The album gains strength as it goes on, getting harder and more abrasive in its second half. And yet even as it rages, it has an elegiac tone.

The songs on Crab Day are more vivid in memory than when they’re playing. There’s distress at the edges that’s hard to source, but as they spin apart in performance, they lodge in the brain.

It blunts and softens its influences, whether heavy rock or soul or krautrock, and delivers them in a medium-temperature hippie haze.

It’s another landmark release for this deceptively versatile and forward-thinking artist, and perhaps, just perhaps, his most effective album to date.

With The Follower we have the first truly top-tier Field album that seems to draw its energy more from refinement than innovation, from the spin of the wheel rather than the speed of the car.

Even now, with this seventh album, the old thumping insouciance remains, while the subject matter becomes increasingly morose. These are the kind of songs that could easily, in the live setting, lead to sweaty euphoria; you realize almost as an afterthought that they are all about death.

The Body’s use of nearly-subsonic bass and samples puts these now commonplace building blocks of electronic dance music to their most infernal purposes. If there is something unsettling about an extended, windshield-rattling electronic kick drum, The Body has found it and perfected it.

Like the last two Damien Jurado albums, this one takes a while to sink in, and it’s backloaded, so you have to get all the way through for the payoff. And yet, if you’ve taken the other two Maraqopa journeys, it is remarkable how this third installment augments and complements them.

Rock that soothes and sears at once is a rare thing, and Heron Oblivion has made a whole album that makes the contradictions feel like an ancient tradition.

Varmints is an expansive, surprising listen for which sonic left turns can be taken for granted.

[The final track is] less antic and virtuoso than the earlier tracks, but a good deal more touching. Elsewhere Neufeld jets off for the stratosphere, technical dexterity gleaming in a rarified, surgically clean space. Here she sinks into a rich, loamy here and now, luxuriating in slow exploration of certainties.

This is an album that pulls you up out of gloom and into exultation, and if it’s manipulative that way, so be it. As Watts says, we would like to be like that, and Full Circle makes it feel, at least for a little while, like we are.

The music’s depth, and it is deeper than any other Q/C/Kluster album, encompasses myth and poetry while eschewing assumption and pretense. It walks a fine line between accessibility and the intrigue of novelty while never allowing timbre self-satisfying supremacy.

Freaks of Nurture needs a bit more abrasion to leave a mark. Sunny and pleasant all through, it blurs together like vacation days, each enjoyable, but hard to remember afterwards which was which.

Fleeting is therefore more intimate even than your average American primitive album, with the sounds of nature adding to the authenticity and naturalism of the music as opposed to intruding upon it.

Perhaps in the end it’s best to just say that The Besnard Lakes sound like themselves; they’ve certainly found a way to refine their own sound, and the jarring beauty that can be heard in A Coliseum Complex Museum is a prime example of it.

The confident, relaxed, but still concise and appealing “Vertical” indicates that Animal Collective still have some life in them, and as much as some of Painting With can tend to grate, it’s still an improvement from the band’s last two albums; trying to write pop songs instead of dance records or noise jams suits them in their middle age.

The tales they tell are, while gruesome, well told. And they’ve never sounded better; not only has the time off done no damage to their brash, south-of-the-Ohio harmonies, but the band has taken on the challenge of sounding bigger than ever before and come out triumphant.

Sartain has always sounded wild and dangerous, but Century Plaza is, if anything, more hair-raising than usual.

If you want stark, memorable melodies, you’re better off turning to McCombs’ combo Brokeback; for inarguably affecting rhythms, seek out Herndon and Parker’s turn with Ken Vandermark’s Powerhouse Sound; and for shiny sounds molded into pop songs, you’re better off with McEntire’s other band, Sea And Cake. But if you want that patented Tortoise blend of electronic tones, varied beats, and just-so textures treated as ends unto themselves, The Catastrophist delivers.

This set is intriguing, though recent Fall is easiest to take in small doses.

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.

It’s almost as if they didn’t need the help from guest luminaries such as Angel Olsen, Jeb Bishop, pedal steel player Allyn Love and superstar engineer Brian Paulson (who mixed the album with Miller), but perhaps it’s those additions which make How to Dance such a consistently strong and clean record of a band with a unique southern voice.

A collection of past moments, which add up to a splendid memorial to a monumental moment in New York’s musical history.

In some ways The Waiting Room is remarkable for hitting a number of classic Tindersticks checkmarks without ever feeling like it’s, well, going down a list checking them off.

Adore Life is a great set of songs. Savages have created an equal-but-different follow-up to Silence Yourself. While it can’t have the surprise of their debut, Adore Life demonstrates evolution and exploration that Savages will hopefully continue to embrace in the future.

Emotional Mugger isn’t a bad record, but the songs are nowhere near as strong as the ones on Manipulator, and whatever Segall is trying to get at here is not yet in his grasp.

In short, it’s a one-off that makes accidental magic, bringing disparate talents into temporary alignment without blunting their differences. If it’s a reality show, then it’s one that works and one in which no one should get voted off the island.