Despite some good ideas and intriguing moments, tracks like “Inside World” feel unsatisfyingly aimless.

Push the Sky Away’s rewards are interspersed among plenty of frustrating moments, yet even at its worst, it’s a fascinating album.

For all the grunting and studio manipulation (the way the levels shift around, it's like there's a cat loose on the mixing board), this is as playful as the Fall has ever been, with long stretches of taking the piss.

The aesthetic is head-scratching; ideas are stunted and unreadable as themes unless you look at the music as an arc. But the duo is clever enough to generate an initial sonic mystique that makes you long to figure out exactly what you’re listening to. And that’s the mark of a lasting record.

It’s wonderful stuff, a model of restraint and subtlety that also has visceral pleasures.

No Keys again has no indelible riffs, but it doesn’t seem to be missing them anymore. Instead Dommengang goes deep into the abyss of buzz and croon and humming mystery and finds something beautiful, maybe what they were looking for the whole time.

[One track] is expansive enough to be its own album, indeed, perhaps its own universe. The other is just fine, and you will enjoy it if you like Garcia Peoples’ other new jack jammers like Wet Tuna, Chris Forsyth, Matt Valentine and Steve Gunn. ... One Step Behind takes a giant step forward, right off the edge and into the unknown.

Striking, tenderly bruising. ... The six songs here certainly constitute some kind of hybrid, an illuminating substance that sometimes seems to float in the air, sometimes leaving you gasping.

Both performances are lovely and odd (and they are rendered distinct by flourishes from other musicians recruited into the sessions: Zak Riles’ unobtrusive banjo picking in “Hear the Children Sing,” Ned Oldham’s gentle, pellucid electric guitar in “The Evidence”). But it’s Oldham’s singing and Higgs’ lyrics that make Hear the Children Sing the Evidence so memorably discomfiting.

FACS has been a monster band for a while. Wish Defense may be their best so far.

Wilderness has a few disposable songs: the second half in particular drags on a little bit as different tracks become pretty much indistinguishable. However, the downtime and background amidst moments of appeal channels the spirit of ’70s AM radio pretty accurately.

If you can get past the unintentionally risible title, this new collection of songs from the Austin-based dark hardcore band is quite good. The music is convincingly pissed.

The main issue with this Arbouretum album is that it sticks stubbornly in a mid-tempo calm. There are no big, ripping guitar solos and few instrumental crescendos. The one big exception comes late in the album with “Let It All In.”

Vertigo is another compelling chapter in their evolution.

On every LP, Harris creates an impression of something that is emerging but never quite there, and she’s done it again on The Man Who Died in His Boat.

As emotionally impenetrable as the instruments are, Kinsella’s own inner song remains even more obscured by uncharacteristically opaque lyrics.

Irreversible Entanglements are looking forward, stepping up from the shoulders of the giants to shape a body of work that demands attention.

That’s not to say that development is necessary, but I still found myself wishing for more of a sense of progress. While sometimes it is about the journey, not the destination, two hours of journey is still better off with some pit stops along the way.

The very real pleasure of this collection of songs comes in how the love of tradition collides with raucous rule-breaking energy. You’ve got your outlaw country, sure, but did any of those guys write a song called “Motherfucker” and carry it off? Shook does. Not every song stomps. Some are plaintive and yearning, like the lovely “Jane Doe,” others full of anthemic slow-rocking swirl like “Nightingale.” But all insist on direct emotional engagement and brutal honesty and acceptance of a very specific point of view.

When it works, like on “NYC” or “Roland” it’s a dizzying and beautiful thing that leaves you starving for more. And even when it doesn’t work, it doesn’t fail – it’s just that at times the band seems unable to live up to their own standards and expectations.

Bird’s intelligence – and obvious delight in the associations that words seem to make on their own – often places his lyrics in the precocious high-school poet camp.

The Books have always been both playful and serious, but their latest album moves between the two easily and without making the listener take note. It is so subtle that even when paying attention, it still feels natural.

Each song seems a logical move from the song that preceded it, and no track stands out particularly from the rest. As a distinctive sound, though, as a warm, pulsing vibe, they succeed.

Going Places is a monolith, the cacophonous capstone to a career that never settled for less. It’s two guys arriving at their musical endpoint, culminating nearly a decade of work with one final refinement.

On the Tylers’ third and best album, The Ox and the Ax, there is no obscuring the harsh world conjured by these songs with elaborate instrumentation, overwrought singing or dance tempos. Recorded in crystalline clarity, the instrumental accompaniments are usually little more than guitar or banjo, and while they’re skillfully played, it is the Tylers’ voices, unadorned and rich, that are the center of this record.

The results are as you might expect from the album title: playful, wide-eyed and occasionally chaotic explorations of intense forces that reach above and beyond human dimensions.

FACS knows how and when to apply the exact amount of pressure to engage pain points and pleasure centers.

LUMP, a collaboration between Tunng founder Mike Lindsay and Laura Marling, is cool and enveloping, a mesh of luminous electronic textures and subtly placed instruments, all arranged around Marling’s silvery voice, often doubled or overlapping in harmony.