems mostly like good rock music

This is a four-way conversation rather than a competition for attention and the musicians display a depth of mutual understanding that belies the fact that they are playing together for the first time. Urselli’s production gives each instrument room to breathe and the tracks swell and recede at a relaxed pace as layers of guitar, synth and sound effects form palimpsests of sound.

The Block Brochure, ponderous though it may be, is curated carefully and put together in a way that will actually hold up over time.

On this LP, Orcutt spells out what he does, and exercises sufficient restraint while doing so that he’ll reach people put off by the treble overload of his live performances or the ultra-raw presentation of records like Gerty or A New Way to Pay Old Debts.

Mazurek is a trumpeter and Taylor a drummer, but each contributes via electronics as well. Despite that augmentation, and that the Orchestra has been more an imagined community than an album-releasing entity, Taylor and Mazurek sound lonely.

These aren't songs simply notable for their attitude or irreverence--they're a fine collection of songs, period.

Though it may be tempting to describe Radian merely as an instrumental post-rock group in the Chicago tradition – they are instrumental, and they’re signed to Thrill Jockey, after all – there aren’t any post-rock bands that are engaging with ideas from electronic and improvised music to the degree that Radian does.

[One track] is expansive enough to be its own album, indeed, perhaps its own universe. The other is just fine, and you will enjoy it if you like Garcia Peoples’ other new jack jammers like Wet Tuna, Chris Forsyth, Matt Valentine and Steve Gunn. ... One Step Behind takes a giant step forward, right off the edge and into the unknown.

Adore Life is a great set of songs. Savages have created an equal-but-different follow-up to Silence Yourself. While it can’t have the surprise of their debut, Adore Life demonstrates evolution and exploration that Savages will hopefully continue to embrace in the future.

Songs of Shame is more humble by an entire order of magnitude, but still contains that feeling of honesty, a feeling that should allow Woods to be more than just some ephemeral pleasure once the hype around the band and their Woodsist label inevitably withers away.

The Underside of Power is even more powerful than Algiers’ debut, starker, more violent and yet leavened with an uplifting surge of gospel.

The result of this multi-layered synergy, and what helps separate it from its soulless similars, is a record that is all at once satisfyingly complex, but also invitingly warm.

Yes, this is a heavy album, but luxuriously so. It’s music that stares death in the face and instead of running, hunkers down and gets comfortable.

It’s as if the drug and crime infested landscapes of Sicaro were Jóhansson’s underworld, but, unlike Orpheus, he did not look back on his return, absorbing and assimilating his discoveries into his increasingly unified compositional aesthetic.

These songs still jangle, still twitch, still pulse, but there's an undertone of serenity and philosophical acceptance that makes them resonate, too.

These two tracks ["Feels Real" and "Do It (Right)"] read a bit corny on paper, but Lambkin’s knowledge of genre, song form and structure and how to make music evolve (i.e. filters, not just slapping in new sounds when something gets boring) bundle up the awkwardness with cool to present fresh ink amidst the droves of novice DJ nostalgists.

The Block Brochure, ponderous though it may be, is curated carefully and put together in a way that will actually hold up over time.

The Metallica-aping opening riff and punching electronics-assisted kick of the title-track tell of new territory setting you up for something much larger-sounding than any of the previous three records, but that’s aided by a refined, popcentric approach.

A record that spits in the eye of assertions that they don’t make records like they used to.

Perhaps more than any other record the band has issued in the last 20 years, Sunn O))) best recalls the austere glories of The Grimmrobe Demos (1999).

It is a very direct, very intimate half-hour of songs.

It's to Ejstes credit that he's stayed his course, continuing to pull together nostalgic and post-millennial sounds instead of chasing a mass audience that he probably couldn't have kept anyway.

Martha’s music may be good for you or good for the planet or good for society, but at its heart, it is just damned good.

If metal evokes power, and punk evokes weakness, this record is a dive down a well of powerlessness, sinking deeper than they’ve gone before. It goes down swinging blades.

It's All True is exactly what mature dance pop should sound like in 2011.

Perhaps in the end it’s best to just say that The Besnard Lakes sound like themselves; they’ve certainly found a way to refine their own sound, and the jarring beauty that can be heard in A Coliseum Complex Museum is a prime example of it.

Certainly, people will inevitably point back to Mogwai's similar peak-and-valley approach, but Mono manage to make both the valleys more subtle and beautiful, and the peaks more powerful.

There's a bit of Starbucks gloss to this record, a too-easy-to-like quality that may at first put off serious listeners and music heads. That evaporates pretty quickly, though, as you recognize that its lucid simplicity, its artful artlessness is not a trick, but achievement.