He navigates through colorized thickets of tone on the long songs with the knowing confidence of a veteran wilderness guide.

Holley finds the direct line between his own, relatively recent suffering and the longer narrative of black people in America. Funky, percussion driven “We Was Kings in the Jungle, Slaves in the Field,” is one of the album’s best cuts, rumbling forward on syncopated drumming, fired by blares of brass and winds, lit by ghostly patterns of marimba.

An album that blooms slowly over time and repeated listening.

Visuals is probably the most ‘simple’ Mew has been since Frengers (albeit without that album’s jet engine roar), but if it never quite reaches the twisty heights of +--it remains endearing nonetheless.

This is an album that seriously repays repeat listening, sounding slight at first, but gaining heft with every play. It’s beautiful stuff, and you won’t miss the vocals at all.

When None Shall Pass drags late in the first act, it's largely due to tracks that seem intended to reprise the contemplative vibe of the Float era. A few Jukie guest spots, brazen as the production, round out the way the album works best.

Ski Mask is almost certainly not Islands’ most accessible or enjoyable work, but it ranks with the band’s most forceful and accomplished.

With I Have Fought Against It, but I Can’t Any Longer, the Body have generated a record of power electronics, descending at times into harsh noise, punctuated at points by mournful passages of ambient beauty.

Allen writes like a painter, renewing familiar material--in this case, poorly behaved men and resourceful hookers with Spanish names--via quirks of perspective and peculiar taste in details.

Wit's End stands to lose a lot by being judged on a song-by-song basis: there are standout moments, courtesy of ingenious arrangements and lovely melodies, but the album's shadowy guiding principle remains in my mind long after listening.

An accomplished release that attests to their enduringly unique sound and vision.

A New Way... didn't need reinforcements, and taking in all 14 tracks in succession can be tough going, but a little bit of overkill doesn't dull the bracing energy of Orcutt's kinetic, four-string idioglossia.

What makes KAPUTT so exciting is its elasticized unpredictability, the sense that these taut, punched-out firestorms could head in any direction. Anarchy has rarely been so tightly coordinated, nor order so slapped bloody and sore as on this debut.

The vocals on cuts like “The House That Doesn’t Exist” may be soft and high, but the melody slashes forward with determination and force. Even the Nico-esque whisper psyche of “Flowers Turn Into Gold” exudes intention. Daydream soft sonics swirl in clouds around Prochet’s mic, but she, herself, is wide awake and in control.

As with many works that get tagged as major breaks from an artist’s established work, truthfully much of Too Bright still feels very much like the work of the Perfume Genius, and anyone looking for more of what they got from past albums will be very satisfied.

I DES is an ambitious, moving work.

They’re simply better songwriters than many others in the field, and their ability to recontextualize these sounds into something so subsequently fresh and familiar is a stunning achievement.

Though the length of each successive Grouper album wastes away, at only 22 minutes Grid of Points provides such compelling sketches that the lost minutes only manifest after the music has stopped. Harris’ sound has always been haunting, but by investigating absence on Grid of Points she haunts herself, capturing a restlessness that has returned to make sense of its ending.

Nadler can’t be pinned down, and all of Strangers is an indication of that new challenge she both creates and meets.

More than anything else, one gets the feeling that Bespoke exists to defy categorization and manifest that essential need to live as a unique being, no matter how inevitable the factory-churning repetition of prescribed lifestyles may seem.

Her most self-assured release yet, instantly inviting and comfortable, brimming with a confidence that breeds fast familiarity.

Dereconstructed poses a challenge and stands defiant, and it works surprisingly well as the unexpected convergence of a number of long-running cultural traditions.

Now we have Mount Eerie’s 26-track, 81-minute Night Palace, which unites the many facets of Phil Elverum’s musical preoccupations into a raw, artful, sprawling double album. Unwieldy as it is, there are so many wonderful moments across the track list that it pays dividends to invest the time.

It's music like this, intelligently composed and played, delivered with clarity and purposefully varied, that, finally, makes sense of the Fucking Champs.

The Feelies really are here again, operating in a fashion as insular and purposeful as they did in days of old without denying who they are now. It's good to have them around.

You can hear the absolute precision, yes; but the head and hands have not left the heart and soul behind.

To that end, the most interesting moments are the endings, and the most interesting song on a whole is the title-track that concludes the EP.

However great the merits of their debut might be, one can’t help but feel that there’s something just a little too perfect about Franz Ferdinand, as though they had planned out hipster world-domination around a scientifically constructed chart of "what’s hot and what’s not."