She certainly turned in some of her most thrilling performances for the Peel Sessions.

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

The Beths are bigger, better and more complicated than they’ve ever been. This is the record to beat from now on.

With Stranger Fruit he’s gone even further than that; he’s made something powerful, something that amid all the ritual and esoteric language and bloody events foregrounds the humanity of these imaginary, unnamed people and their real world brothers and sisters in a way that’s far more effective and unforgettable than most metal bands will manage to be on any subject.

Let the Poison Out only ups the ante. Distortion is easy and lo-fi bands are a dime a dozen, but hardly any of them clean up this well.

The songs are good. Both musicians are pros. The execution is offhandedly excellent, like they’re not even trying but nailing it anyway. But you never get the sense that these songs matter all that much to either principal. It’s a parlor trick, a juggling act that they could do all day without dropping anything, but the stakes don’t seem to be very high.

No question that Fohr and her cohorts genuinely like and appreciate the thumpy, cheesy Eurodisco that shimmers through these songs, but they put an unusual spin on it. There’s a warmth in these plastic grooves, an experimental inquiry in these hands-in-the-air raves, a spiritual striving amid hip-jutting, butt-swaying ecstasies.

Scatterbrain is a record of stocktaking but also of hope, at 32 minutes perhaps a lesser entry in The Chills’ canon, it is reminder that one of the great shapers and survivors of the antipodean sound still has much to offer.

The songs feel pared back and polished and just about exactly right, whether in the gospel-swelling idiom of Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam or in the jazzier, more experimental haunts of Calexico. There’s nothing extra, nothing silly, nothing distracting, these songs are as streamlined as an otter in water, slipping through in cool, frictionless purity.

The vocals on cuts like “The House That Doesn’t Exist” may be soft and high, but the melody slashes forward with determination and force. Even the Nico-esque whisper psyche of “Flowers Turn Into Gold” exudes intention. Daydream soft sonics swirl in clouds around Prochet’s mic, but she, herself, is wide awake and in control.

Cryptograms is a tonal wash of brisk speed kicks and seasick comedowns, the kind of thing you could lose an afternoon to.

Credit to Beam, of course, for challenging himself rather than continuing to remake The Creek Drank the Cradle over and over again, but Kiss Each Other Clean is unlikely to count among his best work.

It’s all rather good in a discombobulating way, where the monotonic tension of, say, the Pop Group, meets lavish, emotion-harboring flourishes reminiscent of Orange Juice and even, in a couple of places, the Joe Jackson Band. You can’t get too comfortable even being uncomfortable, because Omni likes to mix it up, the jitter and the sway.

Basic, unassuming, and calling to mind a grip of classic material without going to great lengths to mimic it, Rush to Relax, the band’s third LP, adds almost nothing new to Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s repertoire.

Even if it is hard at certain points to cut through the thick fog of psych drum riffs, Everything Ecstatic leaves ears ringing like a loud summer afternoon in the city – sun-drenched cacophony that doesn’t quite know where it’s going just yet.

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

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

Volume 8 explores some interesting byways of the Bardo Pond sound.

Like Darnielle’s shrill tone that many have come to love and now mourn, We Shall All Be Healed is sometimes on the mark, but often left of center. Its moments of clarity, although surely there, don't come around enough to keep it near the stereo.

It’s particularly satisfying to hear confident music like this, played with the fiery purpose of those who pioneered it over the last two decades.

It is unremarkable to the point of being enraging.

Envelopes could so easily be a cheap Belle & Sebastian clone or a second-rate Magnetic Fields, but they pull off what nobody remembers to in this line of work anymore: personality.

Zeroes and Ones, like Eleventh Dream Day’s early work, has the direct, immediate quality of a live performance.

Living with the Living is Leo's most diverse album yet, a sort of musical "This is your life," where the artist revisits styles and forms that he's loved in the past.

Benchetrit and Spearin’s production work gives You, You’re a History in Rust a pleasantly unpredictable nature.

This is exquisitely made, moodily complicated stuff, and if it doesn’t fit into the current landscape, that’s more our problem than theirs.

Nothing Hurts goes in the ear loud and fast. And out the other ear just as quickly.

Impeccably tasteful, Kitty Wells Dresses is no mere museum piece. It deserves to rest in an enthusiast's country collection somewhere among, say, Buck Owens Sings Harlan Howard and Del Shannon Sings Hank Williams.