Volume 8 explores some interesting byways of the Bardo Pond sound.

There’s nothing wrong with the playing here--it’s all good and some excellent--but these guys are still looking for their killer song.

The band sounds more at home playing these than they do on the Invisible Hands’ two albums, and the empathetic accompaniment of guitarist Cherif El Masri and organist Adham Zidan contributes immeasurably to this project’s success. Despite being recorded in Cairo and Seattle between 2014 and 2017, they sound more like they were done on the set of a spaghetti western or live in Nashville the day after Bob Dylan recorded Blonde On Blonde.

Full Circle Nightmare gets its kicks constantly. It has more heft than, both narratively and sonically, Craft’s debut, Dolls of Highland. And, thoroughly steeped in a recognizable tradition of backcountry rollick as he is, Craft delivers a decidedly modern approach to a sound first popularized decades ago.

The result is a strong collection of the sort of rock songs at which No Age excels: swiftly paced, inventively layered and riffy, simultaneously caustic and gauzy.

The whole thing is so fascinatingly diverse and upending that even the most open minded listeners may find themselves rebelling.

The songwriting and arrangements are uniformly strong, seemingly effortless and clever.

All of the transitions are perfectly timed, and the whole is a narrative through which minute but thrilling discoveries become regular events as each listen exposes them. This may not be the game changing statement The Ship was almost two years ago, but it demonstrates a fruitful inter-generational relationship in the making.

It’s an odd concoction of fun and confrontation, at once rigorously disciplined and existentially silly. The Official Body is a hard one, toned and taut and not fucking around, except when it is.

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.

Autobahn makes a very recognizable kind of dark, dramatic post-punk-into-new-wave music, and the easy thing would be to dismiss them as a mid-1980s knock-off. But The Moral Crossing is a very enjoyable record from a band that is already pushing the contours of its sound to find its own center.

The late Steve Lacy arguably attained the deepest degree of intimacy and prolificacy with the pianist’s songbook, but others like German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach have made substantial strides as well. Smith’s set fits confidently in their company in its balance of original and interpretive material.

Arguing Frisell’s stature as a national treasure is nearly effortless with albums like this one.

Eighty minutes after Bajas Fresh started, it eases back into silence: a long album to be sure, but only exactly as long as it needs to be--no more, no less.

Maybe Xiu Xiu are sometimes ridiculous, but human beings are ridiculous creatures; that’s why these songs feel so real.

A potent mix of performance art, avant-garde tactics and imagined folk practices, O’Dwyer’s music feels adventurous yet also personal, as if she is examining not her own self but her body and its (temporary) presence in space.

He’s a better photographer than he is a musician, but Eggleston’s passion and restless, searching creativity shine through here. And as with his finest images, these deceptively simple pieces can conjure a range of emotions and narratives for more complex and rich than what an initial impression might hold.

Jones remains emotive yet controlled, her artistry enhancing the warmth of her delivery, taking a sound from the past and making it still new and still vibrant. This one is a time machine of sorts, but it looks back to push forward, fulfilling the persistent vision of Soul of a Woman and Sharon Jones.

This is cold, lonely stuff, in other words, high on harsh and gloomy textures, low on solacing gestures.

The New Pornographers’’ songs have always been swift, busy little things for the most part, that’s a large part of their joy, and even if some of the more overt ebullience has been toned down here, the richly arpeggioed repetitions and steady melodic sense on display here means that, “bubblegum Krautrock” or no, this is still heady, catchy stuff.

A series of alternate takes, compilation tracks and previously unreleased songs that hail, aesthetically, from the Burn Your Fire and before era. Which is to say, they are pared back, emotionally lacerating and carried by Olsen’s eerie country soprano, which wobbles and flutters in a high lonesome style somewhere between Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison.

Out of Range is serene and difficult, trippy and literate, loosely countrified and footnote-ably dense and referential, a zone-out record with a library card. Not many albums simultaneously slow down your pulse rate and rev up your brain, but this one does.

The whole thing takes only thirty-one minutes--but it’s a transportive half hour. The album cover’s crayon mountainscape suggests just the kind of escape the duo’s music provides: easy and innocent, a land somehow fuller of plenty and wonder than the reality it momentarily suspends.

Lotta Sea Lice avoids the potential flippancy of a side-project, using well considered song selection and quality lyricism to drive a singular but, we hope, not a single collaboration.

Hallelujah Anyhow is the group’s third. And it’s a neatly balanced work: intimate in certain moments and larger in scale at others. What makes this album work, ultimately, and what makes much of Hiss Golden Messenger’s music work on a larger scale, is the use of implicit contradictions that run through it.

Her performance reinforces the thrust towards freedom that shows up in the other songs. She isn’t just playing with the women and men in the band; she’s rising above them, flying high and alone in the blue.

Visuals is probably the most ‘simple’ Mew has been since Frengers (albeit without that album’s jet engine roar), but if it never quite reaches the twisty heights of +--it remains endearing nonetheless.

The words, as always, tap into the subconscious, making different kinds of sense depending on when you hear them, though that meaning may be more a matter of you than the words themselves.