The result is a fascinating, successful hybrid.

There's nothing self-consciously modern or calculated about You Are Not Alone, no visible strain from trying to mold Staples' style into something she's not. It's just her, as she is at her best, and Tweedy deserves credit for bringing that out.

Over its 23 songs, Iron & Wine’s sound changes, from scratchy sparseness to well-appointed sparseness and through to the jittery clamor that marked The Shepherd’s Dog, but the underlying world doesn’t.

Refuge clocks in at over an hour, an hour in which, as stated earlier, not a whole lot of stuff happens. And yet maybe it takes that long to clear out the buzz and chatter, to slow down, to focus on one sound at a time and to find a stillness. It’s too long, it’s too slow, it’s too eventless until it’s not, and then you’re there.

The band does what it does best, which is couch surreal oddity in unstoppable catchiness.

The ratio is fixed, and any intimations of possible ineptitude is eradicated in a batch of songs that transition from anthem to chaos with ease.

I like this relatively blunt, unadorned Tracey Thorn – not that she was ever forced or florid in her expression, but Love and its Opposite offers her most complete disarmament yet.

Thanks to Sherwood’s production, all nine songs on Rainford are engaging on the macro level; you won’t have to work hard to enjoy them, and you’ll remember how they go later, and the micro; they are, in the classic dub tradition, rich with bizarre surprises.

The Bug can still shock, and with so many highlights here, it’s hard to complain.

Throughout Megafaun, the balance between expectation and surprise is maintained neatly.

The recondite spirit remains, but the sense of restlessness has disappeared, and with it much of the impertinent energy that propelled "Gone Ain’t Gone." What we gain in its place, though, is more rewarding: a closer look at the mechanics of Fite’s itchy-legs sophistry, the nature of his controlled eccentricity.

V may be more intimate and introverted than Ancestral Star or Lost in the Glare, but it is no less cinematic. It’s a remarkable return to the fore for Porras and Caminiti.

Ex Models are not afraid of the gaps created by their minimal approach; they use the silence to contrast the unholy racket they can make.

“The Song Before the Song Comes Out” seems to be Keenan sketching a possibility with her voice and whatever device she had at hand. This kind of intimacy is evident on a number of the collection’s tracks.

The album has a gleeful, headlong, nearly slapstick propulsion. .... There are some tranquil, romantic interludes, like the Julee Cruise-ish “Plastered” and the dream-pop, 4AD drift of “The Lady Vanishes,” and that’s all fine, but what this band does best is unpredictability, where you never know who will take the mic next, or where a song will take its latest sharp turn. This time, Bar Italia goes into some satisfyingly dark and noisy places, and cheers to that.

Amid the brightness and snark of another consistently entertaining Fujiya & Miyagi record, it’s a reminder that even our modern Lucifers have many dimensions to them.

The New Pornographers’’ songs have always been swift, busy little things for the most part, that’s a large part of their joy, and even if some of the more overt ebullience has been toned down here, the richly arpeggioed repetitions and steady melodic sense on display here means that, “bubblegum Krautrock” or no, this is still heady, catchy stuff.

It's not a return to form so much as a complete reinvention, this is an album that highlights a particularly buoyant Animal Collective, one that’s managed to expand their sound in surprising ways while still retaining the same basic creative impulses that made them such a joy to watch develop over the past decade

A pure, dream-like quality hovers around these tunes. The subject matter is, perhaps, a touch more mature than it was. Friendships gone fallow, loved ones missing, roads not taken, the bittersweet recognition that life is what it is now and will likely continue that way—the songs consider midlife with clarity and a little sadness but not much turmoil.

It is in the spaces between words and drums, and in the general structures of the songs... that El-P most clearly exhibits growth. And it is these points on the album that make I’ll Sleep an intriguing release.

Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline is a return to the same blissful twilight as before, virtually unpaused.

Their charisma lets them make a few risky moves (such as the African percussion on the extended closer "Church") and yield massive returns.

Continue as a Guest sounds exactly like a New Pornographers record. It’s energetic, insanely catchy and occasionally thrilling pop music. The compositions are dense and clever and complex, but not too much for their own good.

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.

Each piece is seemingly quite simple in terms of overall construction, with sustained atmospheric tones juxtaposed with spare melodies traced out in the foreground. However, pop on your best headphones, focus on the interplay between the layers of these richly detailed mixes, and you’ll find plenty of instrumental texture that’ll raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

Ultimately, this album manages to sound like all and none of these, making Barn Owl a band that's becoming harder to pin down and easier to appreciate.

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

Jurado’s records are always slow burners, but this minimalist one takes an especially long time to catch fire. It sounds like less than it is for half a dozen spins and then suddenly rears up, fully-formed and out of hiding. It may not be as mesmerizing as the Richard Swift triad, but The Monster That Hated Pennsylvania is its own odd, quiet, disconcerting triumph.