Jones and Taylor were only recent regulars in Monk’s orbit, but both align well with his designs and the drummer’s hard-driving sticks goose the music repeatedly. The leader plays with his usual marriage of advanced angularity and idiosyncratic energy, balancing the occasional ensemble uncertainties with a string of strong solo detours to which the band gladly defers. ... Nearly any Monk is Monk of note, but “new” Monk of this nature deserves the encomia it’s sure to engender.

On seminal albums like Monster Movie and Tago Mago the songs flow and breathe in a very different way than the shortened pieces here. Those unfamiliar with Can would be wise to start with the albums, then come to this collection and enjoy the peculiar window it offers, which is full of fun surprises and brief snippets of Can’s genius. Fans, though, needn’t think about it before snapping up this necessary release.

House of Land makes for a strange old-timey listen. It doesn’t stretch as far from its foundation as some of its referents might suggest, yet it continually pushes at something slightly alien. ... That intelligent play between various traditions makes for a listen at least as captivating as it is new-fangled.

Back in the mid-1970s Faust asserted both ownership and ironic distance with the song “Krautrock;” here, they show that they can still wax motorik if the situation requires it.

Backed by a chorus of backing singers clearly having the time of their lives and giving her further wings, Sangaré is poet and storyteller, moral guide and denouncer of injustice all wrapped up in one singular, beautiful voice.

Without being especially political, the album is resolutely female in the strongest, most self-asserting way.

The music on Burning the Threshold is simply good--easy and reassuring, maybe, but masterful and in many places downright gorgeous, too.

It’s dark and brooding, fiercely sparse at times and blindingly dense at others. Footwork is no longer an appropriate descriptor for this music. With Black Origami, Jlin has transcended her roots to build a language all of her own. And simply put, it’s brilliant.

Play What They Want is his densest, most elaborately arranged Man Forever album yet. But even so, the rhythm forms a spine, winding and punching and scatter-shooting in continuous, fascinating Rube Goldberg-machine motion, as meditative layers of vocals, keyboards, harps, brass and guitar billow fog over the intricate, interlocking works.

Even the wordless tracks on Arca are among the producer’s most powerful vignettes.

Some of the finest, yet frustratingly overlooked folk rock of the era.

Halo distinguishes itself in its startling moments of suspension and sparseness.

Not all of the songs here find their mark, but it’s a fun ride nonetheless.

The music offered here constitutes the expected fluid mixture of rhetoric and instrumentation.

They don’t shy from their strengths, but they don’t struggle to feature them either, creating an album that never feels like a flippant one-off. Big Walnuts Yonder might be doing a whole bunch of things, but it’s largely an album about making those things cohere.

As often, Dulli brings the devil into lurid though realistic scenarios of decadence. Sex, drugs, damnation and witchcraft, along with ruminations on lust, aging, memory and oblivion, live in disturbing proximity and maybe account for the daunting scale of In Spades. It’s the right amount of too much.

Everything about Snow feels worn-in, the loose but precise way that guitars and drums and basses coalesce around melodies, the seen-it-all cadences in which these songs are sung, the bemused sense that here we all are again, still mired in a dissatisfactory world, still shrugging away things that hurt and perplex.

The songs, hard and soft, fast and slow, seem better than ever. Lanegan may sound like he’s done everything there is to do, but he’s clearly not done pushing into new territories and getting better.

The merging of the two artists’ sounds feels entirely natural.

Devout isn’t perfect, some tracks are superfluous, but as a defiance of white stereotypes and genre clichés, it’s a remarkable work.

Just Say No… is quite probably the group’s heaviest and most abrasive salvo to date.

The result is his most fully realized album to date, and a reminder after those lower-profile years that Lekman’s voice is a singular and valuable one.

The fact that Untouchable gets in and gets out in a little over a half hour adds to its classic rock ’n’ roll charms--the accomplished playing, engaging production and dizzying variety of mid-tempo reveries, adolescent rushes and inconsolable ballads boosting its overall appeal.

Taken individually, the album’s 10 vignettes suffer slightly from a lack of individual cohesion, their structures incorporating mostly several short, seemingly miscellaneous scraps. Yet over the course of several listens, Toxic City Music does provide some sort of overall flow, its slippery patterns serving as auditory snapshots of dank irradiated zones and heat realm communities quarantined in an airless isolation.

What makes the band so great isn’t just their utterly compelling sound; it’s that on this, their finest record, they’re not so much going for “fucking epic” as for emotional heaviness.

If the album’s second half falls off a bit due to the programming of consecutive slow burners, the orchestral layering we expect from the quartet is still there.

Bardo Pond isn’t so much about evolutionary change as the recurrent invocation of altered states via sound.

Despite the band’s articulate playing, Song of the Rose has shortcomings--regularly, Arbouretum is content to indulge in an all too familiar canon--incognizant of any current trends, their musical DNA arrested in amber.