Hippo Lite is a genuine collaboration. Aside from a few glimmers, Cate and Tim’s own distinct sounds are less detectable. They’ve ended up with a batch of songs that are physical in an elementally curious way.

Despite the confrontational title, Broken Politics caresses like a lost Sade album. Cherry has done a most unexpected thing: soundtracked the Trump era in quiet storm soul.

Like Masana Temples as a whole, “Dripping Sun” is fun but uneven, too ambitious stylistically and not quite ambitious enough sonically.

Like grief and its ghostly aftermath, Konoyo is enveloping, disorienting, even voluptuous, resistant to narrative and rich in sensation, and is one of 2018’s most vital records.

She embodies strength and resilience, mustering loudness when necessary and fluttering a little with vibrato and emotion, but never giving in to it. The quieter songs as equally powerful.

Escovedo and Don Antonio play with that search through country, rock, cool jazz, and more, reflecting chaotic but exciting sensory experiences. The Crossing, with its big scope and questionable coherence, can be a bit much, but it’s a welcome and valuable statement from an artist capable of pulling it off.

The work is too much for casual listening, and it refuses to be background music. And so, perhaps live performance is the most appropriate setting. This double disc captures both the awkwardness of performing such inward-looking material and the communion this sort of sharing carves out. Elverum’s lyrics are searing in their specificity.

The wide variation in music and the uneven results (all of it, perhaps, evidence of the record’s conceptual ambitions and smarts) prevent Dose Your Dreams from being a uniformly pleasurable record. But, man, is it full of ideas and aesthetic vitality.

There’s something off in the way that the euphoria attaches to the chillier depths of his songs. It’s unsettling enough to suggest that it maybe could be interesting if it worked, but it doesn’t quite.

Emanon moves through dimensions and times with a surprising fluidity. That the album includes three discs and a graphic novel gives it unusual heft, but Shorter’s construction of the segments provides insight into his recent era, particularly stemming from 2013’s Without a Net.

Someday Everything Will Be Fine is a wrecked and wreckless antidote to a world that most definitely is not.

The result is that rarest of prizes for a band that’s hit 25 years old: a record that stands not only as a genuine step forward in their body of work but also as one of their very best, an album as harrowing and transportive as anything else they’ve done.

Exuberantly weird ... The opening songs feel a bit thin, returning to trippy terrain that GT Ultra had already adequately investigated. ... The album’s second half, however, is terrific. The mix thickens with idiosyncrasy, glimmering electronic flotsam and some assured singing from Carlson. She doesn’t have enormous range, but she conjures compelling presence.

The songcraft has gotten notably sharper in just two years as well, making this very much a band to enjoy now but also one to keep an eye on for later.

It’s hard to think of 7 as anything other than an extension of Beach House’s sound, incorporating slightly different, smaller ideas but all easily applied to their own syntax.

It should be stressed as bluntly as possible, then, that Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton haven’t “just” made a good album for a couple of teenagers; I’m All Ears is pretty damn good for Rambo.

Like a great short story, Body is well worth revisiting, even after you know the plot twist, to savor details and subtleties you missed the first (or second or third) time around.

Despite some rather simple melodies (and even simpler lyrics), or maybe even because of them, I’m Terry hits the mark.

Coding emotional experience into sound is what this stuff is all about, and Jones nails it again and again.

He’s been moving this way the whole time, though you may not have connected the dots before, and now with Deafman Glance, he’s arrived.

It remains a little bit of all its influences, at times more like soul, at times almost straight country (particularly on “Here Is Where the Loving Is At”), but more often the proverbial blender mix.

Familiar as aftermath, the sounds sit at the edge of memory, providing a different intoxication than the vivid hits of adolescence. It’s a specific perspective that often has the clearest view of a movement. This scrappy album finds yet another future for old futurism.

There is machinery working even in the greenest corners of this sonic garden, whooshing and clicking and percolating in the interstices to make everything look a little brighter and more colorful than life.

The whole album is vastly enjoyable, but it finishes in an especially strong way in a sequence that starts with exuberant, pop-buzzing “Happy Unhappy,” continues into the gorgeous, lushly harmonized, anthemic “River Run Lvl 1” and ends in that “Whatever” version gushed over two paragraphs above.

Both musicians are good enough at this genre that Joy is never a total drag (if not quite a Joy either), but also both of them have been better, and Segall has been better this year, so caveat emptor.

Their sound--two guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, vox--is basic and elemental, drawing on rock, country and sometimes soul, though Among the Ghosts has less of the Memphis horn sound than previous albums. Still the force and authenticity of these tunes is undeniable.

Have You Considered Punk Music deconstructs punk music so thoroughly that it seems like something else again; it sounds more like the abstracted post-punk of the early aughts band Wilderness than anything you’d hear right now.

These are not reproductions, but rather meditations that breathe and exist on their own terms.