It’s a lengthy, reflective and beautiful record that mostly steers away from the more rock-oriented sound of Shearwater’s last two releases.

Gonzalez has wisely resisted the urge to bulk up his sound, and concentrated instead on seeing how far a guitar, his voice and a few continents worth of influences can carry him.

Load Blown is stunning. It engulfs. While sacrificing little if anything to compositional templates, the record is remarkable listenable.

For all the sturm und drang on Half Divorced, the component parts of each song are well-differentiated and clean. You get a clear sense of both the individual performances and their interaction.

Da Mind of Traxman marries the soul of the past with the bangs of the future so fluidly that the sound's innately harsh nature has been marginalized, making for an all-around enjoyable experience no matter the location.

While it makes no effort to conceal its intellect, it solicits an under-the-table emotional connection the Seas and Cakes of the indiesphere simply will not allow.

There may be an idea at the center of the record, but it’s overwhelmed by the sheer visceral quality of the songs. You listen and your guts shake. The whole room seems to shake. One is reminded of a clause the Body have quoted from Hrabal’s foreboding writing: “my whole room hurts.” If that’s akin to the affect the Body are seeking, they have succeeded.

Messy, expansive, full of contradictions, sharp turns, and a joie de vivre that wants to experience and express everything at once. They are also endlessly inventive and engaging, their effortless melding of styles held together by glorious harmony and complete assurance.

This isn’t a case of trying to reinvent the wheel so much as it is reveling in just how very good you’ve gotten a making wheels in the first place.

At its best, jazz is a genre capable of evoking every other musical discipline, and the deftly-played music on We Are Sent Here By History serves as an energizing reminder of that. It’s deeply felt music that makes for a rewarding and often thrilling listening experience.

Wavering Radiant is strong enough on musical merit that decade-strong devotees deservedly ought to join new converts in welcoming the latest Isis album into the world.

The combination of bile and hook, of wiry, mistrustful intelligence meshed in danceable synth pop works throughout the album, the contradictions bristling without overwhelming the tunes.

Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois pits Lanois’ laconic style against Funk’s frenzy until the contradictions between them are heightened and collapse, resulting in a deeply weird and captivating album.

There is machinery working even in the greenest corners of this sonic garden, whooshing and clicking and percolating in the interstices to make everything look a little brighter and more colorful than life.

A dramatic, often fascinating work, it inspires repeated and careful listening, and stands alongside the best of Bachmann’s work.

One skippable track makes for a slight mark against an otherwise strong return to the world. After decades of teases, EPs and live stuff, a few good singles would have been satisfying, but with a quality album, it’s certainly nice to have the Chills again.

This kind of detail-heavy album can make you feel like you're missing something if you're not paying attention. Each listen can run the risk of feeling incomplete. But by that same token, it also means it can feel new each time.

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.

The energy ebbs and flows between these two poles, so that intellectual inquiry becomes a gateway towards straight-on freakery, and wild intuitive leaps make sense of complex formulae.

You may stumble upon an experiment or a minute-long fragment here and there, but the deck is stacked with memorable songcraft and an attitude that understands silliness without succumbing to sketch-comic dead ends.

Mekons are the equal of any post-punk band on both sides of the Atlantic, and they are still very serious about proving it.

Snaith rips the rarefied sounds of modern pop from their established context and forms nonlinear compositions constantly in flux.

Out of Range is serene and difficult, trippy and literate, loosely countrified and footnote-ably dense and referential, a zone-out record with a library card. Not many albums simultaneously slow down your pulse rate and rev up your brain, but this one does.

Aware of the vastness but alive to the myriad small beauties that flit in and out of view, seemingly oblivious but alert to the potential threat of your presence. Carmen Villain captures these delicate balances in her music and invites the listener to ponder their passivity and question their gaze.

Newsom is, obviously, not the first musician to get technically better at what she does while we’re looking on, and not the first, either, to elicit a twinge of regret from listeners who liked the rawer, wilder beginnings.... Divers hides its sting not in an unusual voice, but in its lyrical and musical complexity, and it’s a good trade after all.

Future Times takes a few plays to sink in. Its balance of the monumental and the delicate, the personal and the epic, shift as you listen and only draw you in gradually over time. Stay with it, though. It’s worth it.

Until the Colours Run is a huge improvement, though: bigger, messier, louder and more transcendent. If you’re into Speck Mountain, The Besnard Lakes or No Joy, this one is worth a spin.

The tunes tend to unfold at mid-tempo and with the logic of a short story as, once more, Jones composes and performs, with seeming effortlessness, a set of memorable melodies that reward repeated listening.