Here Hayes gives every instrument space to breathe, while creating a beautiful group sound that moves with all the lithe grace of ‘70s soul sides.

Lost Time is a spiritual statement, executed through but not limited by drum kits, and it works towards revelation.

I'm From Barcelona is fun, but ultimately shallow.

Seek Warmer Climes is still more visceral than cerebral. It washes over you in a foul, cold, gritty spray, and you can hardly breathe when it’s coming straight at you.

Is Talkie Walkie the redemptive effort their audience has waited for? Yes and no.

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.

The real measure of Knoxville's success is that it always feels it has ended too soon.

These tunes are constructed around static, meditational sonic atmospheres that fluctuate in volume and timbre but do not fundamentally change. There’s a sense of the eternal in them, even when as in “Scarper” they twitch into propulsion with percolating electronic rhythms.

To think about Invisible Girl too much would most certainly do it a disservice. Khan and BBQ are obviously not reinventing the wheel -- they’re just reveling in the eternal command of lock-up-your-daughters rock & roll.

As with their earlier release, Extra Golden seems to shine particularly in two speeds: an amped up tango rhythm that seems to accompany the more soul-driven songs, and a faster gallop that tends to yield the most sweat

Its appeal is immediate, rather than slow burning, and you can see it gaining fans who are less transfixed by eccentricity, more interested in tightly constructed songs. Yet at the same time, the words and images in these songs are deeply personal and self-revealing in a way that, I think, the first two albums were not.

Without the contextual anchor that Vo’s art gave to “Deforms,” Girl often gets lost in its own tormented vision. The album plays out like a series of crises, some real, some imaginary, some personal, others global. ... The better angels of Xiu Xiu’s nature are on display in the slow, scraping cello elegy “Amargi ve Moo” and in album closer “Normal Love,” the closest Girl gets to a legitimate pop song.

The players worked remotely, sent in files and Johnson and Kaufman fit them together. All of which makes it even more remarkable how effortless and streamlined this album sounds, how its sounds swirl around the listener like warm currents, and how carefully Johnson kept the balance between letting the songs speak for themselves and enveloping them in luminous arrangements.

Brian Borcherdt has made rough, beautiful songs out of broken bits of things, haunting atmospheres from the gritty transience of dust, and that's something worth doing.

Because of the language barrier and the unfamiliar cultural references, you’ll probably miss some of the subtleties, but that makes this album all the more fascinating. More than most records, it’s a journey through a strange, dreamlike landscape that resembles what you know only tangentially. Mystery, indeed, but an intriguing one.

As the music comes full circle, Vertigo Days forms a satisfying whole. On subsequent spins, more and more subtle threads and parallels become apparent, highlighting the craftsmanship The Notwist have invested in what may prove to be their finest album to date.

Everything on this oddball album demands your attention, often in unexpected ways.

It blunts and softens its influences, whether heavy rock or soul or krautrock, and delivers them in a medium-temperature hippie haze.

Though excellent in brief parts, much of the album is still worrisome, at times specifically seeming to document a band running out of steam.

It takes time to acclimate to the album's frenetic fog. In that sense, Centipede Hz is both a return to and rejection of form.

We worship “cool” in rock and punk. We love the bands that stay unaffected behind their dark shades, from the Velvets on down. But what’s so great about this second Bar Italia album is that it shows how hard that is, and what a cost it exacts.

In short, the observations are sharp and the music cranks. Twenty-first century Brooklyn doesn’t sound like much fun, but Bodega does.

Today is the Day ranks as an outstanding album on its own merits, but its timing is also impeccable. Arriving at the end of this year, it will hopefully silence those who have accused Yo La Tengo of sliding into mid-career pleasantness.

Listening to Equilibrium is like attending a Matthew Shipp museum retrospective: one samples the various facets of Shipp’s recent career without delving too deeply into any one of them.

As it stands, I enjoy it for what it is.

Lux is immersive, intriguing, delicate and evasive, like many an ambient record. And, inescapably, it doesn't resonate as much as Eno's groundbreaking works in the genre.

This is where the irony comes in--he sacrifices most of his originality to referential tropes. Through successfully emulating noteworthy keyboardists of the past, he nearly obliterates his own identity as a practitioner. It's not that he isn't good, either. He's too good.

This is a record full of loose ends and fractious energy, not at all compromised by its move up the food chain.