Lookout lacks the piercing insight of Berman’s best work––those Old Testament and American Gothic retellings laced with sarcasm and self-loathing. At the same time, there’s a casual quality to this set that trumps the belabored tangle of the last go-round.

Set ‘Em Wild, more so than many albums like this, at least has the quasi-coherence of forming out of the above-mentioned process, and if anything, that makes it more interesting than just a collection a songs.

Johnson only reveals so much. Fruit Bats excel in that sort of space. Johnson sounds less becoming when he lets too much irony in.

It's cool that he's trying to change things up, but there's no substitute for a strong result.

Emika's made a very personal album here that succeeds by its own exacting standards.

[The songs are] skeletal, bittersweet and exquisitely quiet--open enough to make the most of what her cohorts could offer, firm enough to have a semi-personal punch.

Habits & Contradictions is less like a label-released full-length and more like an amateurish mixtape, a work in progress.

In recognizing this missing piece [violinist Noel Sayre] straight on, Occasion for Song may finally have found a way forward.

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.

At 20 songs deep, this is a long program, but there is really no fat to trim. All of the songs are patently fleshed out, and in spite of the laundry list of ideas, it never seems claustrophobic.

Comfort Of Strangers is the best thing Orton has recorded since her debut.

The main album is sharp and vitriolic and honest, with hardly a place to take a breath.

And indeed, kabong it does. Fun stuff.

Maybe they've been listening to The Byrds and Love, but detecting those influences in a band that doesn't have any vocal melodies makes it hard to say for sure.

The Stimulus Package finds him working the angles as sharply as ever. On this album, he swings like a trapeze artist between the extremes of solemn commentary and hardboiled boasting.

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

It’s entirely possible that the skillfully-made Odd Blood will find an entirely new bunch of listeners. Many of the old ones, like this writer, will probably just find themselves frustrated.

These songs blister and spiral and swirl in early 21st century guitar-centric, indie-fashion. ... In an album where Black Belt Eagle Scout celebrates their home, ["Spaces" is] the song where they finally let the listeners into the house.

The New Pornographers’’ songs have always been swift, busy little things for the most part, that’s a large part of their joy, and even if some of the more overt ebullience has been toned down here, the richly arpeggioed repetitions and steady melodic sense on display here means that, “bubblegum Krautrock” or no, this is still heady, catchy stuff.

The building of momentum from beautiful or ominous minimalism into cathartic, sweeping heaviness is remarkable.

Though it may be tempting to describe Radian merely as an instrumental post-rock group in the Chicago tradition – they are instrumental, and they’re signed to Thrill Jockey, after all – there aren’t any post-rock bands that are engaging with ideas from electronic and improvised music to the degree that Radian does.

Each album isn’t simply a solitary entry into the Destroyer oeuvre, but rather some tile in the mosaic or thread in the pattern.

"Third Mouth" is arrestingly pretty, with its delicate guitars and looming, swelling synth notes, but also unfathomable.

The Seduction of Kansas is, all things considered, a solid second album. It builds on the promise of Nothing Feels Natural, and while it occasionally fumbles its own goals, it’s hard to fault Priests for aiming high. One can only hope that the radical ambition and sense of purpose on display here carries them far into the future.

It is crowded with guest artists and jostling with stylistic adventures, but its eccentricities have been mostly sanded down to a glossy finish.

There is little time wasted in this record's nine songs, and that Mesirow packs so many wonderful sounds into it without really complicating the chord progressions or basic melodies is perhaps the truest testament to her talent.

The busted up and agonizing forms that result accumulate into a hell of a record. Put on your black boots and stomp around in it awhile.

It is not as raw as the first LP, not as musically belligerent or emotionally wrenching. Instead, it's got an elegance and symmetry to it, a sense of space and precision that was, if not entirely missing from Hammer of the Gods, at least not fully realized.