A love of/obsession with antiquity can, at some point, become unbearable. To my ears, The Repulsion Box is one such ridiculous period piece.

It contains everything that makes Eyehategod the unique proposition that they are. It’s an Eyehategod album in excelsis, if you like.

In the format of the double album LP, with over half the songs heading into 10-minute runtimes, he's going to take you on the scenic route through all the pain he's experienced. If only Pearson was as compelling a lyricist as any of the abovementioned figures [Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, and Townes Van Zandt], Last of the Country Gentlemen might have matched the power of his earlier work.

The Fool brims with potential for something more substantial, but never confronts those depths.

Though it doesn’t hit the peaks of No Earthly Man, his 2005 foray into the pure history of the ballad, Spoils easily holds its own.

Sonic Nurse is the happy medium they've been craving. The songs, despite being mostly over five minutes long, are all to the point without feeling meandering.... The balance between noise and melody is right, with each emerging and vanishing at just the right point.

In expanding her breadth, Merritt relinquishes too much of the depth that made her debut so distinguished.

One of Deerhoof’s finest albums, something we should have been prepared for, even this far into the rockers’ career.

On the inauspiciously titled Take Care, Take Care, Take Care, the band's sixth album, it's focused inward and enriched its traditional dynamic ebb and flow with some artful embroidery.

As rich as this stuff sounds (it’s hard to think of a working musician with classier production values) or how much she emotes on the mic, it’s calculated, cerebral and a little bit cold.

Alas, the manic pace of the total structural collage makes it awfully hard to settle in as a listener. Deerhoof vs. Evil has a Guernica quality, in which pleasure and humanity are sublimated to the grotesque, which in turn is justified by the supposed inevitability of rational progress.

They’ve attempted to tighten up where their debut hung slack – shorter, less songs, less room to drag. Yet dragging is all that Celebration Castle does, falling deeper into the garage-meets-new wave dichotomy that looks good on paper but would require considerably more talent to execute.

It’s a better album than Is This It, but then again, so were a dozen other rock records that year.

Stone Breaker is undeniably a Mark E product, propulsive disco-house clouded by his trademark ambient haze, with terrific builds and releases. It's easily one of the better dance music albums that will come out this year.

By blurring the lines of his influences, Wymond Miles has been able to create an album that is very much a reflection of his own vision and personality.

The unpolished, unpredictable nature of Meridian is certainly part of its charm, one way or the other. There are a lot of cinematic drone albums out there, and the organic, human touches here lend this one more personality than most.

Where the debut felt, at times, unnervingly exposed, Iron Gates has a sense of center, balance and calm.

Having demonstrated their ability to adeptly blend movement and atmospheric melody, Caminiti and Porras should aim higher than simple--albeit skillful--drones. That said, Ancestral Star delivers more than enough to reward the patient listener.

However it started, this joint project evolved into something unexpectedly powerful, and that it would be a shame if it stopped here.

The individual tracks here are no less weighty or patient, but it feels like a fire has been lit under Morgan, moving him to make his point more sharply than any before.

There's a distance between the trauma in the lyrics and the overall mood of the song, which only reinforces his albums' theme of optimism in the face of the worst circumstances. So, how does it stand up? Pretty well.

Though the scale of these EPs isn't as wide as some of Muhly's other recent works, it feels every bit as immediate.

Tempest delivers her labyrinthine tales with forensic detail offered gracefully like Saul Williams, Roots Manuva, Asian Dub Foundation and Tricky / Martina Topley-Bird on Pre-Millennium Tension (think “Bad Dream”).

Without a doubt there are quite a few moments on Loose Fur to enthrall diehard fans of anyone involved. And yet, when all is said and done, I’m still wanting more, wondering what else they could have done.

I like this relatively blunt, unadorned Tracey Thorn – not that she was ever forced or florid in her expression, but Love and its Opposite offers her most complete disarmament yet.

So it continues with Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, an album with no missteps...because every trick that Mogwai has used in the past is present in almost comically balanced fashion.

With its powerfully cohesive sonic topography and motley cast of rat smashers, ill-fated squires and cigarette eaters, Space Gun is a robust marriage between the band’s rugged past and more polished present. Further, it’s a reminder that, ultimately, Bob Pollard’s best character is himself.

Don't Be A Stranger is very subtle album, soft in tone but twisted and eaten from the inside by corrosive intelligence.