It retains Mountain's dense production, but swaps out its calculated affectations for raw sexual urgency, deep-black humor and desperate foreboding.

When drums and fiddle swagger, it feels like a Krautrock hoedown. Still, the harmonium exerts enough of a presence to give the music a devotional quality. In combination with the chanting, this music invites you to surrender to reverence without telling you what to believe.

The in-the-moment experience of Fernow’s music is all physical; the aftershock is almost all intellectual, the specifics of the apparent transformation provided entirely by the listener, who is left standing not so much accused as self-implicated.

It’s not often that music this loud and distorted can break your heart.

Here’s an album that gets at the balance between pure, raucous, positive punk energy and the elegiac textures of lush, baroque pop.

The songs here have engaging, melodic hooks to spare.

Gloss Drop is the most self-sufficient world Battles have made yet, and a pretty good argument in favor of music that gets less and less interesting the more you know about it.

Picking out parts is really beside the point – the album works as a restless, searching, gorgeous whole. Morris and his band have never been better.

In the end, Switched on Ra is the best kind of tribute, demonstrating a fundamental grasp of the original material but taking it in an entirely different direction.

The track [“A Study in Vastness”] initiates a string of four pretty flawless songs at the heart of this album that do very little very well. Single ideas unfurl across five, six, seven minutes at a time, never feeling like they need to go anywhere other than patiently exploring exactly where they are.

La Forêt isn't nearly as overtly poppy as Fabulous Muscles was, but it's just as well written.

This one, the first all-Segall live recording (he split a 2015 Live at Pickathon with King Tuff), manages to increase the intensity. It documents a monster tight, no-frills session from 2018 in obliterating, over-the-top style.

Carried to Dust represents a refreshing return to eccentricity.

On the Tylers’ third and best album, The Ox and the Ax, there is no obscuring the harsh world conjured by these songs with elaborate instrumentation, overwrought singing or dance tempos. Recorded in crystalline clarity, the instrumental accompaniments are usually little more than guitar or banjo, and while they’re skillfully played, it is the Tylers’ voices, unadorned and rich, that are the center of this record.

Layers of clever reference resolve into songs that resonate emotionally. They’re smarter than most songs and better played, but they also have that elusive way of landing, so that they seem to tell you more about life and persistence and suffering than what’s in the words.

Mostly as enjoyable as it is edifying from start to finish, the program repeatedly underscores that without artistry of expression, associative anger and the demonizing of one's enemy, however righteous, rarely lead to lasting empowerment for a person or a people.

DJ Haram is all jaded Brooklyn sophistication and all wide-eyed exotic transcendance, all at the same time, and it’s wonderful.

More accurately, these duo performances are truly sympathetic and move at the molecular level, making each piece on Cosmic Lieder wonderfully dense with information and ideas.

At first, it sounds a bit of a mess, and takes serious patience to unpack. But its catchiness does emerge with time, and it cements Ellison's position as one of the few genuinely unpredictable artists at work.

He’s been moving this way the whole time, though you may not have connected the dots before, and now with Deafman Glance, he’s arrived.

Even more striking is the way she folds all this talent into her songs, keeping all the bits distinct while shaping them into a complicated, intricate whole that breathes like a living creature. Nicely done.

This fourth Purling Hiss album takes a lot of what was exhilarating about the self-titled and Hissteria and adds some structure and melody.

This disc has all the ingredients that made Faust the force it once was, plowing headlong through rock establishment and leaving us to reassess the wrecked landscape.

This is punk rock that's both intellectually challenging and young at heart.

The results are quietly remarkable.

My Light My Destroyer is a transformational record for Jenkins. However daunting the path forward may seem, she has a lot to say as she overcomes successive challenges.

Mostly, it reminds you of what you liked about both Comets and Six Organs, and takes that good stuff a few steps further.

Darkness at Noon thrives on pushing and pulling the listener from emotional peak to valley.