The tales they tell are, while gruesome, well told. And they’ve never sounded better; not only has the time off done no damage to their brash, south-of-the-Ohio harmonies, but the band has taken on the challenge of sounding bigger than ever before and come out triumphant.

Sartain has always sounded wild and dangerous, but Century Plaza is, if anything, more hair-raising than usual.

If you want stark, memorable melodies, you’re better off turning to McCombs’ combo Brokeback; for inarguably affecting rhythms, seek out Herndon and Parker’s turn with Ken Vandermark’s Powerhouse Sound; and for shiny sounds molded into pop songs, you’re better off with McEntire’s other band, Sea And Cake. But if you want that patented Tortoise blend of electronic tones, varied beats, and just-so textures treated as ends unto themselves, The Catastrophist delivers.

This set is intriguing, though recent Fall is easiest to take in small doses.

Going Down in History is a visceral, gut-thumping, pretty-close-to-live album one of whose main themes is astonishment at being alive, still, inexplicably.

It’s almost as if they didn’t need the help from guest luminaries such as Angel Olsen, Jeb Bishop, pedal steel player Allyn Love and superstar engineer Brian Paulson (who mixed the album with Miller), but perhaps it’s those additions which make How to Dance such a consistently strong and clean record of a band with a unique southern voice.

A collection of past moments, which add up to a splendid memorial to a monumental moment in New York’s musical history.

In some ways The Waiting Room is remarkable for hitting a number of classic Tindersticks checkmarks without ever feeling like it’s, well, going down a list checking them off.

Adore Life is a great set of songs. Savages have created an equal-but-different follow-up to Silence Yourself. While it can’t have the surprise of their debut, Adore Life demonstrates evolution and exploration that Savages will hopefully continue to embrace in the future.

Emotional Mugger isn’t a bad record, but the songs are nowhere near as strong as the ones on Manipulator, and whatever Segall is trying to get at here is not yet in his grasp.

In short, it’s a one-off that makes accidental magic, bringing disparate talents into temporary alignment without blunting their differences. If it’s a reality show, then it’s one that works and one in which no one should get voted off the island.

This is a remarkable album, lovely but harrowing, meditative but visceral.

What’s left is distinctly Sunn O))) in scope and scale, as heavy and loud and intense as anything they’ve produced.

A weird aura of nostalgia hangs over Jet Plane, the longing you might feel for a Buckeroo Banzai future that never quite happened. And yet, most of these tracks are very urgent, very present, very right now.

The song selection, from two very distinct periods in Oldham’s discography, makes for a cohesive album, and it exemplifies how strong his songwriting has been from the beginning.

[This] is the first time Bowie’s been interesting since 2002’s overlooked Heathen, and if you prefer his avant-garde side, this is the first sustained material of its kind in far longer; both of these are certainly things to celebrate.

It’s tempting to spend the whole review quoting Goulden’s best lines, but the songs are solid musically, too.

This record doesn’t want to be anyone’s friend, but if you’re ready to feel, it’s real.

Grey Tickles and Black Pressure is furiously funny, intelligent and confrontational even as it heads to an upbeat ending.

The first two discs make a good introduction to the curious, and following the anthology format, it’s exciting to think that anyone who does come to the band this way, although they’ll have a fine overview of what makes Mogwai compelling, still has plenty of riches to discover.

The Silence is readily accessible (certainly more so than Batoh’s eyeball-movement-tracking Brain Pulse Music), but hard to pin down. It sounds folky, much of the time, and then it lets the bottom drop out.

Easy on the ears, Film Music’s approachable offerings are compounded by the high recording quality, new transfers made from original half-inch tapes in the Tariverdiev family’s Moscow apartment.

At its best, you can get lost inside Garden of Delete’s rabbit hole of different directions and unexpected asides, but at other times it’s easy to feel shut-out, as if you’re looking in at someone’s intellectual ADHD, but he’s steadfastly refusing to meet your gaze.

These are beautiful, rather unsettling pieces that feel almost right, almost wholly natural, and yet just off.

More than nihilism, the songs on Death Magic ultimately resolve that what’s important is loving and understanding each other because there’s nothing else. Going in that direction at the same time as their songs go in a much more immediately ingratiating one is a bold move for HEALTH, and here it pays off.

It sounds a bit like the Weakerthans did on their debut, that is, looking one way at singer-songwriter work and another at politically charged punk and trying to gauge just where they should fall between those two poles.

All in all, Metalmania is a lovely little album.

Vertigo may be the Necks’ best studio album yet, but they are still far from recreating the magic of their live shows.