No Elephants is a gorgeous album, but maybe the most interesting thing about it is the way it bites through the beauty.

The squalling sax that wends its way through most of these tracks and Josephine’s joyful, yet solidly unsettled yelps temporarily brings to mind a more professional and spacious Mika Miko, but that similarity mostly traces back to a common debt owed to Kleenex/LiLiPUT--all three bands make the ennui and alienation of second adolescence both incredibly vivid and, strangely, a lot of fun.

This second Quade album is lovely and strange, fed by crystalline streams of rustic sound but not limited to them, and indeed, reaching into post-rock and symphonic art rock with its haunted melodies.

It's decidedly a Pallett album, just breezier. I like it.

It is a challenging and humorous album that works like a society brave and wise enough to allow dissent.

It's the kind of recording many people can enjoy and want to have in their collection. You can throw it on in most any circumstance. It has the sensuality to seduce, the edge to agitate and the style to inspire.

Oh Holy Molar is a subtle album, but its impact is hard to shake.

This is no victory lap around the baptismal fount, but rather a document of spiritual struggle and hard-won artistry.

Pine is deft with a bow. She’s also a skilled arranger, layering violin, viola, cello, and bass elements with a photographer’s eye; the depth of field expands and contracts as each piece unfurls.

It affords Van Etten the space to really lean into the role of frontwoman, at times reaching into an almost operatic register. It’s a dramatic and unexpected new chapter for an artist who is rarely less than compelling.

The songs on WOT are about as accessible as any Donovan has ever written, with bright clear melodies, relatively tight structures and minimal instrumental embellishment, but they still resist easy analysis.

When the mood allows, and there's time to let it all sink in, an album like ( ) is indispensable nearly from beginning to end.

Occupied With the Unspoken can be challenging and obtuse. It can also unrepentently beautiful. And, at its best, it's both.

Smith’s tracks are both banging and self-effacing, yet the two opposite impulses never seem fully at odds with each other.

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.

The music has a spaciousness to match the timeline: jangling steel strings slide over martial drums while fuzzy synthesizers burst and Rigby repeats the title phrase. She sounds both invigorated and uneasy; a little bit triumphant and a little bit daunted by her arrival.

He sings in a voice that makes everything sound like an indecent proposal (and honestly, some of it is). A younger, less whispery Leonard Cohen with a slightly wider range might be the best point of reference.

Despite their darkest moments and constant shifts in tempo, tone and style Being Dead sound totally in control. The kitchen sink maybe threatened with an unmooring but Where Horses Would Run is greater than its many parts, held together by sheer joy of music making and the commitment of the trio to give free rein to their instincts.

Here are very lovely songs, tempered by oblique though evocative lyrics; here are rustic landscapes juxtaposed with computer sounds and eccentric field samples; here is violence couched in the gentlest possible terms.

Almanac, on the whole, is warmer, more confident and polished than Widowspeak’s self-titled entrée. Enthusiasts along with those on the fence may well find themselves bewitched.

When the Mekons are operating at full strength, their music’s undeniable vitality is somehow in tune with the struggle and suffering they sing about. Not every song on Deserted achieves that level of intense commitment to an emotion or an idea. But most of the songs do, to menacing or to magisterial effects.

The first four songs on Are We There don’t work as well as the later ones. Ultimately this doesn’t hurt, because the later ones are among her very best.

The record proves that Lightning Bolt are still very much a force to be reckoned with.

While it sounded on 2003’s Promise of Love that the American Analog Set were turning themselves into a shoegaze-revival band, Set Free sounds more in line with the gentle atmospheric rock on their finest album, 1999’s The Golden Band.

Viewfinder works because of the way it sounds, at times bright and harsh as neon, at others soft and ambiguous and elusive. You may not be able to discern exactly what it means, but the colors are bright, the edges sharp and the turns often surprising.

With Hey Mr. Ferryman, Eitzel again distills a brutal, nonsensical world into beauty. It’s a feat worth observing.

One of its strongest allures was its comfort and maturity.

Gardner and Hammel haven’t come close to exhausting their songwriting prowess, and Re-Arrange Us is probably their most appealing album to date.