Hoffman used to be in Ex-Cult. They have the same driving, droning, chanting, intoning attack, and though it’s pitched way up high in a womanly register, it concedes nothing else at all to conventional femininity. Great stuff.

Here is a pretty, pleasant record; and maybe that would be enough if Teenage Fanclub had never done more, wedding angst and bliss in a way that few other bands ever did. ... Teenage Fanclub seems to have swallowed the Serenity Prayer whole, accepting a lot and changing little, and it’s hard to say whether that’s wisdom or stasis.

Bullish and forceful, The Disco’s of Imhotep is also a work of considerable intricacy and mystery. Jamal Moss aims high and rarely overreaches, making the album not only ambitious, but a welcome blast of modern house that would live up any club night.

Even though this is Blackburn and Hartley’s first record as Higher Authorities, they’ve had this psychedelic, dubby feel nailed down for years now. Making it more prominent is just a nice touch.

If Craig can manage to maintain his unique delicacy of sound, while pushing his melodic capabilities, he could achieve something special. Yet, if he allows pop elements to take over, instead of remaining as hints and references, he risks becoming simply another producer penning groovy, soulless hits for electro-pop scenesters. In order to remain distinctive, Craig will need to keep the balance he’s struck here firmly in mind.

This crew has figured out how to make it work as a quartet.

The whole album feels like catharsis, as slow dirge-y openings give way to extended instrumental crescendo, as Zedek views from a position of calm, weathered experience, distance, the roil and mess and hurt of human existence.

At nearly two hours, these two discs are an embarrassment of riches for the 65daysofstatic devotee and most likely sufficient for anyone casually interested in the band behind No Man’s Sky.

The orchestra’s nearly perfect. Cline’s selections are non-traditional but trustworthy and intelligent. The album keeps a persistent mood even as it reflects on the mood. But 80 minutes of it requires patient listening, and there aren’t enough moments to really grab here.

The energy, from the opening whistles and stomps that kick off “Driving School” to the final crazed, surf-guitar-on-two-wheels of the “Batman” cover, is anything but studio; it is immediate, volatile and contagious.

Future albums will reveal whether this is as much of an offshoot as Mogwai’s other soundtracks, but this understated, solid effort reveals a lot more imagination and prowess than most bands that have been around over 20 years.

Rhyton is never quite that simple. Here it becomes a vehicle for pretty much all of Shuford’s obsessions, sometimes two or three on top of each other at once, and honestly, it works pretty well.

Tooth, with its sharp title, minimalist drum attacks and hauntological synth textures, represents the antithesis of such plurality, reducing dance to its most antagonistic and unflinchingly bare-boned aesthetic and coming up with a new language from familiar idioms, sometimes from other genres.

When there are fewer tracks, Anderson contrasts foreground sharpness with distant background. “House of the Setting Sun” and “Chimes” present fatigued leads pushed along by hazy, distant clouds of tone. What the new climate hasn’t changed is Anderson’s persistent restlessness, wandering off the road to find unusual details. Into the Light heads into the desert, knowing it’s hardly a deserted place.

If the consistently lovely Piano is radical at all, it’s in a subtle and contextual way, serving partly as a space for Taylor to investigate several of his own previously released compositions and a few covers with a quiet kind of focus, and partly as a sustained exercise in mood.

While Pythagorean Dream serves the practical end of giving Chatham something that he can tour from town to town without having to school a new set of musicians for each performance, it’s not a compromise or even a reduction. It’s just one more chance to let him show what’s inside a sound.

The Triad has no standouts and doesn’t even stand out in the Pantha du Prince catalog. What it does do well is provide a consistent listening experience, blending all of Hendrik Weber’s strongest proclivities into a 10-song, 63-minute album best thought of as a mix.

It may have taken a while, but the rewards of this belated collaboration are exquisite.

There are times when Lenker approaches Marissa Nadler’s eerie otherworldliness, though not for long. ... Couple that with a really good, dense, aggressive musical attack, led by Meek, but supported by bassist Max Oleartchik and drummer James Krivchenia, and you’ve got something special, especially in the more rock-oriented tunes like “Masterpiece,” “Humans” and, especially “Paul.”

While albums and concerts get to end, the knowledge that real lives carry on scarred by real-life tragedies like the one related make The Glowing Man a fraught record to hear.

It’s all attitude, baby, and on their second album Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic, it’s out in spades, for everyone who remembers when rock music rocked, politics and punk could live together without cancelling one another out (or making one more about the other), and bands could dig into a specific influence without being too obvious about it.

Eyes on the Lines is summer’s quintessential pleasure, the unmapped excursion through sunlit spaces, the unhurried but never static interval for reflection, the road trip that goes everywhere and ends up exactly where it started. It’s an album to get lost in, every time you listen to it.

Unlike your average grime productions, these tracks are rarely propulsive or tailored for the dancefloor, but rather shift and shake convulsively under the weight of stark, metronomic beats, swathes of sub-bass and icy synth swirls. Listen carefully, and there is a certain melodicism nestled in the heart of this album, but its tone is despairing and subdued, glimmers of light in a dark and uncaring world.

Nadler can’t be pinned down, and all of Strangers is an indication of that new challenge she both creates and meets.

Allen writes like a painter, renewing familiar material--in this case, poorly behaved men and resourceful hookers with Spanish names--via quirks of perspective and peculiar taste in details.

Hopelessness has occasional flaws. Not all the songs conclude satisfyingly, and some of the lyrics are vaguely trite. But despite them, it is a missive from an artist who has never ceased to evolve and now asserts herself with gusto and unflinching purpose.

Toledo’s first full band record, his first record with a producer, with a sound that is ragged but clean, emotionally raw but cleverly structured. It’s a record that engages heart and mind and viscera all at once, and if some of the songs go on longer than pop usually does, it’s because they have more to say.

Over its brief 26 minutes the songs crest and fall within a fairly narrow band, and when one feels like it’s about to peak and explode, the group instead will pull back a bit. There are shifts and changes aplenty, and there’s certainly no risk of tedium, but this is a reserved set of songs nonetheless.