Perlas is a lovely, understated album, sure in its stride but happy to wander, and somehow peaceable and playful, even as the songs hymn broken hearts.

This Dreamless Sleep, is often beautiful, but short on such surprises, and it becomes a bit of a snooze as a result.

Skullsplitter is ultimately that: comforting, even more so than it is odd.

It meanders stylistically all over the map, but unites all those styles in a pounding, obliterating “Bristol Road Leads to Dachau”-style drum beat that punches you right in the soft tissues.

The Body’s use of nearly-subsonic bass and samples puts these now commonplace building blocks of electronic dance music to their most infernal purposes. If there is something unsettling about an extended, windshield-rattling electronic kick drum, The Body has found it and perfected it.

Rhyton is never quite that simple. Here it becomes a vehicle for pretty much all of Shuford’s obsessions, sometimes two or three on top of each other at once, and honestly, it works pretty well.

There are songs that seamlessly slip onto your mental shelf for Ted Leo and the Pharmacists--the music-hall-nodding “Can’t Go Back,” moody, politically-aware “William Weld in the 21st Century,” Lizzy-raising “Run to the City,” nostalgic, Billy-Bragg-ish “Lonsdale Avenue” (which first surfaced via The Both, Leo’s project with Aimee Mann)--but there are also some very interesting diversions.

The second half of the album mixes up longer, quieter intervals of unreality (“The Healer,” “Walking Again” “I Can Still See”) with more bangers (“Swampland” “Red Eyes”), and packs less of a wallop than the onset. Yet there is no question that 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo is more like Ubu’s earliest material than anything Thomas has put out in years

The words, as always, tap into the subconscious, making different kinds of sense depending on when you hear them, though that meaning may be more a matter of you than the words themselves.

Autobahn makes a very recognizable kind of dark, dramatic post-punk-into-new-wave music, and the easy thing would be to dismiss them as a mid-1980s knock-off. But The Moral Crossing is a very enjoyable record from a band that is already pushing the contours of its sound to find its own center.

Familiar as aftermath, the sounds sit at the edge of memory, providing a different intoxication than the vivid hits of adolescence. It’s a specific perspective that often has the clearest view of a movement. This scrappy album finds yet another future for old futurism.

“Equivalents 5,” a four-note sequence shifts pitches and timbres amidst constantly changing atmospheres. The tune itself never changes, but it doesn’t have to keep the listener engaged. It’s the qualities of the sounds, such as the swelling bass and swirling high end of its predecessor, “Equivalents 6,” that count. Just as Stieglitz’s images of clouds became things in themselves, the tones cease to be means and become ends in themselves.

For this 15th solo album, the songwriter beefs up his arrangements a tad, though only compared to the last album, not the lush psychedelic swirl of his Richard Swift-abetted Mariqopa records. Yet the songs remain plain and beautiful, their clean lines unfettered by too much volume or density, delivered in a voice that creaks sometimes but doesn’t falter as it runs up effortlessly into near falsetto range.

The players are so good that even their sketches make for engaging listening. And two songs on the EP are quite good.

Feelings does no damage, it exists to target pleasure centers and does so. The influences are the point and yes there’s the Gilberto voice, the Mendes smoothness, the Getz sophisticate sheen but also a lack of Stereolab’s knottiness and the kind of knowingness and look-at-me cleverness of some of the practitioners and fans of whatever round of lounge revivalism is going on now. There is nothing here to take offence at unless you want to split the hairs between anodyne and placebo.

Though they are spare and though there are a lot of these songs (17), the album doesn’t sag. A restless energy courses through them. Spike-y, unsentimental observations keep them engaging.

The players never lose touch with the paradox of these songs, which have long endured through their strength and frequent expressions of anger, but which also have much still to tell us about human weakness and vulnerability. By tuning into that paradox, the players have made a terrific, surprising and emotionally dramatic record.

The longest track on the recording, at 7’21”, is “Sadder than Water,” where the stasis of basslines found elsewhere are broken into an angular melody overlaid with oscillating chordal material. This, along with the outer two tracks, points to a promising way forward for Shenfeld, in which her skill at creating textures is matched by her ability to develop them.

Plastic Eternity is the rare dead serious, head-trippy album that is also a lot of fun. Here’s to Mudhoney for standing on the precipice and laughing.

It’s not an indulgent album. There’s a discipline to every song. No note sounds wasted or out of place. It so perfectly captures the spirit of those gritty 1980’s psychosexual thrillers, at once lush and foreboding.

Some of the most likable “weird hip-hop” around.

It's the same songwriter we've seen in snapshots from various foreign lands, this time in front of buildings that may as well be down the road: same Seine-side accordion we heard on The Flying Club Cup, same mournfully stately horns he picked up in the Balkans for Gulag Orkestar.

Despite what appears to be a decided attempt to branch out musically, Prekop returns with a slight variation on the same theme that has seemed to follow him around since birth. Luckily, for fans of Prekop's work, progress and self-redefinition has hardly been the point.

In a world where electronic music is omnipresent, Laurel Halo succeeds on Chance of Rain in creating a distinctive voice, one that never allows the listener to settle into a sense of security.

The result is a sound that remains accessible, even sing-along worthy, as it wrestles with the most perplexing existential questions.

Come to Life feels fragmentary in places, still more mixtape than debut album. It can be amazingly disorienting.

Formulaic but thoroughly satisfying.

The Power Out may surprise and confuse listeners expecting Rock It redux, and the new album has a few rough patches and a general inconsistency due to Electrelane's willingness to experiment.