Arab Strap successfully juxtaposes songs that deal with the fallacy of human interaction, while maintaining a singular Scottish sound and mindset.

Rage, speed, and math are still here; but there’s a cinematic scope and a real attention to mood and texture that’s new.

Carnival is far more subdued than Shanghai, simmering with supernatural menace, but never quite breaking into frenzy.

Every sound is thrown like a punch, rocking you back with sheer bludgeoning impact. The sound is instantly familiar, though surprisingly hard to pin down with punk antecedents.

Approaches to guitar rock that are generally better segregated sound great together here, as they jump from '90s indie to shotgun at yr face drunkfuzz. I've got no idea where they can go with this. For now, they've made a record that leaves me spinning after every spin.

“Is it making you feel something?” the band asks, in the song of the same name, and yes, yes, yes, all kinds of things. That’s what’s so great about it.

It's good to hear a group continue to challenge themselves without kicking their strengths to the curb.

What makes Album so good, however, won’t be a consensus opinion on whether or not it’s culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. It’ll be the personal associations brought to it by each person encountering Girls for the first time.

This is a prickly, buzzy, invigorating record from a songwriter at the top of his game.

Romantiq is a strong addition to Popp’s compendious catalog, one that unifies certain sound selections and approaches while providing ample variety.

In gaining power and speed, Secret Machines seem to have lost a sense of pace. Now Here is Nowhere rocks hard, but compared to the EP it contains half the ideas in twice the running time.

The layered caramel of [Brett's] voice stays thick from track to track, but finally, it's Rennie's poetry that gives Last Days Of Wonder its legs.

A genuinely engaging and fun album.

Polizze is in no hurry to make an impact, allowing the music to grow organically, often spreading out into long-form improvisations. ... Worth the wait? Absolutely.

She returns with a more personal album, the tragically influenced yet unbowed Untame the Tiger.

Breaks in the Armor may, with a few slight tweaks, find Bachmann doing more or less the same thing as he's done on his past few albums, but when he does it this well, there's little reason to object.

Listen to the second album next to the first, and it’s like when the eye doctor finds the right lens strength and all the letters become legible.

The music (which is credited to the Cairo Gang) is in a soft folk vein and sounds as though it were designed to be complementary to Oldham's lyrics rather than to showcase the Cairo Gang's own talents.

With Hey Mr. Ferryman, Eitzel again distills a brutal, nonsensical world into beauty. It’s a feat worth observing.

It’s somewhere between 2011’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill and, say, Peter Jefferies’s Last Great Challenge For a Dull World; there are discernible melodies here, but above them is an overwhelming sense of loss, and the musical chops to channel it.

It is in the spaces between words and drums, and in the general structures of the songs... that El-P most clearly exhibits growth. And it is these points on the album that make I’ll Sleep an intriguing release.

Martha’s music may be good for you or good for the planet or good for society, but at its heart, it is just damned good.

She succeeds in a rare feat here, making a mood-sustaining record comprised of songs that only improve when listened to in sequence.

This one, the first all-Segall live recording (he split a 2015 Live at Pickathon with King Tuff), manages to increase the intensity. It documents a monster tight, no-frills session from 2018 in obliterating, over-the-top style.

Though it's well produced and confident, and goes deep into its web of influence, it seems so rooted in this moment that it feels transitory.

It’s all a challenge, and it doesn’t always work in Morby’s vision. ... Morby might be digging through a city’s musical landscape, but he’s reaching for something that persists, and the people to persist with him.

Future Islands clearly wanted to tug some heartstrings this time around, and in the respect, On the Water is an unqualified success.

Mostly, it reminds you of what you liked about both Comets and Six Organs, and takes that good stuff a few steps further.