You can’t listen to Via without going through the wringer, but you also can’t listen to it without feeling stronger, surer and more defiant afterward.

Revisiting the past isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but turning elements from one of their discography’s savage outliers into a competently turned-out, but not outstanding new chapter in the ongoing story of Wire hardly seems like the most ambitious thing they could have done with that material.

Ripely Pine is overloaded with sound, lurching with sudden dynamic shifts, swiveling from one melodic idea to another, trembling with strings, gleaming with brass, fractured into colored shards of bright feeling.

It’s worth your time to follow him through these grayer back alleys. Once you get your bearings, you’ll wonder where he’s going next.

The members of Ensemble Pearl have made an album that takes heavy, and turns it into a contemplative virtue.

This fourth Purling Hiss album takes a lot of what was exhilarating about the self-titled and Hissteria and adds some structure and melody.

It’s all very soft and comfortable, musically speaking, like an old couch you can’t get out of.

On an emotional level, LISm is hard to get at.

It goes through stretches of boredom. From a distance, the album seems concise and poppy. But up close, the heavy grazing of each song bursts its seams.

Cerulean Salt is a very strong album, frank and blunt and vulnerable.

For illumination on this particular sect of techno’s journey over the past few years, it’s hard to think of an album more deserving of the limelight than Incubation.

New Moon contains a handful of good songs, just like The Men’s prior two albums for Sacred Bones. The main difference here is that the stellar tracks aren’t embedded amongst thrilling instrumentals.

As one comes to appreciate them through repeated listens, it becomes clear that what initially sounds like a letdown is, from another vantage point, an impressive achievement.

Maybe a bit more editing could have given it more coherence. At the same time, there are no duff tracks, and a lot of fascinating moments.

Thom Yorke used to make better music than the nine anemic Atoms for Peace cuts here.

Unlike the dark, industrialized beats currently populating many dance music playlists, Woo is light on its feet--more the soundtrack to an evening of beachside serenity than a 5 a.m. scream from some Mancunian warehouse.

Despite its velocity, the album is ambient in the sense that it sounds best when heard with the same indirect, free-associative attention that’s behind it.

Eight is another slow burner but the flame is more ostentatious than we’re used to from the L.A. trio.

As Long Island is the most attractive and consistent Boog release to date, it is still a difficult proposition to say “hey, this band is for you.”

Not much of a change then, is it? But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

There are two fairly strange intermezzo experiments and a few heavier-hitting sing-a-longs thrown in to excite ardent fans of their self-titled debut, but overall the album sacrifices listenability to broadcast and hint at Payseur’s “I will say what I will” evolutions to come.

In between [“Very Large Green Triangles” and "Aesthetic Vehicle"], some of these tunes feel a little bit generic; those tracks have notable features, but they don’t seem to do anything that’s all that different from other Matmos albums.

They’re no longer one of the torchbearers of a perceived trend, but they continue to grind out records of a style and overall quality that are still hard to come by (whether we need more of them is certainly up for debate).

These songs stick in your head in a way that 15-minute guitar jams never do, while still maintaining a bit of hoary mystery at their core.

Push the Sky Away’s rewards are interspersed among plenty of frustrating moments, yet even at its worst, it’s a fascinating album.

A successful homage, What the Brothers Sang seems to distill and convey this vision, showing us the Everlys through McCarthy’s and Oldham’s eyes, but in such a way that allows their distinct aesthetic to shine clearly through.

As is often the case, the idea of this partnership ends up being better than the result.

Perez, Pattitucci and Blade are about as blue chip as they come, and they easily outclass their somewhat calcified counterparts on the Rollins outings, but there are still sections in the collection that don’t feel on par with Shorter’s storied brilliance.