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.

The quality of the album isn't the issue, it's the qualities, the contradictions, the duplicity: it's what makes it as durable a listen as ever, but oddly empty when it comes to empathy.

While Dulli has mined the same vein of pop music for almost 25 years, he has nonetheless accomplished an awful lot with it.

Flat Worms doesn’t go anywhere strange or new. You can lose your way in the record’s middle section, where songs become easily exchangeable, one for another. That said, the first three and last two tracks on the record are noisy fun.

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.

Rhyton is never quite that simple. Here it becomes a vehicle for pretty much all of Shuford’s obsessions, sometimes two or three on top of each other at once, and honestly, it works pretty well.

There's something lunky and crude that weighs down the chaos, even if it outwardly resembles arty contrariness. Motorik without motor skills, New Brigade actually sounds new.

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.

This album's problem is a very, very shoddy sequence.

Ultimately, Conquistador contains few surprises, but its stark beauty and understated textural depth prove that Carlson is still finding new and engaging ways of repeating himself.

The few moments of clarity don’t diminish Sleepwalk’s seductive anesthetic, which may be one of the album’s drawbacks.

"Jarvis"... is essentially a patchwork drawing from low and high points of his career - a quilt meant as a cover as well as an ornament.

There’s a sense of stagery in this album, as there is in all JSBX discs....

The spoken words mix wonderfully with excellent musical arrangements, but the original songs primarily suffer in comparison.

Their attempt to weld the cerebral and physical is not always smooth but part of the attraction is to sit in on a work in progress, to hear the musicians grasping at handholds and swinging for the next ledge, fearless in the vulnerability of thought and action.

Devotion goes down a little easier is both its strength and a feature that proves a bit disappointing in the end.

Working almost like a glorified mixtape, many of the tracks bleed together or start mid-scene with field recordings of corner action. It adds to the feeling that you’ve dropped in on something important.

Violent Hearts occasionally plods, as on "No One," "Other Girls," and the opener "Believe," (at least before its delightfully messy climax). But more often it quietly impresses, revealing new melodic and harmonic strands with each subsequent listen.

It's a densely constructed EP, and the more baroque and strange it gets, the more compelling it becomes.

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

What's up with all this defeat? The answers, in no particular order: Because he's Neil Young.

Hval is unafraid to experiment and let the chips fall where they may. The results on Iris Silver Mist are variable but always intriguing.

Spirit Counsel doesn’t make for an easy listen, but largely because of its length. Moore’s compositional work and tonal explorations remain intriguing on repeated listens.

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.

Oversteps can trudge a bit--there’s a ponderousness to some of the cuts that’s borne of that most un-Autechreish of values, predictability. It takes a while for the exhilaration to kick in, but when it does, it’s worth the wait

Cut Off Your Hands' anthemic-ness--its lack of austerity and rigor--will put some people off. Yet there's something rather good in the way these songs bring together luxury and despair.

It seems borne more out of logical considerations than organic ones. It doesn’t mean the music is necessarily bad, but rather that it’s animated more out of a lifelessness than anything else. It’s undead music.

The charm of these songs won't last forever. They'll have their season in your heart or car stereo, their refrains will seep gently into your vocabulary, and at some point you'll stop needing them, but it's welcome company while it lasts.