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.

This one is as strong as the last one, a shade better for shifting the densities of the drone more. It should be a detriment that they could be shuffled together without notice, yet it isn’t.

Pile is a challenging band to listen to casually--but its dense, exquisitely crafted bombast pays both immediate and long-term dividends over repeated listens, as the mutated strands of their musical DNA infect and take over.

Torche’s strongest effort since 2008’s breakthrough Meanderthal.

They’ve found a way to wedge different sonic elements together, creating an assemblage of oft-quoted elements that feels fresh and vital even when its tone turns elegiac.

Bad News Boys works more as a collection of singles than a continuous listening experience. You’re constantly switching gears as you move through it.

Xe is a refreshing glimpse of a band captured in its most primordial state, and for all their clinical musical intellectualism, the album also offers snippets of Zs’ odd sense of humour, not to mention each player’s unique talents and virtuosity.

Every song on his debut album is sourced from an old record or field recording, but he and producer William Tyler have gone out of their way to ensure that they don’t sound particularly antique. In fact, while they’ll rest pretty easily upon Americana-tuned ears, they don’t slot too easily into any particular scene.

Bishop’s elaborate flights celebrate what his instrument can do, and express by example the notion that having an interesting time along the way matters more than where you’re going.

Volume is fine, fuzz is good, but it shouldn’t obliterate the songs.

As a portrait of a man in a city sharing his thoughts and feelings, it’s strikingly effective, all the more so for being so far-reaching.

A band that glides effortlessly when it might benefit from a bit of friction. A little ugliness might break up these pristine gate-reverbed vistas and make them seem not just stylish and cool but real.

Range Anxiety provides plenty of action and feeling, though not always in the ways you catch on a surface listen.

His complexity comes through more clearly than ever on Alasdair Roberts, his most stripped-down solo side in years.