The music, befitting the subject matter, is at turns somber and hopeful, developing slowly and deliberately and captivating from start to finish.

What’s exciting about her music, and about this album in particular, is how she slips loose from those guidelines and finds a sound that’s fierce and primitive but also modern.

What unites the songs, if anything, is a breezy insouciance that belies careful construction. You get the sense that, like Yeats’ women, this is an album that must “labor to be beautiful.” It hides the work very well behind a sunny façade, but you don’t get movie-perfect string swells and luminous vintage keyboard lines and cheerful blurts of all-hands brass without a certain amount of forethought. Consider Collins the impresario, taking what his collaborators give him and polishing it to a high gloss.

The album is beautifully sequenced overall. Sometimes the transitions purposefully jar and provoke—elsewhere they’re seamless, prolonging, elongating a motif.

His complexity comes through more clearly than ever on Alasdair Roberts, his most stripped-down solo side in years.

If another band were to serve up the fiddling strings and lollygagging vocal harmonies of “Animal Shapes,” the wanky guitar breakdowns of “The Poor, The Fair, and the Good,” perhaps Tanglewood Numbers wouldn’t feel like such a disappointment. But Berman’s a brilliant lyricist with 30 or 40 minutes to spare every couple of years, and his voice seems oddly absent from this record.

Decidedly not for the faint-hearted, -io couches existential terror within ritualistic performance and orchestral musicality, and is often a challenging listen. With that in mind, approach -io with a brave heart and you’re in for a thrilling ride.

To See More Light is another strong effort from Colin Stetson, and a familiar one. Should there be another entry in the New History Warfare series, Stetson would benefit from a broadening of his tactical approach.

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.

It may fall short a few instances, but it’s a record with genuine ingenuity.

It's dark, lovely and slow to blossom, but leaves an impression once it does.

These are not reproductions, but rather meditations that breathe and exist on their own terms.

Overall, Almanac Behind is perhaps the most successful of Bachman’s “noise records”.

The Horizon Just Laughed is less showy than the Maraqopa trilogy, but in its quiet way just as visionary and odd.

Modest reservations aside, this is more top-drawer stuff from Shauf, as we’ve come to expect. Drink deep.

Drahla clearly knows their progenitors, but one needn’t focus on this legacy when listening to angeltape. It is a singular document by a distinctive and up-and-coming group.

This is a significant step up for an already promising band. Speedy Ortiz may not be major yet, but they won’t be arcana for long.

Penelope Three spends its 35-minute runtime exploring this fertile intersection between haunting folk and anxious electronica, creating a deep, resonant space that’s beautiful, eerie and unsettling.

There’s actually a groove there, however, and Author & Punisher’s lot is to never give in to the base aesthetics of speed or pummel. Instead, Melk En Honing explores every corner of sub-doom tempo, with occasional detours into extreme melody and harmony buried deep enough to avoid comparison to Alice In Chains and neo-doom sweethearts Pallbearer.

The point is that new stuff is added without compromise or dilution. And listening here, you realize that change is good and maybe even necessary, no matter how much you like how Protomartyr has always sounded.

He easily sidesteps the drama that dogged he and his band throughout 2007 (and ultimately led to their declaration of hiatus towards the end of the year), turning Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel into a beautifully melancholic slice of shimmering, ambient pop.

If the DFA medium/message commands one groove rattling under a nation, Less Than Human is evidence enough that bot-genius Maclean is just the half-man needed to bang up the plumbing so that all faucets drip lightning bolts.

This Is the Kit’s new album, Careful Of Your Keepers, has a wonderfully languid, rolling, fluid quality.

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

Kill the Lights, his second full-length, follows 2016’s largely acoustic Confront the Truth and 2014’s moderately more abrasive Dissed and Dismissed and amps up the voltage somewhat, especially in the anthemic “Jasper’s Theme,” site of this disc’s best electric guitar licks.

While albums and concerts get to end, the knowledge that real lives carry on scarred by real-life tragedies like the one related make The Glowing Man a fraught record to hear.

Fennesz has produced a maximalist experience with apparently minimal equipment but this is not about the machines rather the human producing the sounds. Agora is another deep exploration of the boundaries of experimental guitar ambience in which to lose oneself.

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