Elements jostle together with the pitch and roll of the walk home after last call, the songs themselves are beautifully put together, with striking images that fit the melody exactly, shine for instant and then are tossed away.

Tense and uncertain, The Weather Station will keep you tuning in.

Bootleggers will tell you that there are better versions of almost anything Neil Young puts out, and maybe they’re right, but that doesn’t matter much when this record’s playing. Because nude, even if you see some flaws, you’re not going to care because they’re dressed just right for love. You might love them even more for imperfections like the disarmingly stoned giggle at the start of “Hawaii.”

If the joy of the album is tracking Ranaldo through his worldly interests, his hippie mode, his indie-rocking, then the struggle is never feeling at home because the record never quite finds its sweet spot.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor still has a place in this flattened landscape despite its familiarity, its flaws, its limitations. Luciferian Towers is testament to the group’s staying power, an unexpected but welcome declaration of defiance.

The remarkable thing about Kelley Stoltz up to now has been how seamlessly he absorbs his influences, finds their essences and out of that irreducable core makes songs that are entirely fresh and new.

The second half of the album mixes up longer, quieter intervals of unreality (“The Healer,” “Walking Again” “I Can Still See”) with more bangers (“Swampland” “Red Eyes”), and packs less of a wallop than the onset. Yet there is no question that 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo is more like Ubu’s earliest material than anything Thomas has put out in years

Very few other bands are working at the level of aggression, precision, intensity and intelligence that Protomartyr musters. Relatives in Descent is yet another record from this outfit that you can’t afford to miss.

The album does lose focus somewhere around the halfway mark, unfortunately, the playful titles (“Cockblocker Blues,” “This is Mister Bigg. How you doing Mister Bigg”) not reflected in barely-formed tracks that disappear into the haze of their own making.

Music for the Age of Miracles is rather beautifully arranged by MacLean and long-time drummer Mark Keen, scored by Chris Taylor with the strings and brass conducted by Anthony Harmer.

There are songs that seamlessly slip onto your mental shelf for Ted Leo and the Pharmacists--the music-hall-nodding “Can’t Go Back,” moody, politically-aware “William Weld in the 21st Century,” Lizzy-raising “Run to the City,” nostalgic, Billy-Bragg-ish “Lonsdale Avenue” (which first surfaced via The Both, Leo’s project with Aimee Mann)--but there are also some very interesting diversions.

Even the most contemplative cuts move with purpose and vigor and carefully plotted complexity. Long-time listeners might well miss the fizzing, popping, overload of good feelings that Eyes and A Certain Feeling brought on, but quieter, darker tunes have a value, too.

They’re almost what you expect, but not exactly, and that disconnect takes you into a strange and lovely little world.

This is a relatively brief album but one so rich and with such a definite sense of itself that it’s hard to feel shortchanged; Demen gives us a rapturously enchanting world to live in, but one you could imagine becoming too much.

Its tracks are elliptical and abstract even as they stretch towards forming actual grooves. But in that respect it’s close to being the most rewarding for those who can stomach this strange, out-of-sync universe.

Dreaming in the Non-Dream is different. To the best that mostly instrumental music can articulate non-musical experience, it sonically renders the business of hunkering down and figuring out who has your back.

For all its formal and conceptual experimentation, there is a visceral, emotionally unsettling core at the heart of Lack 惊蛰.

Beast Epic is a good album. In some senses, it’s satisfying. It just doesn’t get to the concreteness, to the creation that makes it something more.

Tempting as it is to try, given the linear nature of both the album’s first half and the journeys it references, Raft resists being poured into any one narrative container.

Each taken singly can easily be appreciated, as they’re all gorgeous. But Mellow Waves as a whole is ultimately difficult to recall. Cornelius has certainly achieved the waves he was after, but the mellow winds up needing something more.

Despite there being a wealth of moods and stylistic flourishes on Distractions, it nevertheless coalesces into a forceful and homogenous whole.

It’s beautiful and playful and spiritual and full of soul, like their earlier work was. If you miss the aughts-era AC’s handcrafted, bitter-sweet-sour jamborees at all, you’ll want to check Eucalyptus out.

The patient deployment of new resources is one of Rotations’ greatest strengths.

This album is very aptly titled, since it is nearly always evoking a kind of nameless, non-verbal good feeling that sometimes lofts us up and out of our tediously tick-tocking lives. Are Euphoria bubbles up and out of the mundane and time-tethered into unreal, glowing landscapes of altered experience.

These 40 minutes for maybe the most well-rounded Los Campesinos! record yet.

The Underside of Power is even more powerful than Algiers’ debut, starker, more violent and yet leavened with an uplifting surge of gospel.

On this LP, Orcutt spells out what he does, and exercises sufficient restraint while doing so that he’ll reach people put off by the treble overload of his live performances or the ultra-raw presentation of records like Gerty or A New Way to Pay Old Debts.

The result is an album that can stand easily with Slowdive’s other heights and that manages the extremely tricky feat of sounding like the band that fans love and missed while at the same time marking a new step forward. The