It's flighty, frustrating, and at times a little frigid, but intelligent and never lacking in momentum.

If the concert starts off jittery, with the frenetic 13-minute “Invitation”--the band seems almost too hyped-up--the remaining two-hours are a seamless, pitch-perfect display of A-game professionalism married to virtuoso sparkle.

Rather than re-tracing the path that made him popular, he has hacked into the wilderness of his new inspirations, no matter how divergent, and emerged triumphant.

At a lean 28 minutes, it’s their shortest and most instantly rewardable—no instrumentals and none of the longform post-rock indulgences of 1998’s Terraform or 2007’s Excellent Italian Greyhound.

Honest surges with the self-assurance of an artist finally coming into his own.

Though Crow and Now Only are spare records, Jacobikerk makes the versions on (after) sound hollow but full. Elverum’s voice, impossibly soft, fills the space with solemn clarity. But the most striking thing about (after) is that, even after so many performances, these songs sound as raw as they did when Elverum first committed them to paper and tape.

Their debut does more than enough to stand on its own, not only ambitious in its own right, but leaving little doubt about Hundred Waters' capability of handling wherever their ambition takes them from here.

Her lyrics mostly return to subjects she has revisited so many times that, on Jellywish, she also reflects on her weariness of talking about them: grief, death, and mortality. Here, though, even these topics are part of the record’s life-affirming warmth.

The trio is so refreshing and exhilarating because of the space they elbow-out for themselves and the vibrant spirit they pump into the exhausted genre, proving that simply adding some cavernous echo to a track isn’t enough.

The record is self-assured and polyvalent, a current of shifting emotional states that MIKE’s exquisite word and production choices shape into rich affirmations.

It's hard to predict where they'll go from here when Receivers sounds as if they've stretched their favorite sonic ideas to the very brink of saturation--but no one could have guessed they'd take them quite this far.

For all its psychedelic tendencies and marketing trappings, Goat's World Music feels as assured and unfussy as folk music.

Rebound isn’t seismic—longtime fans will have no trouble cozying up to many of these songs. There are elements, however, that separate the album from its predecessors and suggest some tentative movement toward a new way of working.

This is an album that sounds invigoratingly abrasive when you're moving and pins you to your seat when you're not, a study in pushing the limits of distortion that works as just plain good club music.

There have been times in James’ career when his knowing smirk threatened to eclipse the music. But here he’s obviously having a genuine blast, and his joy is infectious.

A compact reminder of the overwhelming force carried by Antony's best music.

YG and DJ Mustard have been dress rehearsing for nationwide stardom all along, but My Krazy Life is ratchet music’s Technicolor reveal.

That the archaic should sound this fresh is at least a mini-miracle.

Rare is the EP that sounds so crucial to an artist's catalog and narrative, but it won't be surprising to look back on this release in a few years and see it as pivotal in Dum Dum Girls' career.

It’s hard to determine how Monster got this way and the demos included with this reissue aren’t edifying. The band declined to throw in any embryonic versions of songs that actually appear on the record. ... But the 1994 Monster as-released tends to outright reject R.E.M.’s past.

The four suites of music here sound incredible, capturing the grandeur, aggression, and power of their symphonic punk with perfect clarity. And it feels incredible, too, as it endures passages of oppressive darkness to step at least toward a new dawn.

Sumday is all glorious, throbbing heart.

With Caligula, she has created a murderous amalgam of opera, metal, and noise that uses her classical training like a Trojan Horse, burning misogyny to ash from its Judeo-Christian roots.

Combined with an expert use of space rare for such a lo-fi record, UMO manages a unique immersive and psychedelic quality without relying on the usual array of bong-ripping effects.

Impressively, Eagle maintains a coherent aesthetic across 12 tracks by ten different producers, a muted brood that resists the default loudness of mainstream hip-pop. There’s a lushness to the production absent some of his earlier work.

The UK trio is hard, fast, and viciously catchy, but above all scary.

A creeper, an album of broad gestures that reveal vivid, flickering details over time, its pleasures unfolding as what it actually is gradually erases speculative notions of what it might be.

The tracks on this album coalesce and morph, more than they progress. They get more traction from a good drone than from an elegant harmonic resolution. There’s a process of real-time exchange and dynamic micro-attunement that only jazz musicians can achieve, but not many of the cathartic peaks you might expect from a jazz performance. What matters is a vibe.

It’s Eitzel’s heaviest album, but it’s also, in a peculiar way, his sweetest.

With The Something Rain, Tindersticks provide a wholly convincing reminder that they are, by definition, an incendiary device.

For many listeners, his mannered delivery may prove as off-putting as Oberst's own vibrato, but for these songs, it sounds fittingly evocative, as if only he could sing them.

The Creek Drank the Cradle is made of small epiphanies.

Despite Friedberger’s singular phrasing and voice, there’s something inviting and comfortingly familiar about Personal Record’s approach to pop melody.

1990s bring hooks, sneers and, well, intoxicants to spare, with the punched-up sheen of a production budget to boot (helmed by ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler).

