House of Land makes for a strange old-timey listen. It doesn’t stretch as far from its foundation as some of its referents might suggest, yet it continually pushes at something slightly alien. ... That intelligent play between various traditions makes for a listen at least as captivating as it is new-fangled.

It's engineered, in a feature-article-friendly way, to embody its creator's personal development and comment on it in a way that's slick, weightless and easily disowned. For the first time in Marshall's career, lighter equals better

It’s great fun, but it’s all boundless energy without centre.

The potency of AHAAH's genres of choice are both the album’s difficulty and strength; if you aren’t partial to Balkan brass, klezmer or mariachi, abandon all hope of sticking this one out.

Pole’s technique still relies heavily on the minimal, but Steingarten is garnished with a sonic density lacking on his first three full-lengths.

It’s definitely a more expansive palette, and not entirely to my taste, but I’ll defend any artist who takes a chance like this.

The guitar is the wild card in these tightly reined-in, metronomically repetitive cuts. It rises in fits and starts, jabs at solid masses of beats, tests the outer limits of rigorously defined song structures.

When McCombs gets deep into his vision of the world, or maybe a liminal state between ours and his, he’s at his finest on Tip of the Sphere. He needs a lifeline, though, to keep him tethered enough to this one that neither he nor his audience wanders off. He hasn’t gone too far, but the steadiness works better than the spiraling as this disc goes ‘round.

A ragged, gnarly listen, Future Teenage Cave Artists is, fittingly, one of the band’s most experimental offerings in years, offering short bursts of breakneck, catchy garage rock, counterbalanced by plenty of reverb-drenched dissonance and eerie atmospherics. Just as it feels like it may be settling into something approaching conventional songcraft, the band chucks in a blast of competing ideas that sound like they’re eating each other alive, desperately scrambling for survival.

The songs are best when they say the least, implying depths that are, perhaps, mostly in the listener’s head.

Each moment of each song is completely unpredictable, to the point where even after multiple listens some of these transitions still seem to come out of nowhere.

Mostly Taiga is about sensation, playful and wild and smart but moving way too fast for contemplation.

The title is Norwegian for "poverty," but its rewards are as rich as they've ever been.

At times, it sounds as though the band was still working through exactly how they wanted all of the various elements to work together, such that there are some immediate, hook-filled songs ("White Winter Hymnal," "Your Protector," "He Doesn't Know Why") and other songs whose more complex structures require more from the listener.

An album on which the odd lyrical infelicities barely detract the duo’s breezy musical confections. Brijean still reside in a pastel world but the shades of gray have become harder to ignore and Macro is a homeopathic remedy which works best when they make you believe.

The songs are fine, the lyrics are striking, but there’s nothing to break your heart.

Though Woke Myself Up is a group project, one still gets a sense of it having been recorded at home, amongst friends. They seem to be having a nice time of it.

What makes Strength In Numbers interesting is the way it departs from the usual.

Biasonic Hotsauce is broken up by some campy skits that buffer the genre hops, and after a few of them, the record turns toward electro.

An album full of cover versions is not really essential listening, although there are a few songs here reminiscent of the better covers from past Yo La Tengo albums.

It's a gorgeous and dreamy feeling, and one that's easy to spend a lot of time in.

More often than not, Slave Ambient offers a sound that's equally familiar and new, simultaneously meeting expectations and evading them. It's an album whose immediate accessibility cloaks a deeper, subtler series of rewards.

Though AUN isn't always interesting, it is a cohesive collection, and I don't doubt for a moment its suitability as the score for Honetschläger's film.

At the end, Wyatt takes the For the Ghosts Within's over-riding mushiness, runs with it, and it makes it totally work.

When obtuse means nonsensical and there's no one consistently there to tie the free associations together, it becomes less a case of judging Vast on his own street odyssey and more a case, ironically, of falling back to where we started in the least desirable way: It's good, yeah, but it's no "Iron Galaxy."

When MF Doom takes the time to plot and scheme it, no idea is too outlandish, no beat too unorthodox, and much of MMâ?¦Food? is the work of a master chef cooking up some marvelous shit. However, masters get held to a higher standard.

Thomas has a near prodigy-like ability to generate indelible hooks that pull from a relatively deep well of inspiration.

Sunwatchers II is an enjoyable listen, and its energy and good intentions are admirable; it’s clear that Sunwatchers take the spiritual and political implications of musical ecstasy seriously.