Like The Disintegration Loops, A Shadow in Time is not sentimental--it just is. Basinski’s music exists to make us feel, but won’t take the easy route in doing so.

With Hey Mr. Ferryman, Eitzel again distills a brutal, nonsensical world into beauty. It’s a feat worth observing.

If False Readings On proves anything, it’s that Matthew Cooper has again shown just how good he is at making music that’s too engrossing to be just ambient, too pretty to be just noise, too eventful to be just drone (as worthy as those all are as forms) and too individual to be the work of anyone else.

Not Even Happiness is a work of intimate loveliness, surely one of the most flat-out beautiful songwriter albums of a year that is just getting going.

Chapman may be tying off a loose end by making this record, but he doesn’t sound like he thinks he’s at the end of the road yet.

If you flipped over Car Seat Headrest or just harbor a fondness for melodic hiss and fuzz, you’ll like this.

He sings in a voice that makes everything sound like an indecent proposal (and honestly, some of it is). A younger, less whispery Leonard Cohen with a slightly wider range might be the best point of reference.

This is wonderful stuff, both as pure entertainment and a document of a vanished era.

The music’s references doesn’t sound particularly new, but Batoh sounds newly energized and fully in command of his new band.

Whether she’s howling about airport security machines, falling in and out of love or lust with someone or turning a jaundiced eye on the past, these are as solid, anthemic and moving a set of songs as any Against Me! have put out.

By the time “Civil Weather” floats to a halt, it’s hard not to want more from Oneida and Rhys Chatham, either separately or, on the basis of this LP, together.

The result is a fascinating, successful hybrid.

Though the music lulls and comforts, you get the sense that these Lightman sisters harbor a prickly thought or two.

The closer “My Will” is a hymn that induces chills, the choral heights a total wave that subsumes the tom tom trot. Those rhythms make this add up to more than folk + rock. But the ancient rhymes transcend equations.

It’s a majestic, often breathtaking collection of some of the most important electronic music of its time, where Voigt managed the seemingly impossible task of bringing the forest to the disco, or vice versa.

The personal songs, about Choi’s dissatisfactory early education and immigrant family, have a whiff of mythic American meta-story, while the historical ones are deeply felt and eccentric.

The individual tracks here are no less weighty or patient, but it feels like a fire has been lit under Morgan, moving him to make his point more sharply than any before.

Richard Youngs has given us an album that just about anyone can pick up a guitar to play along to, but that doesn’t mean the experience of listening to The Rest is Scenery is an easy one. Fans of his, of course, wouldn’t have it any other way.

Pretty much everything else in Meluch’s body of work can fit somewhere between this LP and Sonnet, but surprisingly these two disparate poles are unified as the best work of his career.

Mandel, of course, steals the show: it’s an eight-track statement for him to make, and he has plenty to say.

It arguably represents some of the sharpest, strongest songwriting of Hersh’s post-Throwing Muses solo career and perhaps some of her best work, period.

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.

Preserved and proffered in sound, the Parks, both physical and cerebral become a source of solace and wonderment.

The record called E, then, is not exactly what you’d expect from any of them, a volatile concoction of musical ideas and impulses that amplifies their distinctive gifts without sanding off any of the jutting edges.

These tracks are surely less orthodox than starting from the masters (properly name-checked in the liner notes), but even the experiments that don’t quite pay off are worthy listens. And anyone will find more than enough here to make this worth their while.

It's brutal, direct and reflective while struggling for a way both out of and within the dark.

The roughness, the edgy vocals, the cacophonous guitars won’t be for everyone, but this set is a welcome window back through over 20 years of avant-rock.

The abrasiveness that seems to have jumped out of Serpent Music for many seems to me to have a higher purpose of providing a counterpoint to Yves Tumor’s overarching thoughts on love, loss and meaning. For all its quirks, this is a really beautiful album.