The songs feel physical and unpremeditated, without theoretical underpinnings, but executed with such conviction that they carry you almost bodily from one track to another.

It’s easy to forgive Gnod such self-indulgence, however, even if it means Infinity Machines just about fails to maintain interest throughout, because this album sounds like very little out there, at least from a rock perspective.

Sylva might be Snarky Puppy’s most conceptually complicated album, but it’s easily penetrable as a listen. The album could make more demands and it isn’t as stunning in its individual moments as previous recordings, but those ideas would resist League’s compositional intent.

Its 42 minutes are comparatively modest, sure, but there’s no question that the man behind the boards here has his finger on the pulse of what may be missing most in electronic music right now--a central reference point. In Colour is that star, the record to hold everyone else’s narratives together.

It’s lovely, in an effortless, frictionless way that wafts on warm currents and soothes as it passes.

Loyalty can slip into the background if you let it, receding into prettiness until you miss the uncompromising intelligence and honesty. Yet that in itself is a triumph, as the former child star steps back and steps back until all you can hear are the songs.

Even incoherent and excessively long, Frozen Niagara Falls shows that, like John Wiese with his recent--and more rewarding--masterpiece Deviate From Balance, Fernow is pulling apart the clichés of noise and looking at where it goes from here.

Hairball doesn’t redefine its chosen genre, nor does it really refine it. It’s a straightforward album, one meant for windows-open listening on a sunny day.

A chilly, deliberately off-putting, but deeply fascinating record.

They may only be covering a small slice of what they’ve achieved previously here, but they so totally capture their moment that these songs blot out much of the world around them, so that they only exist, with you, blanketing day and night.

Side one of MCIII consists of perfectly enjoyable songs, with similar ingredients--piano, interesting guitar work, a voice reminiscent of ‘60s pop, but that ineffable thing that makes songs stick in your head just doesn’t seem to be here.... The second half of the album is problematic in a different way.

It is clearly intended to connect with people who aren’t allergic to a straight beat or a straightforward tune. But it’s still, in its own way, surprising.

It is crowded with guest artists and jostling with stylistic adventures, but its eccentricities have been mostly sanded down to a glossy finish.

Who Is the Sender? has a gently melancholy, a resigned aura that looks lovingly on this world but also speculates on the next. Both elements, the careful observation of what is and the restless querying about what may be, meld into a wise and spiritually resonant whole.

There’s a sense of stagery in this album, as there is in all JSBX discs....

It’s a fascinating, detailed and absorbing album, and one of the best electronic/dance albums I’ve heard in many months.

There is certainly not much to coax the ladies onto the dance floor here. Still visions are visions, and whether you find them through hedonism or self-denial, worth having. In some cases, it is hard to tell the difference.

The result is still identifiably Benoît Pioulard, but richer, deeper, stranger.

Fantasy Empire’s production values keep some of this internal resistance in check, and the album’s relatively linear songwriting does the rest, with much of the record proceeding at a pretty steady gallop, without too many wrinkles or games of musical tug of war.

The band does what it does best, which is couch surreal oddity in unstoppable catchiness.

An album that can be assertive as it is reflective, and as troubled as it is engaged.

It’s head-nodding, melody-following joy, which maybe shouldn’t work for a bleak album. But it does.

The band strikes a balance between symmetry and expansiveness, which gets at the core of why the krautrockers have endured—disciplined beats allow the free-form wanderings to reach places that more shaggy jamming misses.

The musical backing is radiantly raw, splintering guitars, hard thwacked drums, riffs that saw up from the bottom, break the surface and resubmerge. Barnett’s band — Dan Luscombe on guitar, Bones Sloane on bass and Dave Mudie on drum--is quite good, in a raucous, Replacements-into-Thermals way.

This is the best live album I’ve heard in some time, intense enough to hold your attention through its massive two-hour length, inventive enough to add something to what you think you know about these songs.

The Ark Work is certainly not black metal. The problem is that it’s really not much else, either. Indeed, even after repeated listens, it comes across not so much as an album but as a sort of formless mass, which could be a good thing, in the right hands, but here does little more than baffle and exasperate.

Skullsplitter is ultimately that: comforting, even more so than it is odd.

You’ll never hear the same thing twice in listening to Levon Vincent. Akin to the highlights of his past discography, something in the mixes of these songs jumps out to grab you by the throat, then gradually retreats as other elements subtly work their way to the fore of your consciousness.