Burn Your Fire is a minefield in the best possible way, studded even in its quietest moments with subterranean threat.

The now-well-established ensemble pulls off a notable twofer with Give the People What They Want. It’s made a full-length album that hangs together as a distinct whole, and it’s also written a collection of unique songs that stands tall as an example of what still makes the genre vital.

It’s the steady pacing of Trouble, the band’s commitment to the thoughtful lyrics and the permission given to influences and early passions that guide Hospitality towards a sound that is recognizable, only richer, deeper and closer what they were aiming for all along.

Nothin’ But Blood is a wild, discontinuous kind of ride, rattling from tradition to mayhem, from salvation to specific descriptions of sex acts, in a flow of songs that are no more like each other than if you’d pulled them from a pile of tapes. What unites them? A bristling electric guitar. A laceratingly unsentimental view of life. A coruscating energy that burns right through whatever you were expecting and reveals the hard true life-force at the bottom of Biram’s songs.

With Held in Splendor, this group discovers their influences, then surrounds and deconstructs them. At its best, the album achieves bliss and demands attention.

The songs here have lost none of the lonely strength of their earlier material, and the band’s performances are no less gorgeous; but the new strength of Gem Club is that their music is capable of being just as joyous as it is devastated, and the result is powerful.

From All Purity will never have the impact of Earth’s second album, Khanate’s self-titled debut, Take As Needed For Pain by Eyehategod or Sleep’s drone doom bible Dopesmoker, but it contains all the important ingredients that made those records so essential.

Ghettoville is a purposefully secretive record, a vision quest, a Cassavetes lens--at times challenging to sit through, but the more you look into it, the more you might discover.

Morgan Delt is too academically rooted in the past to really disconnect from it. Still, as a debut, it shows some promise.

If the first half of Chiaroscuro is tragedy you can vogue to, then the ending is just tragedy--pure, simple and affecting.

[The songs are] skeletal, bittersweet and exquisitely quiet--open enough to make the most of what her cohorts could offer, firm enough to have a semi-personal punch.

Mug Museum gives off a solid first impression, but gets sturdier the more time you spend with it.

Come to Life feels fragmentary in places, still more mixtape than debut album. It can be amazingly disorienting.

Innocence finds Pontiak as hefty as ever. Its opening salvo finds the band in particularly fine form, carving out melodic passages from a tempest of fuzz and feedback.

Taken as a whole, Brothers and Sisters is a remarkable piece of work. It easily outclasses the two previous Jurado/Swift collaborations, and makes a strong opening bid for one of 2014’s best albums.

Sonically these songs are crafted out of beautifully thin, translucent textures that brush over one another to create half hues and harmonies. And lyrically, too, they pile evocative, not definitive, images one on top of the other, until a song can encompass two diametrically opposed ideas without any tension at all.

There’s a jump in recording quality, but this isn’t always a boon to this sort music and can be a distraction here.... When they put their harmonies in unexpected setting, it works.

If you can’t conceptually get behind the concept of a metal kid giving up noise for beauty, you’re probably not going to like the record. Otherwise, check it out. It’s lovely.

Rave Tapes is the sound of a band equally unafraid to strike out in a markedly different direction, one confident in its voice and skills in a way that, along with the quality and control of the songs here, speaks well for Mogwai’s future.

In a world where electronic music is omnipresent, Laurel Halo succeeds on Chance of Rain in creating a distinctive voice, one that never allows the listener to settle into a sense of security.

When they’re not trying to imitate the inimitable, Painted Palms hit a pleasant if not ground-shaking plateau.

When it comes to the spiritual, Bad Debt is a worthy addition to a lineage that preaches the complicated records resonate strongest.

Until the Colours Run is a huge improvement, though: bigger, messier, louder and more transcendent. If you’re into Speck Mountain, The Besnard Lakes or No Joy, this one is worth a spin.

There’s a Dream I’ve Been Saving is an engrossing 107 song compilation of weird artistry that panders to all the trends of its era, that being 1966-1971.

The most heartening thing to be said about Music for Shut-Ins is that it reflects the opposite ethos, a go-for-broke glut of great songs in or around house music’s orbit.

It may be that he doesn’t have a country bone to stand on, but he obviously knows all about the music’s spirit.

It coasts at times too comfortably its relative strengths, and it never really generates a significant excitement in its more extended jams.

Ski Mask is almost certainly not Islands’ most accessible or enjoyable work, but it ranks with the band’s most forceful and accomplished.