The unpolished, unpredictable nature of Meridian is certainly part of its charm, one way or the other. There are a lot of cinematic drone albums out there, and the organic, human touches here lend this one more personality than most.

Ultimately, Instrumentals 2015 is minor in everything but the quality of the music--and that seems a very FSA-like play indeed.

That link underlines that Red River Dialect’s pensive, acoustic incarnation is not incompatible with the wilder, louder more forceful material before it, that indeed, it funnels the same intensity through quieter, more melancholy channels. Tender Gold and Gentle Blue is a softer album but no less true.

Here on this fourth Cairo Gang album, Kelley works in full-blooded, freak-beated 1960s garage mode--and damn if the change-up doesn’t suit him.

All Tense Now Lax at times evokes luminaries like Coil or early Current 93, but ultimately exists as its own beast, one that is never predictable, always challenging and achieves that oh-so-rare feat in rock music now: it turns the genre inside out and pulls the remains into a brave new form of noise.

Infinite Dissolution paints with the boldest of rockist strokes and then tears them all down again.

The problem is that if it’s not very compelling as theatre, the theatrical parts get in the way of enjoying the songs, which are pretty good in a brash, bull-headed, punk-belligerent kind of way.

There’s a minute-to-minute emotional immediacy here that, even if you don’t understand completely, you can feel like the weather, always changing.

Van Etten’s born-loser character could have been a bore were it not for her disciplined musicianship (her early years included classical music and multiple instruments) and her painful but enduring singing. It never stops sounding like real hurt.

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.

Things begin promisingly with “She Never Could Resist a Winding Road” and “Beatnik Walking,” two nimbly played songs on which Thompson and his band get to show off their chops without showing off.... Unfortunately, that fact [a relatively small band playing together on relatively little time] begins to show for the worse on "Patty Don’t You Put Me Down."

Luminiferous burns hard, but it’s searching for an attitude adjustment that could make the flames grow higher.

There are a few hollow trunk rattlers here.... At.Long.Last.A$AP is no fashion accessory, it’s practically a reinvention.

Don’t Weigh Down the Light is a precise, meditative work, and one that can be rewarding with each successive listen.

For the first time in years, Godspeed is both operating at peak strength and not (as far we know) about to go on hiatus.

Holly Herndon is far too conceptual to ever really merit banal classification as a techno or electronic producer, and with a bigger platform (intentional), she shows that her vision opens a multitude of possibilities that go beyond genre. Platform isn’t the album to realize that potential, so obvious since Movement, but it’s a tantalizing taste of the future.

It feels like they’ve found a way to channel attitude into songs that are more powerful and compelling.

The songs feel physical and unpremeditated, without theoretical underpinnings, but executed with such conviction that they carry you almost bodily from one track to another.

It’s easy to forgive Gnod such self-indulgence, however, even if it means Infinity Machines just about fails to maintain interest throughout, because this album sounds like very little out there, at least from a rock perspective.

Sylva might be Snarky Puppy’s most conceptually complicated album, but it’s easily penetrable as a listen. The album could make more demands and it isn’t as stunning in its individual moments as previous recordings, but those ideas would resist League’s compositional intent.

Its 42 minutes are comparatively modest, sure, but there’s no question that the man behind the boards here has his finger on the pulse of what may be missing most in electronic music right now--a central reference point. In Colour is that star, the record to hold everyone else’s narratives together.

It’s lovely, in an effortless, frictionless way that wafts on warm currents and soothes as it passes.

Loyalty can slip into the background if you let it, receding into prettiness until you miss the uncompromising intelligence and honesty. Yet that in itself is a triumph, as the former child star steps back and steps back until all you can hear are the songs.

Even incoherent and excessively long, Frozen Niagara Falls shows that, like John Wiese with his recent--and more rewarding--masterpiece Deviate From Balance, Fernow is pulling apart the clichés of noise and looking at where it goes from here.

Hairball doesn’t redefine its chosen genre, nor does it really refine it. It’s a straightforward album, one meant for windows-open listening on a sunny day.

A chilly, deliberately off-putting, but deeply fascinating record.

They may only be covering a small slice of what they’ve achieved previously here, but they so totally capture their moment that these songs blot out much of the world around them, so that they only exist, with you, blanketing day and night.

Side one of MCIII consists of perfectly enjoyable songs, with similar ingredients--piano, interesting guitar work, a voice reminiscent of ‘60s pop, but that ineffable thing that makes songs stick in your head just doesn’t seem to be here.... The second half of the album is problematic in a different way.