Horses... is Silver Mount Zion’s most musically satisfying disc to date because, while the well-worn formulae are present, sonic variance and compositional modification has brought a welcome diversity to an increasingly wearisome aesthetic.

Bodega have extended their musical palette and tightened their songwriting to produce an album that bristles with energy and intelligence.

The result is a melding of energies that is both fragilely beautiful and extraordinarily resilient.

While Wakin On A Pretty Daze may not be an anthemic leap forward, it is in many ways even stronger for its existence as example of a craft being so finely honed.

Enemy takes the game Built to Spill has been playing for a while now and hits the right emotions in the right way.

The music is simple, but not easy, adorned with intricate picking that cascades over itself like a waterfall. The lyrics feel like really good haiku, pithy, made of small words, but evoking wonderfully precise natural images. It’s a good album for being alone somewhere calm and beautiful, not engaged with the world but not cut off either and enjoying the quiet.

It carries the manic, youthful energy of Parks’s very best works, plants itself deep inside the listener’s brain as though tapping into some deep American (meaning in this case both North American and West Indian) musical unconscious, and magically holds together as a single, unified and exhilarating listening experience despite its meandering through a dauntingly wide range of material and approaches.

The eleven tracks here are tight, raw, and marked by insistent thumping rhythms and taught chunky riffs, laying the groundwork for one of the band’s most straight-ahead rock albums in years.

It is not as raw as the first LP, not as musically belligerent or emotionally wrenching. Instead, it's got an elegance and symmetry to it, a sense of space and precision that was, if not entirely missing from Hammer of the Gods, at least not fully realized.

As a portrait of a man in a city sharing his thoughts and feelings, it’s strikingly effective, all the more so for being so far-reaching.

Monoliths and Dimensions is a bold step forward and bodes well for Sunn 0)))’s future relevance as not just musicians, but honest-to-god composers.

As distinctive as it is complex, is as much about the journey as its component pieces, commanding all the familiar electronic music components with ease, but infused with the warmth of soul and a kind of cross-continental sophistication.

This is a great album, and you’re probably going to want to hear it again and again.

Dream logic rules this world, with periods of calm beauty, eruptions of noise and the sense that for every step forward there are delays, disruptions and detours that must be dealt with in order to proceed to a distant destination. If abstraction is the rule, the emotional resonance is real and deeply felt.

Pyramid is well worth scaling.

It takes an incredibly steady hand and a reservoir of patience to pull off this tone, but delightfully, still below the surface is that tension. There are these competing moments in her music then, and it is the way they compete that makes her aesthetic unique and beautiful.

If you listen to this album a lot, you may spend the first two or three times through snorting at odd phrases, recoiling from the venom and viscosity in Smith’s vocal delivery, but as you go, you begin to pick up the ferocity of the grooves underneath. No one else balances articulate, convincing hallucination with freight train propulsion like the Fall does, and this album, they take it further towards the edge than before.

This is a relatively brief album but one so rich and with such a definite sense of itself that it’s hard to feel shortchanged; Demen gives us a rapturously enchanting world to live in, but one you could imagine becoming too much.

A pleasantly lush album that may be his finest work yet.

Kinski’s boldest statement to date.

In Black Duck, they draw on many different aspects of their respective, eclectic backgrounds, flitting freely from sun-drenched cosmic country, to driving kraut rock, to radiant, enveloping ambiences, all played so expertly that it seems effortless, though it probably isn’t.

This is a remarkable album, lovely but harrowing, meditative but visceral.

With its shyness, lack of flourish, unvarnished finish and relative dearth of guest appearances, Preparations is, more than any other Pref record, some decidedly this-level-type shit.

It remains delightfully messy and is all the more viscerally resonant.

You’ll never hear the same thing twice in listening to Levon Vincent. Akin to the highlights of his past discography, something in the mixes of these songs jumps out to grab you by the throat, then gradually retreats as other elements subtly work their way to the fore of your consciousness.

Lights’ debut was a strange, beautiful thing, and one of my favorite debuts of last year. Rites is bigger, sharper and in all ways better. Lights just got a good deal brighter.

It’s clearly the best Young Widows record.

Costello stays away from pop hooks here, concentrating instead on a tentative but engaging marriage of words and melody.