While Jamie Stewart & co. succeed at replicating the fractured nature of their live shows – the mix of sparse and dense, broken and enraged, auxiliary percussion and programming, noise and melodiousness is all here – it's beginning to sound rote.

They’re simply better songwriters than many others in the field, and their ability to recontextualize these sounds into something so subsequently fresh and familiar is a stunning achievement.

Ultimately, Love Will Prevail probably isn't going to win over any newcomers, but it's a solid addition to Cult of Youth's catalog; it's pretty clear by now that nobody is doing this type of thing with the gusto and attention to detail that they are.

This is Frog Eye’s most elegantly structured, premeditated, composed album ever. It is also miraculously, unexpectedly the band’s best to date.

This is a record that makes me hope for even better things to come.

Blood Rushing is an odd cornucopia of sounds, styles and rhythms bound together by Foster's singular voice and unwavering control, and such a surprise on first listen that I found it something of a grower.

You can’t listen to Via without going through the wringer, but you also can’t listen to it without feeling stronger, surer and more defiant afterward.

More even-tempered than almost any of their previous efforts, it’s their most consistent full-length since Realistes.

Back in the mid-1970s Faust asserted both ownership and ironic distance with the song “Krautrock;” here, they show that they can still wax motorik if the situation requires it.

ISAM's clusters aren't as advanced as Tobin might have you think, and only represent a monumental leap forward if you compare them to his trio of classic albums, all of which were recorded more than 10 years ago.

So is Patton a charlatan or a genius? While Suspended Animation doesn’t exactly settle the question, it’s shitloads of fun trying to find out.

Despite the intricacy, the provocative joining of primitive and futuristic, you’re left with both too much and too little. The tracks run on for over an hour in their skeletal, restrained way. There’s not so much to think about, and a long time to do it in.

One of the most beguiling and rewarding Six Organ of Admittance albums — 39-minutes of synth ballads, cracked space-glam and 1980s-glossed guitar overload.

Glynnaestra is not quite of this world, but that has a good bit of its appeal.

Taken as a whole, however, OH consists of more stellar stuff from a band that’s always taken the tortoise’s view of the race.

It covers too much ground, spreads its inventive energies too thin.

Wild Peace is a work in progress, a document of a band on a very fast track, but still figuring out exactly who and what it is.

To wit, what irritates most about Compass is the way it assaults the listener with wave after wave of sonic winks, of moments intended to be witty or clever that instead fall flat. Busy and fussily filtered at every turn, I guess it’s ‘crazy’ sounding or something, but there’s nothing communicated in the slightest.

Slight doubts about whether or not Zooey Deschanel is the best person to be singing these songs aside, Volume One is pretty much spot-on.

Particularly in the lugubrious opening half of the disc, Clogs tends to repeat things simply for the sake of repeating them without really building towards anything.

Thom Yorke used to make better music than the nine anemic Atoms for Peace cuts here.

You can feel him, almost, willing the elements of words, drums and bass to come together in a music that is more than the sum of its parts.

Stepping gingerly and keeping balanced in precarious places, Wald is a cat. It’s as pleasing as a purr.

For most of its runtime, highlights included, the album is mired in the same self-drowning-out that afflicts the best of its ilk.

It is full of unusual clarity and purpose and seems to have benefited from a certain amount of restraint.

Bill Callahan's latest solo effort is so laid back that it almost never gets going at all.

With so much in the blender, it's a testament to BSS's production skills that tracks like this don't fly apart. But they do get muddled.

Two fistfuls of songs that are at once as tight and as expansive as the band has ever been. The trio isn’t unrecognizable in their compositions, but it’s the way they use space that appears to have shifted. The result is formidable for fans and an easy entry point for those just joining the journey.