Young Enough is a big pop influenced record that rings authentic and hits every mark both lyrically and musically--an album to dance the pain away.

There’s maybe a bit less of the clever wordplay here than on previous albums, but the words, like the music, are sturdy, not over-crowded, unexpected and right. There’s not a cliché on the disc, but the lines lead exactly where they need to go, slipping sideways into standards that are off center enough to matter.

This Mess Is a Place is considerably more grown up and pop-leaning than any of Tacocat’s previous albums, with lavishly massed vocals and bounce-y hooks, yet it retains an air of joyous subversion, sweet but spiky and smart.

Life Metal is music as event. It’s a terrific record.

What unites the songs, if anything, is a breezy insouciance that belies careful construction. You get the sense that, like Yeats’ women, this is an album that must “labor to be beautiful.” It hides the work very well behind a sunny façade, but you don’t get movie-perfect string swells and luminous vintage keyboard lines and cheerful blurts of all-hands brass without a certain amount of forethought. Consider Collins the impresario, taking what his collaborators give him and polishing it to a high gloss.

All Time Present is a guitar players album, but more than that, a songwriter’s work.

In the relentless, rampant pursuit and procurement of new musical product, it’s easy to lose sight that a return to and expansion of what’s worked previously can prove just satisfying for both artists and listeners.

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

Not only is Ilana Moctar’s best record, it’s also one of the best Saharan records to reach Western ears, and an early contender for the most exhilarating rock record of 2019.

While Sky Blue may have the most appeal for those who are already immersed in Van Zandt’s work, it’s good enough to rank among his studio albums. It distills what makes Van Zandt a compelling figure and shows him using his delivery to match the strength of his material.

A record that’s wonderfully represents Clark as the songwriter he was without turning the focus to Earle and the Dukes.

The Seduction of Kansas is, all things considered, a solid second album. It builds on the promise of Nothing Feels Natural, and while it occasionally fumbles its own goals, it’s hard to fault Priests for aiming high. One can only hope that the radical ambition and sense of purpose on display here carries them far into the future.

Czarface Meets Ghostface may not be the stone cold classic the participants are capable of but it is a very enjoyable trip through a world populated by comic book and movies heroes and villains.

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.

It’s kind of fun to hear Ex Hex experiment with their production, but it would have been more fun to hear them take some real risks with, say, an acoustic number or some synths. Truth is, despite its heft, It’s Real isn’t a huge departure from Rips. It’s more like a bulky rough draft of the record that preceded it.

These are not songs that wander aimlessly, that get lost in mandala-like intricacies that make sense only in large, sunny green spaces, late in the afternoon, preferably in Vermont. There’s a tight cohesive tunefulness to this second album from the New Jersey-based band that transcends the genre.

When the Mekons are operating at full strength, their music’s undeniable vitality is somehow in tune with the struggle and suffering they sing about. Not every song on Deserted achieves that level of intense commitment to an emotion or an idea. But most of the songs do, to menacing or to magisterial effects.

This one, the first all-Segall live recording (he split a 2015 Live at Pickathon with King Tuff), manages to increase the intensity. It documents a monster tight, no-frills session from 2018 in obliterating, over-the-top style.

Fennesz has produced a maximalist experience with apparently minimal equipment but this is not about the machines rather the human producing the sounds. Agora is another deep exploration of the boundaries of experimental guitar ambience in which to lose oneself.

New Rain Duets teems with ideas that float and drift together. It works because McCaughan and Lattimore use their shared vocabulary to tease out the beauty in the murky haze.

The lightness of PUNK isn’t toothless escapism. Rather, it’s a challenge to find sweetness, joy and individuality in a world that trends toward cynical conformity.

High Anxiety is the record that some of us have been waiting for Oozing Wound to make.

It’s hard to overstate just how much fun this record is, how playful its complex rhythms are, how brightly colored its tonal variations. Plastic can be a lot of things, but here it is an utter joy.

All in all, the album is a genial bird’s eye view of life presented in aphorism, perspectives from a man well aware of his aging and embracing it. There’s something joyful even in the moments of tension, as if their eventual dissipation is a given.

On Time Out of Time is conceptually fascinating, playing as Basinski often does, with very large abstract ideas that seem to have no obvious analog in music. Yet the concept yields a calming ambient sonic output that sounds not so different from other kinds of music that have nothing to do with black holes.

Brickbat is a worthy addition to the growing canon of bands and performers addressing the powers that be.

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.

The long view is serene, but it boils with nattering subtext. Robert Forster makes lean, minimal, elliptical songs about the struggle against time and self. He makes it look easy, but buried contradictions suggest that it’s not.