Brood Ma's vision of the future may be dark, but on the challenging, rewarding DAZE, his future as a purveyor of its soundtrack is all but secured.

It's all good, but none of it is great. Still, if this is merely the first taste of an eventual vault series of releases from Townes Van Zandt's musical archive, it's more than enough to make us hunger for more.

Karaoke Angel is a beautiful surprise from Sarlé, whose career as a solo artist has only just begun.

This is tough-talking, hard-living stuff, but it's been infused with a welcome dose of 21st century sexual politics.

Where Donovan really soars is the quieter moments on the record.

Putting the tiger back in a 15-year old cage works well for the band, for the most part. You can feel Stump chafing against the creative box he's put himself back in, and the tension it creates in the music gives many of these songs a sense of immediacy.

Like much of Willie's work these days, Band of Brothers might not bring many new fans into the fold, but it's sure to please those already there.

While it might be just another Bettie Serveert record, it's also another solid addition to their already impressive discography.

Bahamas Is Afie contains some of Jurvanen's best work to date, standing up there next to 2012's Barchords high benchmark "Lost In The Light."

With Everybody is Going to Heaven, Citizen have forged a visceral, stunningly nuanced work that is nothing short of immaculate.

Stripped is exactly that: fully chilled out and no-frills in intent and sentiment. It's better than expected.

[An] astoundingly distinctive album.

The album is slippery, but perhaps not in ways that are interesting enough to memorable, and definitely not as much as his previous work.

Overall, LAGEOS is an engaging listen that just might surprise you in the places it goes.

We just need to sit back and enjoy it when a band like this comes around and puts out a record as big and fun as Master Volume.

Somehow, the players have managed to escape our universe, and what they've brought back with them is both captivating and indescribably beautiful.

One of the best records of their 30-year career. Neither prog nor doom, Katatonia sound like no one else.

Between Fox at this most stripped back and Fox at his most ornate are "Vedana," "Arising and Passing" and "Parasthesia," which mostly eschew the stream of consciousness rhythms and melodic flourishes of the rest of Contact for a more pensive feel, replete with drones, tuned percussion, and tantric textures. These tracks aren't ineffective so much as they are on a different plane from the rest, one less ecstatic and adventurous.

Something to Lose is evidence of Better Person committing further to terrain covered on his earlier EP, mining often overlooked musical traditions with obvious enthusiasm and yearning credibility, an effect that is elevated when paired with Goldwasser's expertise.

Ugly Season may lack the emotional resonance of Hadreas' best work as Perfume Genius, but it achieves a wildness that he's never quite accessed before, an alchemy between his bone-raw earlier records and the epic proportions of his later work. It's not the most essential Perfume Genius album, but it feels like an important one.

Rajan successfully bridges vintage influences into the best of modern psychedelia, resulting in the most precise and mature Night Beats album to date. Perhaps the secret ingredient is just a little hot ghee.

The Hope Six Demolition Project implicates all of the Western world's complacency, making for a complex and challenging, though gorgeous, listen.

93696 is an ongoing, turbulent act of engagement — its surging power will throttle you, blow you over with fury and ecstasy. But it will also pull you in for an embrace, to quell and allow for the chance to breathe and reflect.

Although Dedicated might be a more comprehensive piece of work as a whole, Side B is so impressively strong that it could easily be a continuation of the album (its B-side, even). Side B is brimming with starry-eyed euphoria, glittery synth-pop confections and her characteristically odd lyrical syntax.

Rather than make giant artistic leaps every few years or so, Woods are content to push forward incrementally, showering fans with material that nonetheless gets better every record.

Although the 40-minute LP may come off as the work of an artist still trying to find his sound, Long seems to somehow pull off an enviable genre-bend on An Act of Love.

Silver Cloud delves deeper into the internal, headphone experience than even R.I.P. and it's easily Actress's best release since Splazsh.

Cody is undoubtedly Joyce Manor's strongest effort to date, the apparent result of meticulous revision that has tightened up their sound on all fronts.