Xe is a refreshing glimpse of a band captured in its most primordial state, and for all their clinical musical intellectualism, the album also offers snippets of Zs’ odd sense of humour, not to mention each player’s unique talents and virtuosity.

The nostalgia of postmodernity, that backward glance, is apparent in every moment of Parallax Error Beheads You. While it can sometimes seem like a quagmire for the less creative, it’s transformative here.

Impeccably tasteful, Kitty Wells Dresses is no mere museum piece. It deserves to rest in an enthusiast's country collection somewhere among, say, Buck Owens Sings Harlan Howard and Del Shannon Sings Hank Williams.

A schizophrenic mess of maypole folk and motorik drive.

It's bold without making a big stink about it. It's personal without being solipsistic. It's a musical proof of Umberto Eco's thesis.

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

Plastic Eternity is the rare dead serious, head-trippy album that is also a lot of fun. Here’s to Mudhoney for standing on the precipice and laughing.

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

If it weren't all so much fun, CSS would be really objectionable. But if it wasn't so objectionable, it certainly wouldn't be this much fun.

Not Even Happiness is a work of intimate loveliness, surely one of the most flat-out beautiful songwriter albums of a year that is just getting going.

What makes the Constantines appealing, then, is not that they do something totally new but rather that they do something familiar very well.

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

Pile is a challenging band to listen to casually--but its dense, exquisitely crafted bombast pays both immediate and long-term dividends over repeated listens, as the mutated strands of their musical DNA infect and take over.

They’ve created one of the most haunting and terrifying metal albums since the legendary Khanate broke up.

Throughout all of this, Nace’s innate instincts as an improviser couple effectively with Crain’s production mastery resulting in a release that stands apart, while fitting in perfectly with the guitarist’s broad body of work.

Breakers is a gorgeous oddity, one of the year's most arresting albums of any kind, and "252" hints at the potential for even better material ahead.

Honor Found in Decay, the band's 11th or so studio album, is an organic, humanizing refinement of said retooling, one that is very subtle yet undoubtedly informed by guitarist Steve Von Till and bassist Scott Kelly's forays into the fandom and unadorned tribute exercises regarding the late Townes Van Zandt.

The looping phrases of Reward are carefully considered and joined with the precision of mortise and tenon. Her songs have always been like small rooms, though they are no longer drafty and rustic. This is a record of tidy natural sounds. They are not immediately inviting, yet spending time in these well-mannered spaces becomes a pleasure.

It’s not jazz, not rock and certainly not Fahey-style picking, but vivid and exciting all the same.

Some of beats are a little perfunctory, but the interplay between the grieved and the griever, the subtlety of the writing and beauty of the arrangements on Fall To Pieces haunt long after the needle lifts.

While Breakup Songs is hardly less fractured than Deerhoof's other albums, it's also one of their more coherent efforts.

Revelator is an exhausting listen in the best sense of the term. Skip at your own risk: Far from hip-hop homework, Elucid’s Revelator is a port of call in this storm, a howling document from the edge, muons in which we are all tomographers.

Having the backstory on Walker’s path to sobriety isn’t necessary to appreciate Course In Fable. There’s enough allure in Walker and guitarist Bill MacKay’s elaborate latticework of glazed melodies and modal chords that call to mind McEntire’s other band The Sea and Cake, and how drummer Ryan Jewell floats through it all with loose, jazzy flourishes.

Success is a fine example of Oneida’s willingness to fly in the face of fashion and once again reinvent themselves.

While Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes could have become an exercise in studio-based formalistic noodling, Adebimpe and Malone’s vocals and lyrics give the songs structure and direction.

If you have a weakness for fat synth sounds and sputtering early drum machines committed to reel-to-reel tape, this stuff could set you swooning.

The result is a record is suffused with grief without ever drowning in it (or, for the most part, addressing it directly in the lyrics even when you can parse them out).

In short, it’s a one-off that makes accidental magic, bringing disparate talents into temporary alignment without blunting their differences. If it’s a reality show, then it’s one that works and one in which no one should get voted off the island.