On their 21st album, Three, their usual album-length evolution is divided into three 20-minute acts, much like 2006’s excellent Chemist.

Regardless of the frames built around them by producers or the press, Amadou and Mariam make great pop music, and their new album gives us more of it.

More droning tracks like the shuddering, radiant “Silos” or the enveloping “Ash Clouds” feel like you’re in the midst of something potentially perilous. Elsewhere a ghostly horn-like element over the patient cadence of “Spark” or traces of piano dancing above the diffuse background of “Candling” provide the faint relief of a way through the murky surroundings.

These 40 minutes for maybe the most well-rounded Los Campesinos! record yet.

Brian Borcherdt has made rough, beautiful songs out of broken bits of things, haunting atmospheres from the gritty transience of dust, and that's something worth doing.

This is a Red Bull of an album, a total kick in short bursts but likely a strain on your heart in larger doses.

Everything is sharp and lucid and full of impact.

The closer “My Will” is a hymn that induces chills, the choral heights a total wave that subsumes the tom tom trot. Those rhythms make this add up to more than folk + rock. But the ancient rhymes transcend equations.

It’s almost as if they didn’t need the help from guest luminaries such as Angel Olsen, Jeb Bishop, pedal steel player Allyn Love and superstar engineer Brian Paulson (who mixed the album with Miller), but perhaps it’s those additions which make How to Dance such a consistently strong and clean record of a band with a unique southern voice.

This album is louder, catchier and more memorable [than King Tuff]. It doesn’t break rules or upend conventions, but it fills its songs with more oomph and pressure than ever.

The ingredients that make up Dark Crawler are a tasty mix, and Danjah could do worse than keep cooking with this recipe.

The result is a strong collection of the sort of rock songs at which No Age excels: swiftly paced, inventively layered and riffy, simultaneously caustic and gauzy.

Barely a moment passes without her voice proudly standing front and center, leading the listener through bittersweet songs that surrender to the ebb and flow of how it feels to be a twenty-something woman in twenty-first-century America.

Magnificently noisy in some places, forebodingly quiet in others and at all times distended from full cognizance, Dream Weapon is a balanced, well executed step firmly away from Genghis Tron’s former selves. Call it their Year Zero.

The fact that Untouchable gets in and gets out in a little over a half hour adds to its classic rock ’n’ roll charms--the accomplished playing, engaging production and dizzying variety of mid-tempo reveries, adolescent rushes and inconsolable ballads boosting its overall appeal.

With Mind Bokeh Bibio recognizes that our happiest, hands-in-the-air, hedonistic moments are shadowed with memory. A bit of hiss, crackle or distortion can evoke the sadness under the celebration.

Now two albums on, she’s found a way to transcend and expand upon it and open her solitary music to include us all.

A bit of guitar jangle pushes up under her voice, a subliminal rumble of bass, but mostly, notes are allowed to ripen, carry and decay slowly, on their own terms. On a record that runs a flag of hedonism over brainy complications, here is the real thing, swooning, wordless and headily scented.

This is a fun summer record, and just as bitter and conflicted as any fun summer record could be. There is still an art to misanthropy, and Free Energy has it down to a science.

This album is very aptly titled, since it is nearly always evoking a kind of nameless, non-verbal good feeling that sometimes lofts us up and out of our tediously tick-tocking lives. Are Euphoria bubbles up and out of the mundane and time-tethered into unreal, glowing landscapes of altered experience.

For the first time in years, Godspeed is both operating at peak strength and not (as far we know) about to go on hiatus.

All Tense Now Lax at times evokes luminaries like Coil or early Current 93, but ultimately exists as its own beast, one that is never predictable, always challenging and achieves that oh-so-rare feat in rock music now: it turns the genre inside out and pulls the remains into a brave new form of noise.

They turn their wit into complex sentiments, making for an album that encompasses more than it delineates, even as the writing stays specific. Two voices don’t make for a proper community center, but they do make for something potent in a potentially bleak context.

It’s a lot less singular than its predecessor, but that makes it a more directly exhilarating experience.

Clearly steeped in the great tradition of the British folk song, yet able to combine its structure and ethos with rock rebellion from both classic psych and more recent guitar rock, Erland & The Carnival's Nightingale is a distinctive exemplar of folk revivalism for the age of indie.

One of the best things about Balf Quarry is the way it builds on the game-changing craftsmanship that Magik Markers brought to Boss.

These New Puritans are still thinking the same off-kilter, rhythmically intricate thoughts, but filtering them through a whole different music making process. Either way, it’s impressive and quite lovely. Nicely done.

There's a freedom in her voice and a joy that is apparent.