These 23 tracks cover a lot of ground musically and critically, tracing her massive hits in the mid 1960s and following her as she weathers professional upheavals and changing pop trends. Start Walkin’ does not, however, include Sinatra’s very first singles, when she was a teenager trying to find her voice.

Everything about this song -- and this entire album, for that matter -- suggests this heart's still got a lot left to burn.

If you think intelligence in indie lyrics must come at the expense of coherence, take in a couple of these impeccably linear narratives.

Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava stakes its claim as the band’s most agitated yet fiercely funky record.

We Will Always Love You overflows with heart, enough that it buoys even the top-heavy moments, and the bittersweet mix of emotions feels remarkably appropriate for the current moment.

Though reference points like Daft Punk and Prince have rightly been thrown around, Radical Connector is in fact a strange album that doesn't sound like much else.

If Hippies has a flaw, it's only that it overstays its welcome by just a few minutes.

East of Eden, in that sense, isn't so far from Studio's West Coast: a masterful, hypnotic album that draws on a world of influences but is ultimately limited by none.

There's also the fact that you won't hear another record like it this year, possibly ever-- all the comparisons that can be made to Tom Waits, Lambchop, Grandaddy and Vic Chesnutt will only tell a small part of the story.

Its six songs shine just as bright as those on Talk Tight, but they cast longer, darker shadows.

The music is undeniably alive, even though--or perhaps because--the band that made it is all over.

Brisk, 47-minute runtime aside, Post Self is a daunting listen, as well as an essential one, even by Godflesh’s sterling standards.

The tracks on The Concretes are easily their most accomplished, fluid statement to date.

Taken as a whole, The Next Four Years moves like a piece of fine engineering—all curved lines, no wind resistance.

World Eater does not seem like a doomsday device by design, though. It might sound like one now, but Power leaves open the possibility of it being his darkest transmission before the dawn of a new bright tomorrow.

Centralia is less severe than The Seer, but it's executed with the same unyielding desire to move and to feel.

On Lost & Found, Smith is defining her own destiny. In the process, she confirms that she is special and rare, an asker of impossible but necessary questions.

Long-time collaborator JAE5 is absent from the writing credits, eschewing his usual anchor role, but the album still boasts a remarkably consistent sound, thanks to keen interplay from the likes of TSB, iO, and Levi Lennox.

Like the best artists from the South, Goodman renounces perfect symmetry and leans instead toward the crooked and out-of-focus. These are qualities embodied by the characters who populate her songs.

Sophisticated and subversive in equal measure, their staccato sing-alongs come on pristine and precise, then unspool in surprising directions as decorum gives way to abandon.

So yes, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers is just another Califone album, but it's also a reminder of just what a special thing that is.

Coles Corner is unapologetically retro to the max but it works.

As rap music, The Doctor’s Advocate is good; as tangled psychodrama, it's better.

On their new album Bottomless Pit, they stitch together one of their most cohesive grotesques ever, renewing their focus on songcraft, rather than chicanery.

There's thrilling evidence of compelling, thoughtful craftsmanship.

Ty Rex is also an album-length acknowledgment of Bolan's core strengths. Throughout, Segall plays it straight—the solos are never excessively flashy (sticking close to the originals) and the recording quality is slightly muffled... Of course, it's a Ty Segall record, so he still brings some of that fire.

That's Signal Morning's greatest strength: It's a supremely busy record that at the same time doesn't sound fussed over.

These are among some of the most surreal, existential, and fascinating songs of Mitski’s career, zooming out from the exigencies of her vocation to probe the essence of the human condition and our place in the cosmos.

Like much of Cave's work, there is an ominous sense of dread always creeping. But unlike previous work, there's a speed and intensity to Grinderman 2 unheard before.

The raw, carnal fervor of Booker’s punk numbers is still present--and sometimes it’s more pronounced--on Witness’ acoustic and naked electric blues and soul, when the opposing forces of a lush or refined landscape and Booker’s gravely voice work in concert.

This is the one that puts them firmly and officially up there in the top tier of the dance-music crossover-album crowd, up with the Daft Punks and, umm, Basement Jaxxes.

As far as improvements go, The Warning isn't so much a triumph as it is a reach in the right direction.

With SIGN, Autechre have managed to do something that machines can’t do nearly as well as humans: surprise us.

At 45 minutes, Can Our Love... is Tindersticks' most concise album yet, and it sacrifices nothing in content. Eight songs may not seem like much for a full album, but it's all this band needs to make a fully rewarding listen that only gets richer the more you visit.

In Another Life is visionary in both content and form: The first half is filled by the 24-minute title track, while the flipside offers three versions of the same basic song, but with different singers, lyrics, and moods. Both sides are slow and pleasingly repetitious, quiet rebukes of the mania of modern life.

Much of Go matches the uplift of Sigur Ros at their most dramatic. There's more sonic density here than ever-- Go's cacophony of flutes, piano, horns, strings, and bird calls beg for a 5.1 mix.

