Orcutt builds musical structures layer by layer, part by part. These compositions are sometimes jaggedly ecstatic – “Or head on” for one, leaps and lurches with joy. As in any congregation, sometimes a delighted, discordant, untrained voice rises in volume above the rest.

The real masterstroke of So It Goes is that it’s not: This is one for the here and now, as contemporary as New York hip-hop gets.

HEY WHAT is equally thrilling for the way they now sound impressively eloquent using it. If last time was learning and pushing towards a necessary change, HEY WHAT simply is living a different way, channeling the disarray of their noises and our world into something beautiful and moving, all the stronger for any fractures, cracks and fuzz.

Jaar attempted something ambitious with this album--it stands apart, even if it never risks a whole lot. Space Is Only Noise is unique, but also a work of modesty and, for an album that samples French poetry and is rarely danceable, it's unpretentious.

Past Life Martyred Saints was a ferociously personal record in a way that people responded to, but The Future’s Void is just as intense, even though it takes on almost entirely new subject matter and methods.

As Keepnews said in the original liner notes, “There can be room for vast newness within the unhampered framework of this ‘old’ music.” [Ahmed] have continued to mine that sense of discovery with ongoing zeal.

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's an encyclopedia of rhythmic assimilation, perfectly executed, nary a lovingly adopted concept out of place. Catchy as hell, too.

I’m not sure anyone was looking for a doo-wop revival led by a father and three sons, but here it is, and it’s a kick.

It's not an intrinsically triumphant album, and in part that's why it's a triumph: comfortable, well-adjusted rock by and for aging erudites, a bit greyer, a bit wiser, but no less creative or inspiring.

This is a record full of loose ends and fractious energy, not at all compromised by its move up the food chain.

White Chalk shifts between comforting melancholy and supremely discomforting performativity with preternatural ease.

It’s that prickliness that makes this record intriguing, and durable enough to reward repeat listens.

As a cohesive statement, this very well could be their best in a very long time, if not ever.

Landwerk No. 3 is, like its predecessors, a work of craggy beauty that does homage to a world—that of pre-war European Jews—destroyed in the same wave of technology and social change that made possible the preservation of its traces in the archival recordings and, in turn, rendered the recordings obsolete.

Early music is fascinating to people in a way that goes deeper than anything else, and for musicians and artists, all those early things spill out in the things we make. Gonzalez does that here in a fun and remarkable way.

Though comprising only nine songs across just over half an hour of music, Actually, You Can is bursting at the seams with ideas.

On the whole Basement is noisy and rough, and often sounds more like the best record Heatmiser never made than the next Elliott Smith album.

All At Once shares many of the same stylistic preoccupations as War Prayers, but by carefully reworking similar material, it improves on its predecessor.

V for five, V for victory and V for very much what you want from the Budos Band.

They're not breaking significant new ground here, but neither are they standing still.

It sounds, at times, less like a proper shoegaze act and more like a memory of one: the hooks as pronounced, but with an ineffable dreamlike quality thrown in, less something quantifiable than something to be experienced. Thankfully, this is an album that both satisfies and mystifies; both are welcome qualities.

Wild Loneliness is the perfect album for this moment, in which darkness isn’t denied but is repudiated to within an inch of its life.

Another record by the Bevis Frond, and another long, acid-fried blues? That’s a gift.

Bright and Vivid gives little of itself immediately, but unfolds to a much larger extent over time.

Circular Sounds takes the craft aspect to a higher level. Stoltz’s early records were scrappy, guitar-centric home recordings, and his previous LP, Below the Branches, was a piano-dominated, primary colors affair, but this one is a study in how to blend signifiers and sonorities so that they enhance each other.

Ghettoville is a purposefully secretive record, a vision quest, a Cassavetes lens--at times challenging to sit through, but the more you look into it, the more you might discover.

This record clears a spot. And in some temporary way, wins against the ever mounting pile of post-punk consumer artifacts.