Dizzying and beautiful at once, it is unlike anything else from 2009.

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.

Five years is a long time to make fans wait, but the quality of the material and willingness to tinker with their fairly rigid pop formula has resulted in another memorable, extremely listenable collection of songs.

Preserved and proffered in sound, the Parks, both physical and cerebral become a source of solace and wonderment.

Dupuis’ reference may run more to punk and indie, rather than disco/R&B, but the effect is eerily similar: gender studies inquiries encased in the kind of music that once looked uncritically at female disempowerment. Yet while it’s serious stuff, it’s also fun, with big bashing choruses and somersaulting strings of words that surprise and entertain.

Wallpaper Music is a lot more complicated than it seems, and those complications give it a depth and resonance that most garage punk records can't muster.

Researching the Blues may be one of the most pleasant surprises of 2012.

In the end, it feels wrong to call this album a solo record, since it is defined and elevated by the people Goddard works with. He’s been adventurous in seeking out partners, choosing some familiar ones and some that no one would have predicted, and the risks, especially, have paid off.

In the newfound center on Thank You Very Quickly, Eagleson and company have stealthly transitioned from indie ethno-experimental vanguards to genuine Afro-Rock champions, erasing 7,000 miles of distance and so many years of history.

You Are Free almost has two disparate styles, and that would be the criticism here. Yet that's the result of her particular mania: stand up, shout then quickly retreat to your seat and hide your face.

There’s actually a groove there, however, and Author & Punisher’s lot is to never give in to the base aesthetics of speed or pummel. Instead, Melk En Honing explores every corner of sub-doom tempo, with occasional detours into extreme melody and harmony buried deep enough to avoid comparison to Alice In Chains and neo-doom sweethearts Pallbearer.

Downstate is far more varied [than 2023's Upstate] and the songs make their point and get on with it — a definite improvement.

It's Bowles's reflections on the silence of the desert, the way its stillness rearranges your molecular structure, that resonates with Travels In The Dustland.

Life has a wholly predictable uniqueness.

This is an album that pulls you up out of gloom and into exultation, and if it’s manipulative that way, so be it. As Watts says, we would like to be like that, and Full Circle makes it feel, at least for a little while, like we are.

At its best, it's both cathartic and transformative, harnessing the transformative power of empathy to politicize the personal and personalize the political.

Re-invented and fully assured, Pattern is Movement is a band that can do what it wants. One can’t argue with Pattern is Movement’s results.

With these five songs, The Fresh & Onlys have finally moved out of the garage for good.

The band comes together neatly, covering a range that encompasses stripped-down recordings and wider-canvas anthems. Avi Buffalo make songs that, at their best, remain lodged in one's head for days.

For the most part, Birgy’s excitability lends the album an infectious charm. Ultimately, Mega Bog deserves to be appreciated alongside similarly talented proponents of the absurd, such as Aldous Harding and Cate le Bon. Dolphine is a strange and affecting listen; the sound of a free-wheeling afternoon in the sun curdling into early-evening shadows.

It’s an intricate, carefully crafted set of songs that blows by in a warm breeze.

Benchetrit and Spearin’s production work gives You, You’re a History in Rust a pleasantly unpredictable nature.

Dry Cleaning gave us a taste in 2019; New Long Leg is a banquet upon which to feast.

Way is cleaner, clearer and more luminous--in all ways Ecstatic Sunshine’s best effort yet.

The Australian trio feedtime's 1980s recordings, which are collected on The Abberant Years box set, prove them to be traditionalists of the best sort.

The concept and the execution are both spectacular.

A potent mix of performance art, avant-garde tactics and imagined folk practices, O’Dwyer’s music feels adventurous yet also personal, as if she is examining not her own self but her body and its (temporary) presence in space.

An intriguing record that never repeats itself.