Rather than the longer, complex compositions, the four shortest tracks here are the most intriguing, as they compress Tortoise’s way of layering disparate ideas into brief, disorienting beatscapes.

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.

It lacks the thrill of seeing Nace stalk the stage, balancing Gordon’s cool command with understated menace, let alone the body English each needs to exercise to procure the sounds that they get out of their guitars. It also lacks the contrasting spectacle of the experimental films that the duo often projects upon the rear wall of the hall. What you get instead is a slightly murky recording that filters their outsize rain of blows and ends up conveying solid representation rather than out-of-body transcendence.

Thee Oh Sees conjure sweet, sticky fuzz, and there's very few spaces on Warm Slime to take a breath, or think about what you've heard. Then again, it's this very saturation that makes Warm Slime such a natural high.

Where Beaches blended human touch and electricity to create heart-stopping climaxes and an air of constant expectancy, Broken Ear attempts a streamlined repetition of the formula with much more emphasis on the electricity, and the whole does not equal the sum of the parts.

At its best, then, Vanity is Forever seems to be an album where the nostalgic references are intentional: New Wave as touchstone rather than simply gazing backward fondly.

A band that glides effortlessly when it might benefit from a bit of friction. A little ugliness might break up these pristine gate-reverbed vistas and make them seem not just stylish and cool but real.

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.

Soothing but subversive, Green Lanes is never quite as easy as it seems. You could hear it as the perfect summer record, but if you listen to it carefully, it’s a bit more than that.

An hour of delicately portentous electronics that are not so much haunting as haunted, each sonic element sneaking upon another and spooking it out.

The songs here simply stand together as individuals, each quite memorable while comprising a solid album.

What makes II so vital on a grander scale is that they have reached a masterful equilibrium with the elements that have made them the preeminent producers they are today.

The melody is maintained, with the only difference between the two sections is a very pregnant pause added to the notes, the whole of robotic Europop from the '70s lodged into one oversized chrome éclair.

On Air Museum, they've turned more toward rhythm and pulse. So the melodies now are more like elegant patterns tattooing out micro-rhythms, and the ever-present warm timbral glow the two do so well has become a kind of undertow, a more urgent wave motion.

Techno is, by its nature, hauntingly cold. By pumping some blood to its extremities, the Dirtbombs craft a fresh strain of disco soul.

Sleep on the Wing is quite pleasant, but so soothing and gentle that it’s hard to focus on.

Marked by inconsistent, not fully formed songwriting, Here We Go Magic's new tracks also make for an indecisive, if not bipolar, collection.

Transistor Rhythm clearly isn't the full-force, wall-to-wall banger album that many were hoping for, but it does show that Addison Groove can successfully and consistently operate in a more relaxed mode.

It isn't as succint, and heart-wrenching, as Someday... and it may not have the slicing modernity of HNIA's earlier works, but the idea of the project propels it still.

It’s pleasant enough, especially with the shift away from Broken Social Scene towards a dancier Cut Copy aesthetic, but it’s ultimately forgettable. The perfect connector for a full album, but not strong enough to hold its own.

There are two distinct types of songs on The Power of Rocks: the herky-jerky, dada-ist contraptions described in the first two paragraphs and a sort of luminous dream pop that might remind you of the Green Child.

Lights certainly has its charms--cribbed Afropop, bits like A Rainbow in Curved Air, and a general poppy through-line--but those charms wear thin when placed up against an entire album’s worth of monotonous, mobius strip dance beats.

What you're really hearing is the sound of Mark Ryan thinking out loud, through song. And even though this can be frustrating at times, it's still plenty refreshing to get such an eclectic survey of what most reformed punks are taking for pop music nowadays.

Overall, Dub Egg isn't as strong as The Young's debut, Voyagers of Legend, but second-album jitters aren't the problem. If anything, The Young have a little too much confidence in their style. By the time the finale drifts into its dissipating breakdown, it feels a song too long.

The entire panoply of sounds from past recordings is brought to the forefront and depleted prejudicially. Sonic serpent rattle, centrifugal drones, cottony flashes and fizzes, dog-whistle squelch, electronic hives freed of their bees – the whole lot's here, and it's incrementally larger and more agitated than prior show-'n'-tell sessions.

It is a very accurate document of Wire's 2011 live set; its strengths and weak spots correspond exactly to the ones of the concert they played in Chicago the same year.

The album isn’t easily chewed or digested, but certainly worth the taste.

They remain a fantastic band, constructing their own cities of sound, a strange architecture with wine-dark interiors.