Eiko Ishibashi’s soundtrack skilfully and subtly complements the film’s themes, capturing stillness, beauty, sorrow and uncertainty in such a way that the album succeeds on its own terms as a nuanced listening experience.

In veering so hard and so often, they manage to be that rare thing: interesting. Save for later the development of brand identity and a recognizable aesthetic.

Epic pulls from more corners. The voice at the center isn't arresting, exactly, but in the end that's unimportant. You'll want to stay.

So yes, the combination of energies works as well as it ever did, a remarkable 30 years after it started. The pandemic, far from crushing the joy out, coaxes an unexpected giddiness from two lifers playing as hard as they can for the love of it.

Without hearing it in alongside the images that accompany it, it’s hard to pass judgment on Cave and Ellis’s music.

Hinds and Co. have dispensed with the neanderthal growls and screams of past records, which might have robbed Crack the Skye of its surprising grace and pushed it closer to the nu-metal end of the spectrum.

New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges is an album of somber beauty, its flashes of color existing amidst a broad spectrum of grays.

This third full-length, written around the birth of his first son, takes that bouncy castle exuberance to even greater lengths, channeling the euphoria of sleep-short early parenthood into woozy, optimistic grooves.

I do know that there’s a lot to love about Cutouts, and it’s certainly a more substantive release than its title might suggest — that these are the cutting room–floor tracks from the Wall of Eyes sessions. Far from it: overall, this is a more colorful and dynamic record.

Throughout this often incoherent hodgepodge of tunes, Baroness has mostly abandoned the contrast that made its previous records work so well.

Ultimately, it's hard to embrace Sepalcure. The record has received some critical acclaim, and as far as stateside bass music goes, Sepalcure deserve the attention. But something is missing...risk.

Landwerk No. 3 is, like its predecessors, a work of craggy beauty that does homage to a world—that of pre-war European Jews—destroyed in the same wave of technology and social change that made possible the preservation of its traces in the archival recordings and, in turn, rendered the recordings obsolete.

The lyrics on Red Devil Dawn are some of his most poetic to date.

Blacklisted rings with lost voices and strange journeys, and does a better job of balancing hope, innocence, and darkness than just about anything I’ve heard in a while.

The album is set in a place that’s warm and brightly illuminated. But it’s there, just outside the circle of light, just out of sight, and it makes Oldham’s place even more lovely for the respite it brings.

You end up thinking, well, of course, a band this ruthlessly observant and unflinching is going to be mad a lot of the time, but how great that they bring the same intensity to love.

Hit Parade is such a pleasure, well made and artfully played, deeply felt but never mushy.

Luminiferous burns hard, but it’s searching for an attitude adjustment that could make the flames grow higher.

Another record by the Bevis Frond, and another long, acid-fried blues? That’s a gift.

The Body and Uniform seem to have found kindred spirits in one another’s daring and ferocious dispositions. The result is an excellent record, innovative and exciting, antically entertaining and deadly serious. Play it often and very, very loud.

Overall, the album has an over technical, over clean vibe. All three musicians play very well, and they’ve obviously gotten more intuitive and engaged with one another. But it’s too much skill and too little viscera for my taste. Despite a continuous onslaught of face melting solos, Anthropocosmic Nest feels a little cold.

You may have all the Pentangle you need, and all the Fairport Convention you could ever want to listen to. The Making of You won’t replace any of these favorites, but it can definitely carve a space out on the shelf next to them. Make some room. This stuff is good.

Not quite folk songs or noise experiments or vocal soundscapes or really anything you can pin down by category, they are nonetheless very beautiful and as quietly striking as any music you’ll hear this year.

Holley finds the direct line between his own, relatively recent suffering and the longer narrative of black people in America. Funky, percussion driven “We Was Kings in the Jungle, Slaves in the Field,” is one of the album’s best cuts, rumbling forward on syncopated drumming, fired by blares of brass and winds, lit by ghostly patterns of marimba.

It’s another landmark release for this deceptively versatile and forward-thinking artist, and perhaps, just perhaps, his most effective album to date.

They sound very private, though not uninviting, and, compared to the first album at least, less fanciful and more grounded in everyday events and relationships. Yet while these songs are spare and not at all weighted down, they integrate diverse sounds into the mix. .... The harmonies are what’s lovely here, and a little different from before.

Polymer is a summation of everything that puts Plaid rightfully on the same level of their innovative peers like Autechre, Boards of Canada and Two Lone Swordsmen. Creating worlds at once hermetic and immersive, Plaid’s music ticks along at a human level and envelops you in a protective, provocative cocoon.

This album is loud, obnoxious, personal, and a hell of a lot of fun.