At every turn Marry Me takes the more challenging route of twisting already twisted structures and unusual instrumentation to make them sound perfectly natural and, most importantly, easy to listen to as she overdubs her thrillingly sui generis vision into vibrant life.

The band has spun joy out of its frontman’s gnarliest experience, making metal that sounds sensuous, bellicose, and jubilant at once.

If it's been years since you've listened to these songs, as it had been for me when this reissue arrived, you might believe you're hearing them for the first time. And if you've never heard Earth this early, get ready to change your conceptions: The fountainheads of drone metal have been surprisingly versatile from the start.

Callahan has nothing to add to the general conversation about music in 2011 but is making the best albums of his career.

The most satisfying and sheerly transfixing work of the twosome's career.

Raised in a library of music and having already dissected his influences, Rollie takes confident first steps as Cadence Weapon.

All but one of the mesmerizing puzzles on Vol. II strut across the six-minute mark, and the songs never lose steam because they contain so many variations and plot twists.

The Stand Ins continues that ambitious musical development [in "The Stage Names"], further roughing up the group's sound while sharpening its attack to an even finer point, and refining some of their old tricks while introducing new ones.

Loud, mean, and complicated, this six-piece is an articulate goliath, capable of drowning out Gira in waves before disappearing into pools of silence without warning. Each piece of this unit deserves mention.

[The] more chaotic and caustic Sun Coming Down, but the album’s relentless drive and uncompromising attitude constitute their own special kind of thrill.

There's more to diskJokke than bulletproof connections; his spacey electro-disco is technically impressive and effortlessly appealing.

While Always Foreign is by no means a happy record, it’s still a joy to listen to, driven by the same belief in community, evolution, and possibility that earned their debut EP the title of Formlessness.

On South Bank--the most vital and essential document of Reid and Hebden's five-year partnership--it feels clear that, at least onstage, they were finally able to go the distance.

They're like a combination of Where the Wild Things Are, a fever dream, a pagan woodland ceremony, and a notebook doodle. The music is worth taking in, too, over and over again.

Hear most of these songs a few times and you'll feel like you've known them all your life.

Nothing sounds overworked. If anything, Burhenn and Swift present the songs in an understated manner, confident in the quality of the material and the strength of her voice.

Ism reflects its many homes and the many sounds that feed into the music of the Windy City. Which might sound restless, except Paul exudes such confidence that no matter the session, his bass makes it all hang together.

It’s an intergalactic screening turned sci-fi odyssey. There are visions of interstellar travel, premonitions of the moon landing, and parallels to the mythical, relating the scientific with the divine.

The 11 tracks on his self-titled debut are strange and stirring enough to make him one of the genre’s most exciting young voices.

Laughter in Summer serves as a summary of Copeland’s career, but it’s also a portrait of the artist in his last act: confident, generous, and unafraid.

Panda Bear and Sonic Boom counter with the longevity of artists who have never compromised, and they give us the defiant Reset knowing that despair is a weapon in the hands of a present hell-bent on stamping out our souls.

Ancestral Recall, aTunde Adjuah’s ninth studio album as a leader and his most progressive statement of stretch music yet, is a testament to the contemporary flexibility of the jazz tradition; at times, it also constitutes a hyperspace leap out of it.

Even in its moodboard looseness and nostalgia, Angel’s Pulse has all the charm and careful attention to detail of Blood Orange’s last two magnum opuses.

A return to textbook Mekons-- from gracefully shambling country to deep-beating tribal rhythms, by way of good, clean rock 'n roll.

The incarnation may be new, but the music’s underlying spirit, its animating force, is very much the same.

While Some Echoes starts out as a good album, by the end it reveals itself as the best thing they've ever done.

An admirably cocksure debut on which Levi makes like a 21st century T. Rex-- which, our current retro-obsessed rock culture notwithstanding, is not an easy thing to pull off.

An album that refuses to draw a neatly conclusive arc. Instead, Gentle Confrontation offers an invitation to bear witness to a process that’s human, hard to define, and close to the heart.

