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.

Barwick continues to refine and expand her particularly gorgeous and idiosyncratic sound.

Like the best songs on Front Row Seat to Earth, “Seven Words” would be completely at home in the soft rock seventies, downer sensitivities playing out against expert studio arrangements. Despite these contrasts, listening to her latest work next to her underground phase the melodic ideas and the stately power of her singing is consistent.

Polizze has escaped the weight of history, the whole of the Hiss persona reaching the higher plain that the guitar has occupied from day one.

N-Space was at best ignorable, but Departed Glories makes a mark. Play it quietly and it shades the atmosphere; play it loudly and you can get lost in its sculpted tones and distilled emotions.

Instead of burning before an audience, here you have them working with other musicians and outboard effects to accomplish a vertical array of sounds that reward deep listening as much as full-body engagement.

“13.6” is where the album takes a noticeable turn and Supersilent finally finds its way.

Overall, Battle of Ages is a genuinely impressive release. More than your standard bro doom, it’s got reach, smarts and heart.

It’s about making art in a capitalistic society, where the artist must cannibalize every part of herself and offer it to a sometimes unwilling and unreceptive audience. It’s all a quest for immortality and staying power among icy cold synths, quiet samples and screaming. Sometimes, Jenny Hval is the vampire, and sometimes she’s the one bleeding.

That contradiction between the wistful and the prickly was one of the really fascinating elements of Green Lanes, and it’s gone now, but weirdly Dusk is none the less for lacking it. In fact, this third outing outdoes the second in an unambiguously soft indie rock embrace.

The songs, then, have a warmth and immediacy, even when they turn to otherworldly topics.

It’s as if the drug and crime infested landscapes of Sicaro were Jóhansson’s underworld, but, unlike Orpheus, he did not look back on his return, absorbing and assimilating his discoveries into his increasingly unified compositional aesthetic.

Any way you look at it, though, it commands and keeps your attention, and that’s something to appreciate in any age.

On Sunergy, Ciani and Smith have created worthwhile, intelligent work, guiding each other, delving into free composition to capture their environment and their influences.