Limbo could have passed as a follow-up to this year's excellent Mr. Impossible, and likely would have met with the same acclaim.

While Antiphonals can’t help but seem like a comparatively minor release next to Cantus, Descant’s 80 minutes, it shares many qualities with previous Davachi highlight, 2018’s Let Night Come On Bells End The Day: refined, reflective, and uniquely moving.

A delicate, quietly ruminative collection of songs that she herself arranged and recorded on computer. It sounds, one supposes, exactly as Bunyan intended.

Pole’s technique still relies heavily on the minimal, but Steingarten is garnished with a sonic density lacking on his first three full-lengths.

It's compelling from the start, particularly insofar as they not only avoid genre clichés but also cheap drama. Instead, they play emotionally ambiguous stuff--shifting modes and dynamics, or rather simply smashing them together until the edges are indistinct.

At 69 minutes, I Was Real is a lot to take in. Newcomers are advised to start with W/M/P/P/R/R, the concise, big band counterpart to I Was Real’s occasionally meandering chamber music. Still, I Was Real is sure to puzzle and please whether your devotion to rock and roll and its antecedents is intellectual or physical.

Some of the songs work atmospherically; other take shape as more conventional songs. Yet it all proceeds like a pastel colored daydream, faint sounds swirling into mirage-ish structures then melting away into mist. The words are so buried in the mix that you’ll need a lyric sheet to parse them; like the music, they teeter on the boundary between pastoral calm and 21st century angst. They cling to subtle melodies like a fresh coat of dew.

With the exception of the somewhat dull “Dormant Love,” I’m altogether satisfied.

There is nothing but the interlocking parts that together combine to become something new, something wholly different than merely the additive sum of their individual atoms: the “It.”

It’s clear that she’s going for something beyond mere sonic anxiety. What this record succeeds so well in doing is bringing you into a very particular feeling of emotional velocity.

[Fade's songs] blur and fade like old memories, but leave a meaningful impression.

Tourist in This Town is sharply written, revealing a mordant, humorous understanding of Crutchfield herself and the people around her. There’s a vulnerability in these tunes that lives alongside the cleverness, so that we feel her angst, even as we appreciate her cleverness.

“Everybody’s Song” features the melodic discipline, barely contained anguish and cryptic lyrical finger-wagging that marked the last few Posies records. “Just Stand Back” (“I’m gonna turn on you so fast”) is a hateful little bon-bon that could stand tall on a Sugar record. And yet, The Great Destroyer remains too rickety and pristine to be anyone’s baby but Low’s.

Frozen Orange might as well have simplicity, directness, and melody stamped like a mantra throughout the liner notes.

They walk a fine line between startlingly fresh songs and caricatured styles that don’t mix well.

While it makes no effort to conceal its intellect, it solicits an under-the-table emotional connection the Seas and Cakes of the indiesphere simply will not allow.

Lost Wisdom is not a long album--clocking in at just under 25 minutes--nor is it especially elaborate. Most of the songs rely on voice and guitar alone to make their case. And yet, how splendid they are, layered and looped in madrigals rounds and descants ('Voice in Headphones') or nakedly unadorned ('Flaming Home').

Ripely Pine is overloaded with sound, lurching with sudden dynamic shifts, swiveling from one melodic idea to another, trembling with strings, gleaming with brass, fractured into colored shards of bright feeling.

Such clear chemistry and inspired interplay will hopefully lead to future releases in the same vein. Anyone with a penchant for classic-sounding ambient electronica with a kosmische bent will find plenty to nod along to here.

It amounts to a frustrating end to a frustrating record, one where some great sounds and ideas aren’t fully worked through into wholly successful songs.

Egyptrixx avoids the brittle tastelessness of modern electro and Fool's Gold party-starting by allowing a touch of that cold, spacious futurism to creep in.

Vampire Weekend is an exemplar of contemporary establishment indie rock, sandblasted clean but striking a dirty pose nonetheless.

You hear none of that struggle here. She has labored and sweated and stressed to make a record that is completely devoid of these characteristics. It might have reared up out of a clam shell like Botticelli’s Venus.

It sounds a bit like the Weakerthans did on their debut, that is, looking one way at singer-songwriter work and another at politically charged punk and trying to gauge just where they should fall between those two poles.

Yorkston’s collaboration with the Second Hand Orchestra seems especially fruitful, giving him a jolt, shake them out of his usual tricks and proclivities and opening up new possibilities. If the stories don’t quite scan, the musical more than makes up for it, carrying you past the sense of this music into a restless, moving, non-verbal understanding of what the artists are going for.

Who knew we needed a brace of medieval Christmas carols to get through our current morass? Not me, but Brokaw and Donnelly did somehow.

In 2018 few singers could convincingly build a career as the next great crooner and William’s gambit to do that sometimes sacrifices the effectiveness of the songs, especially on those that serve his voice over craft. But when songwriting matches the talent of his voice the songs coalesce, and the results are spectacular.

Odds Against Tomorrow simply sounds a lot like [the album] Bill Orcutt. The new album’s original tunes evoke the same sense of Americana wrung dry of phony sentiment as its predecessor’s covers. ... The stuttering is gone because Orcutt is ready to show us straight up what he thinks matters.