On Help, bits of digital noise have worked their way into the sound, like the band is absorbing the textures of Dwyer’s more avant projects. Or maybe it’s just a crunchy topping to contrast with the creamy icing, because this is one cake of a record, as approachable as Dwyer has ever been.

It seems trivial for album length to be the crux of what makes Signal Morning work, but with one’s attention less spread out, less diluted, Hart’s musical strategy becomes that much more powerful. It’s the old showbiz adage: always leave ‘em wanting more.

The band comes together neatly, covering a range that encompasses stripped-down recordings and wider-canvas anthems. Avi Buffalo make songs that, at their best, remain lodged in one's head for days.

She writes amazing, heartfelt songs, interesting in tone and composition.

It's furious and raging and exhausting, and the end result is exhilarating.

Functional Arrhythmias moves briskly through these terse, but usually quite rich pieces.

Everything is sharp and lucid and full of impact.

Play What They Want is his densest, most elaborately arranged Man Forever album yet. But even so, the rhythm forms a spine, winding and punching and scatter-shooting in continuous, fascinating Rube Goldberg-machine motion, as meditative layers of vocals, keyboards, harps, brass and guitar billow fog over the intricate, interlocking works.

New Rain Duets teems with ideas that float and drift together. It works because McCaughan and Lattimore use their shared vocabulary to tease out the beauty in the murky haze.

Given DePlume’s voice is such a strong flavor, Gold’s appeal will no doubt hinge on whether it’s to your taste. I find it fine in small doses, but domineering over the course of a double album. There’s some great music here if you have the patience to cherry-pick the best bits.

The interaction between machines and the power and tone of branch’s trumpet is the core here and the duo play off each other with unerring control and infectious joy.

The title of nature morte might reference death, but this music is frightfully, joyfully and overwhelmingly alive.

If you like your punk rock distilled to purity, every idea boiled down to staccato essence, then pony up for Sweeping Promises. It’s bright and nervy, nodding towards funk but with all the grime scrubbed out of the seams.

Barely a moment passes without her voice proudly standing front and center, leading the listener through bittersweet songs that surrender to the ebb and flow of how it feels to be a twenty-something woman in twenty-first-century America.

The slow buildup provides a sense of valediction, with distorted layers reminding us of Mogwai’s love of volume, only to have a slow fade cap things off. The Bad Fire is a satisfying listen from disc to double disc.

Researching the Blues may be one of the most pleasant surprises of 2012.

Over rudimentary, skiffle-derived hooks, a kitchen-sink orchestra creates an aura of portent. Then in steps Meloy, doping up the whole affair with empty melancholy until it has to breathe through a tube, wailing big words in a forced accent that conveys despair but fails to signify its cause, fails to signify anything.

Though this is far from an easy listen, and can be frustratingly wordy and repetitive at times, it’s a rich, admirable and thorny work of art. Invest the necessary attention in this record and it’ll reward in spades.

The only times Deep Politics doesn't work is when it goes for that sun-scorched, ex-cokehead AOR sheen. Perhaps when you cast your nets this wide, a little brim is inevitable.

Women's last record had poppier, brighter aspects than Public Strain, and it's hard to imagine what they might add to this sound beyond an amp'd up production that would wreck their very deliberate effect.

UK Grim waxes artfully dyspeptic, its words a palimpsest of layered, complicated reference to current events and contemporary culture. ... Still at it, still hitting hard, all hail the Sleaford Mods.

Welcoming and unique, this is one of the best debuts in recent memory.

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.

From free jazz to contemporary modern ensemble music, Halvorson has made thoughtful arrangements for Amaryllis. It’s great to hear her rock out too, playing with an abandon that has been simmering all along.

Cheers to the second installment of this beautiful friendship.

On Civilian, the band shows that it can be serious without being overbearing, evocative without being histrionic, and accessible without being derivative.

Their most accomplished and astounding album to date.

Holly Herndon is far too conceptual to ever really merit banal classification as a techno or electronic producer, and with a bigger platform (intentional), she shows that her vision opens a multitude of possibilities that go beyond genre. Platform isn’t the album to realize that potential, so obvious since Movement, but it’s a tantalizing taste of the future.