Listeners who come for the record’s novelty will stay for the class. Seldom do musical fusions sound both so perfectly weighted and utterly irresistible, a cartoon hit of delirious joy.

Despite the omission of obvious classics like “Warm Leatherette” or Fad Gadget’s “Ricky’s Hand” (presumably because the Mute label archive was off-limits to the compiler) Close To the Noise Floor provides a fascinating overview of the formative years of British home-studio electronica: groups who were precursors in spirit, if not direct lineage, to the techno and IDM artists of the ’90s. Still, with the cult for “minimal wave” now a decade old, it almost feels like another task has become urgent: the rediscovery of the groups that did the groundwork for the outfits on Disc 3 of Noise Floor.

The set ranges eclectically in both style and level of inventiveness. Most anyone with any kind of appreciation for the Grateful Dead will find probably at least an hour or three of music to dig and really groove with; Dead freaks might also find a good deal to snicker at.

A 29-track, 93-minute rock opera that immediately restored their claims to outsized ambition, as only a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera might.

Though it ranks among Chasny’s most gentle records, Burning the Threshold nonetheless accommodates a large supporting cast of avant-rock all stars who lend these intimately scaled songs a greater dimension.

He’s made great records before, even exciting and unexpected ones, but never one so comforting and compassionate.

Not particularly easy work. But with Big Time—her clearest and most radiant music—Olsen set out to more deliberately foreground the virtue of ease.

Sullivan, better than singers and songwriters in almost any genre, creates worlds where relationships take on more complex dynamics, but are immediate in their effect.

Bubba is another set of coherent, well-sequenced set of tracks without any major drop-offs, all the more impressive as the album runs more than 50 minutes. It’s flexible, ever-moving, a dance record that could have come from no one else.

Their jangly melodies claw their way inside your brain just the same, making them latest in a long line of Glasgow bands to effortlessly combine celebratory sonics and miserablist lyrics into something singular.

For Bandana, the pair taps into that heritage and allow themselves to be shaped by its highs and lows, its heroes and villains. Finding themselves within that slipstream of black thought and life, they plot their course on their terms. Bandana is tradition and transgression: one rapper, one producer, no limitations.

The new recordings retain their rough edge, but there's luminescence in the production--the percussion is crisper, the guitars are brighter, and Toledo's singing is a lot more pronounced.

The group effort renders Humanhood’s songs lush and circuitous, seemingly propelled by an internal logic that’s being pieced together as you hear it.

Amidon and his cabal of collaborators-- Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, Shahzad Ismaily-- have been merging chamber music with indie rock for awhile now (see also: Sufjan Stevens, Thomas Bartlett, Owen Pallett, Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National), and their touch is nuanced and, on occasion, delightfully odd.

SR3MM ends up being their clearest personal statement yet, finding their voices almost coincidentally.

Across these 102 tracks, he sounds as devoted to his work as ever, puncturing a style of music built to offer definitive answers with his own heavy brand of cosmic nihilism.

This version of NoYork! doesn’t offer any new revelations about the record, but as the physical document of that time a gifted rapper blew off a promising record deal to geek out in the studio with friends and then came out with one of the defining documents of his scene, it’s still a win.

To that end, the whole album has a lightness of touch that makes it sound warm and comfortable, especially after the sad weight evident on the also-excellent "Margerine Eclipse."

He plays with fewer frills than he did on Uneasy—but his fantastic instincts make the consistency of his beats another motor behind the record’s forward locomotion.

A dark, disconcerting record that derives its power from restraint. It's Southern gothic through the filter of Ernest Hemingway, with the frightening stuff left off the page but seeping between the lines.

It’s not hard to hear City Music as a lament for lost innocence, a pledge to maintain optimism and humanity at a time when those qualities don’t just feel like vestiges of youth, but of some better civilization that’s rapidly disappearing. In his best album yet, Morby makes a prayer out of the squall.

Despite the vexations Rutili espouses here, these are some of the warmest and most welcoming songs in Califone’s lengthy catalog, postcards meant to lure new visitors to an old landmark.

It’s expansive and ambitious, and divorced of all the tweedy preening and aw-shucks raggediness the idea of “folk” has accumulated in recent years. It's dark, it’s angry, it’s even sexy, in a sly, subtle way.

Throughout The Inspiration, Jeezy shows a muddled desire to transcend the clichés he helped create, to create further complexity without ever resolving it.

This is an extraordinarily assured first offering from a young artist capable of surprising at every turn. The result is not so much a foreboding portrait of a forgotten, boom-and-bust city, but an invitation to a place and people unduly ignored—and an introduction to an artist who won’t be.

Underworld’s never had trouble getting listeners to their feet. This gorgeously love-drunk finale makes Barbara a record that can bring them to their knees.

With Heaven, they've turned out a record that finds a thousand affecting variations on contented hum.

The record pits some emotive and occasionally downcast singing against arrangements that throb nicely, and there's a good sense of balance and variety throughout.