As fine as the instrumental playing is here, Crutchfield and Williamson singing together creates magic.

Tucker brings on an overload of tone, overtone and sonic sensation that swirls and eddies like a rough tide, at times nearly picking you up off your feet and tossing you over.

This is not your parents’ contradance music or your cool older brother’s free improvisation or even your cousin’s slightly over-ripe New Weird Americana, but something else entirely. Amidon learned the old tunes by heart so he could stretch and cut and distort and juxtapose the pieces to make music that resonates and expands.

Is it a sleek and assured Euro-pop stylist or a morose, sardonic realist, messy and desperate and unsatisfied with the way things are? It is both, sometimes simultaneously. The mix of poise and scruffiness fluctuates continually. .... The point is that there’s plenty of lounge-y, jazzy pop here, but it’s most affecting when it twists slightly off true.

Succinct. ... While Madness begins in a state of chaos, it reaches an uneasy resolution over its half-hour runtime, exploring some emotionally resonant territory along the way.

The record is energetic and often rollicking. Paternoster’s singing and intense guitar antics are center stage, but her longtime bandmates King Mike (bass) and Jarrett Dougherty (drums) are essential to the band’s potent combination of groove and snarl.

The simplistic, drone like beats of Borders numb the mind while freeing the body, so that each track is danceable and sedating. Furthermore, the brooding, deep tone of the beats, paired with an added static charge, are sonically rich and beautiful and draw the ear in.

Ultimately, it underscores everything that’s right with Supreme Balloon--in the absence of any larger narrative structure, the group’s latest album afford them the chance not to be modern theoreticians par excellence, but rather a couple of earnest music fans that convey their own passion through the sounds they create.

While this workmanship-like familiarity leaves little room for surprises, it also makes the hit-to-misstep ratio almost negligible. With this kind of success rate, we can only hope Cartwright has another 20 years of near-obscurity in him.

Slowed down, the only thing revealed is how seamless his stitching his, how clever his adjunctions are and how much musicianship it takes to create a good sample-based record.

The cool thing about Protean Threat is that he’s got the beast and the collar. He can let things run wild in complicated ways while also keeping it wholly and brilliantly under control. Let’s not mince words. This is one of the best rock albums of 2020.

No matter how smoothly the songwriting flows, nothing’s easy on Interstate Gospel. Lambert, Monroe, and Presley know that, yet they take on an array of hard topics and reel off one-liners and hooks as if that’s enough to get us through, which it just might be.

Going Down in History is a visceral, gut-thumping, pretty-close-to-live album one of whose main themes is astonishment at being alive, still, inexplicably.

They’ve found a way to wedge different sonic elements together, creating an assemblage of oft-quoted elements that feels fresh and vital even when its tone turns elegiac.

Clara demonstrates Morgan’s ability to make practically whatever he gets his hands on into loscil music. But when loscil music is this deeply immersive, richly textured, carefully calibrated, and ultimately viscerally satisfying (however one feels about the process), you just hope he keeps on doing it.

With The Alligator Bride, more than previous Howlin’ Rain albums, the breadth of the band’s scope shines in streaming color.

As a live recording, it’s severely impressive, and sounds far more like an obsessively premeditated studio creation than anything on Kinski’s last official album.

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.

Ultimately, Instrumentals 2015 is minor in everything but the quality of the music--and that seems a very FSA-like play indeed.

New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges is an album of somber beauty, its flashes of color existing amidst a broad spectrum of grays.

It’s an eccentric mechanical universe that Kamikaze Palm Tree has constructed and well worth visiting.

Stirring stuff.

The potential guitar soup and airless drum patterns of death metal is helped along by Bogren’s crisp production. And with Twilight of the Thunder God, they’ve written a set that takes full advantage of experience and polish.

The Sound The Speed The Light is as good as "Obliterati."

It’s rich; despite the fact that the cuts are short and sweet, each represents any number of possibilities for repurposing and restyling.

Some of the songs work atmospherically; other take shape as more conventional songs. Yet it all proceeds like a pastel colored daydream, faint sounds swirling into mirage-ish structures then melting away into mist. The words are so buried in the mix that you’ll need a lyric sheet to parse them; like the music, they teeter on the boundary between pastoral calm and 21st century angst. They cling to subtle melodies like a fresh coat of dew.

“Tinde,” at the end, floats a woman’s ululating tones over bare, echoing percussion. But mostly, Amatssou sounds exactly like you expect Tinariwen to sound, like its drifting to you over acres of sand, like it’s moving your bare feet to dance, and that is a very good thing.

DOOM’s sounds as bold and battered as ever. You can almost hear the accumulation of Dutch Masters on his larynx.