You can hear both elements jostling for precedence, the celebratory euphoria of live performance filtering through the doubts and uncertainties and complications of extended time in one’s own head. It’s the combination that’s so thrilling here, in a sound that swirls and envelopes and jitters but remains just out of reach, like the dream of a dream of a dream of life before.

A weird aura of nostalgia hangs over Jet Plane, the longing you might feel for a Buckeroo Banzai future that never quite happened. And yet, most of these tracks are very urgent, very present, very right now.

You end up thinking, well, of course, a band this ruthlessly observant and unflinching is going to be mad a lot of the time, but how great that they bring the same intensity to love.

It's many different things at once, but all of them are confident and powerful.

For this 15th solo album, the songwriter beefs up his arrangements a tad, though only compared to the last album, not the lush psychedelic swirl of his Richard Swift-abetted Mariqopa records. Yet the songs remain plain and beautiful, their clean lines unfettered by too much volume or density, delivered in a voice that creaks sometimes but doesn’t falter as it runs up effortlessly into near falsetto range.

The Umbrellas have always offered bashed up, joyriding sweetness, but here they reach at—and intermittently attain—a Spector-esque wall of rock ‘n roll sound. Even better, that larger scale doesn’t undermine the vulnerability of their songs, but instead amplifies and clarifies it.

There are a lot of good songs on here, to the point where the band's consistency can border on monotony.

Paper Dolls is a really delightful piece of work, tender and whimsical and, despite a certain amount of artifice, touchingly sincere.

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.

The whole thing takes only thirty-one minutes--but it’s a transportive half hour. The album cover’s crayon mountainscape suggests just the kind of escape the duo’s music provides: easy and innocent, a land somehow fuller of plenty and wonder than the reality it momentarily suspends.

The record called E, then, is not exactly what you’d expect from any of them, a volatile concoction of musical ideas and impulses that amplifies their distinctive gifts without sanding off any of the jutting edges.

The results are two fistfuls of noise-rock at least as potent lyrically as anything on God’s Country and arguably harder musically, for a few reasons.

This third Zomes album is far more static, yet the statis itself is arresting.

It’s strange to encounter an album that is so deeply weird and disjointed, and yet feels polished and made with the utmost craft. The result is otherworldly, and plays like a soundtrack to a moody and impressionistic film.

With its powerfully cohesive sonic topography and motley cast of rat smashers, ill-fated squires and cigarette eaters, Space Gun is a robust marriage between the band’s rugged past and more polished present. Further, it’s a reminder that, ultimately, Bob Pollard’s best character is himself.

It's compelling from the start, particularly insofar as they not only avoid genre clichés but also cheap drama. Instead, they play emotionally ambiguous stuff--shifting modes and dynamics, or rather simply smashing them together until the edges are indistinct.

The Lost Tapes doesn't feel like a barrel bottom being scraped; it's a scoop into a pond still teaming with life.

This album is loud, obnoxious, personal, and a hell of a lot of fun.

The atmosphere is lovely—it refracts the light like the last traces of fog in sunlight—but there are songs here underneath, good ones, and that makes all the difference.

There's a just-right roughness to the recording that has worked for bands as diverse as The Commandos and The Trashmen.

What’s left is distinctly Sunn O))) in scope and scale, as heavy and loud and intense as anything they’ve produced.

Today is the Day ranks as an outstanding album on its own merits, but its timing is also impeccable. Arriving at the end of this year, it will hopefully silence those who have accused Yo La Tengo of sliding into mid-career pleasantness.

There isn’t a singular, clear message of hope on The Great Bailout, but in documenting the rage and despair built into life under such a ugly and evil system, Moor Mother has provided something just as valuable — if not more so— in understanding the struggles of the present day.

His inventive and affective pairing of resonating melodies and noise is impossible to deconstruct--that is to say, narrow down to a specified meaning or reason behind each piece. We, the listener, get to apply each of Hecker's abstractions to whichever feeling we choose. That's definitely an ocean worth diving into.

It's good to hear a group continue to challenge themselves without kicking their strengths to the curb.

An album about finding meaning in the quiet, and even people who will never take psychedelic drugs or visit remote Ecuadorian caves, can get something out of that.

Almost all of II has a first-take rawness, well recorded, but without fuss.

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.