This is wonderful stuff, both as pure entertainment and a document of a vanished era.

Easy on the ears, Film Music’s approachable offerings are compounded by the high recording quality, new transfers made from original half-inch tapes in the Tariverdiev family’s Moscow apartment.

Black Times succeeds on its own terms and not as an artifact.

Ingenuity and sincerity (two things in which Hayes excels) are priceless, and the sum of the parts is quite a masterpiece indeed.

Mostly, though, these cuts take songs that you probably already know and deliver them slightly transformed by time and personnel and the live setting. They’re old friends, a little older, a little shaggier, but still magic: “Wolves (Song of the Shepherd’s Dog),” “About a Bruise” and “Dearest Forsaken.” If you ever loved them, you should hear them like this, too.

Some vibrate with a ghostly blues — lovely, haunted “This” and the bent note mirage of “June Bug”—while others swagger fancifully like barroom tall tales (“Monkey”). Older songs, like “Abominable Snowman,” first recorded for 1995’s Parsnip Snips, and “Indian Chiefs and Hula Girls” from 1988’s Water Tower, sidle casually into the present moment, sounding well-loved and unbothered by the passage of time. They sit right next to newer songs like “Fava,” with its transfixing twang of guitar.

A tremendously satisfying and thunderous effort, and their finest work to date.

It's certainly not a perfect album, but Hello Everything represents the pinnacle of performance from electronic music's most thoroughly developed mind.

As the album advances, you get the sense that Clark is finally accomplishing what he claims to have been doing all along: making a techno record.

Here chilly, cerebral ideas provide structure for enticing pop, and the sweetness comes with a bit of vertigo.

Barely out of her teen years herself, Marling explores a whole spectrum of female experience with empathy and intelligence.

With Special Moves, Mogwai have released a "greatest hits" collection in a sense, but it's indeed more special than that. Dramatic, at turns gentle, majestic and harsh, both old and new songs blend so well that there's no feeling of weak recent material sagging amidst earlier favorites.

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

Bishop’s elaborate flights celebrate what his instrument can do, and express by example the notion that having an interesting time along the way matters more than where you’re going.

The balance of spoken word and music is well-conceived. .... Less than halfway through, the Coin Coin series is engaging and ever new.

They have always written insanely short, catchy pop songs in the modern idiom, and, for those looking for the one line post mortem, Innings doesn't just not disappoint, it delights.

The more Clark edits, the more she refines, the stronger St. Vincent becomes. At this point, it's just a matter of consistency.

Even when Ejstes and his combo stretch out, they do so in a catchy way. Sometimes they do it the old-fashioned way with a big, memorable melody. Other times it is a cool sound framed just so.

The individual tracks here are no less weighty or patient, but it feels like a fire has been lit under Morgan, moving him to make his point more sharply than any before.

Every song on his debut album is sourced from an old record or field recording, but he and producer William Tyler have gone out of their way to ensure that they don’t sound particularly antique. In fact, while they’ll rest pretty easily upon Americana-tuned ears, they don’t slot too easily into any particular scene.

These songs stick in your head in a way that 15-minute guitar jams never do, while still maintaining a bit of hoary mystery at their core.

Timbrally, this is just another Nels Cline offering with all of its variety and surprise, but musically, it's his most mature and satisfying.

Though perhaps not as unique or groundbreaking as Ugly Side of Love, Beyond Ugly is still a pretty fabulous record by a band mostly alone in a top-shelf niche.

Eyes on the Lines is summer’s quintessential pleasure, the unmapped excursion through sunlit spaces, the unhurried but never static interval for reflection, the road trip that goes everywhere and ends up exactly where it started. It’s an album to get lost in, every time you listen to it.

This isn’t Black Eyes, or Public Image Ltd., or even the Mi Ami you knew, and it sure as hell ain’t Bob Marley. This is just a band at their very best pointing a fresh way forward for anyone lucky enough to listen closely.

Fish at first doesn’t come across as the sort of defining, revelatory work that The Resurrection and Revenge of The Clayton Peacock and, to a lesser extent, Pachyderm were, but its pleasures are more subtle, revealing themselves in increments.

The band sound more pleasingly unified than they ever have. By the same token, the album feels less adventurous, at least in terms of stylistic diversity, but the focus on Newman's exuberantly literate power-pop affords it more impact.

Guitar solos are fiery but brief and tethered to the main melodic ideas. Everything has been brightened, amplified and streamlined for immediate appreciation.