Ugly is Screaming Female's Steve Albini record, an inevitability for a group like this, and the trio brings its "A" game to the project.

The songs are abbreviated, but nonetheless complete, coherent and fully-fleshed.

By letting their music do all the talking, Russian Circles have told the story of their personal growth entirely in song, and it’s a growth that involves all the melodic intricacy and inventive theme-and-variation play that their contemporaries have had much greater difficulty overcoming.

Comradely Objects, is the band flexing at the peak of their powers.

If you like dub techno - and who among us with a taste for dissociated, repetitive, awesomely deep and gritty music wouldn't? - you're bound to like a lot of this stuff, and love some of it.

Yes, you’ll hear echoes of influence but McGreevy and Lewis have forged their own path based on really good songwriting and musical chops.

Though their formula has changed scant little over the past three decades, it has lost little of its potency.

It is the first album he ever recorded in a studio, and both the clarity of the recording and the precision of the performances betray considerable effort spent getting it right.

More even-tempered than almost any of their previous efforts, it’s their most consistent full-length since Realistes.

Orange is another worthy and replayable stack of oddball tunefulness.

While there might be a sketchy blueprint here, Prince took R&B to unknown places both musically and by integrating a bizarre personal philosophy that tried to make sense of God, sex, life, and death, but mostly sex.

Bozulich stumbles through a sagging mansion of sound like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, which is to say, arch, elegant and utterly used up. But there is power in the decrepitude.

While they sacrifice a little of the propulsive excitement of their debut, the tweaks to their sound deepen the emotional impact of this new set of songs.

However central Sylvian’s bleak commentary, the weight and suggestiveness of this record gives it a sense of unpredictability, possibility, almost an openness beyond itself. It’s absolutely superb.

While the album stands well on its own, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors provided an essential scaffolding.

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.

Musically, Sunbathing Animal is much the same as, but slightly more feral than, Light Up Gold, its two-stepping vamps harder and jitterier, its strangled guitar licks more aggressively atonal.

The band’s mechanics are becoming more masterful, with Marian Li Pino’s drums particularly boosted on this outing.

Sleeper is a large, though not radical, departure from the bulk of Segall’s catalog. But in dialing down the fuzz and eschewing girls-and-partying songs to dig deep into his own personal demons, Segall shows marked maturity as a songwriter.

Despite a 100% turnover in accompanists and recording locations from his William Tyler-produced debut, he doesn’t sound terribly different here. His big, distinctive voice can hold you via sheer volume and timbre even if you don’t listen to a word he says, and his robustly picked electric guitar is a band by itself.

The point is that new stuff is added without compromise or dilution. And listening here, you realize that change is good and maybe even necessary, no matter how much you like how Protomartyr has always sounded.

Despite there being a wealth of moods and stylistic flourishes on Distractions, it nevertheless coalesces into a forceful and homogenous whole.

The roughness, the edgy vocals, the cacophonous guitars won’t be for everyone, but this set is a welcome window back through over 20 years of avant-rock.

I do know that there’s a lot to love about Cutouts, and it’s certainly a more substantive release than its title might suggest — that these are the cutting room–floor tracks from the Wall of Eyes sessions. Far from it: overall, this is a more colorful and dynamic record.

Fennesz has produced a maximalist experience with apparently minimal equipment but this is not about the machines rather the human producing the sounds. Agora is another deep exploration of the boundaries of experimental guitar ambience in which to lose oneself.

Just Say No… is quite probably the group’s heaviest and most abrasive salvo to date.

The whole thing took shape with hardly any notice and minimal rehearsal, across language and cultural barriers and in front of an audience, but nonetheless catches a wave and holds onto it in a very intuitive way. Probably if the players thought too hard about what they were doing, they’d lose the thread, but they don’t. It’s a fast ride and a jam and well worth experiencing.

There’s a lot that could go wrong with this approach on Sun Gangs--but nothing does. For all the arch drama, the big rock songs on here are frenzied, and the small indie pop songs are lean and melodic.