The writing remains the main attraction in Finn’s work, and both as a storyteller and a rock songwriter, he has never sounded more in control.

It’s a sweet snapshot of London 2018--an encapsulation of a newly brewing jazz community, uniting numerous cultural strands that make up the city. When the scene needed him most, Kamaal Williams returned to show the way.

The Expanding Flower Planet feels like an album full of trap doors, where a single, unexpected sound can deposit you into new worlds.

It's a great bunch of songs, and it solidifies the notion that XTC are back from the wilderness and ready to rock the show.

It’s her best and most daring album of this century, featuring some of her heaviest and most haunting performances.

1966 is one more piece to a puzzle that will never be complete--which is of course how Dalton herself would have had it.

Free Reign II is precisely the sort of risky, rejuvenating album Clinic needed at this point in their career, one that audaciously upends the perception that this band just releases the same album over and over.

It all comes together to make an album that stands up as a varied and well-sequenced work, and as a collection of songs you can scatter through a shuffle and dig just as deeply.

For all its sprawl, The Argument maintains a brisk pace, with a White Album-inspired sense of irreverence that ensures Hart never gets stuck in place for long.

Bellowing Sun feels delightfully out of time with the rest of the world. Its length and complex structure dare our shrinking attention spans to fight the pull of Twitter timelines and breaking news, to lean into the present.

At times the songs can sound cold, as though they want to keep their distance, refusing to shed any armor. Although this could be a handicap on other albums, it only serves to makes Carboniferous more intriguing.

It's jaw-dropping, certainly, and what's more, it actually works.

The duo’s latest, Rong Weicknes, is their prettiest, poppiest rush-hour prog-jazz clusterfuck yet.

Disappeared rewires many of Deerhunter’s aural hallmarks. The band has often sounded either gently sprawling, as on Fading Frontier and Halcyon Digest, or aggressive and claustrophobic, as on Monomania. Here, they manage to hit both moods at once.

No Age’s name seems self-actualizing. And in their psycho-candied sound, which has progressively gotten better, they still know how to locate the timeless, fever-pitched feeling of a beginning.

Arpo refines and then traipses further afield than anything else in his discography.

Lionheart is brought to life by McEntire’s soulful voice, by a sweeping Nashville sound, but more so by a deep sense of conviction.

Backed by an all-star band that notably includes Wilco’s Glenn Kotche and Megafaun’s Phil Cook, Tyler is able to summon a wide range of moods, from plaintive pastoral folk to a particular kind of kosmische American music that fuses Brad Cook’s spacey synths and Luke Schneider’s gorgeous pedal steel like a slow, steady breeze on a hot summer day.

One of this year's most interesting records.

There's a wealth of both visceral adventure and reflective emotion in hs pieces. At best, these songs are thrill rides, mood swingers, and thought provokers, all at once.

Drawbar Organ / Quiet Hour takes that fascination [with dub] and grinds it in the back molars, spitting out something lumpy, infirm, and wonderfully transformed.

Comparing the Scruggs cuts and the funky, swampy Cash covers with the austere John Wesley Harding outtakes that begin Travelin’ Thru is illuminating.

A decade later, RP Boo offers us Legacy Vol. 2, a sequel equally worthy of the title.

Classic Objects is direct and personal in a way that Hval’s work has rarely been, even as she evades confessional tropes. The album is soft and loose throughout, never spiking with dissonance. The pops and snaps of hands on drum heads give the songs a distinctly fleshy feel.

There are no extras, outtakes or re-anythinged. But taking these 10 records in a row, chronologically, it is a striking reminder no single artist has had a run like Joni,

Only a interpreter as shrewd and tasteful as Loretta Lynn could find the inherent commonalities in these songs, and make a grab-bag late-late-career album like this feel not only emotionally grounded, but like a powerful choice.

It's also quite good, despite the possible failure of nerve on its creator's part.

It’s familiar but new; varied but consistent; full of ambience but sturdy.

The songwriting is as strong and intricate than on 2006's classic The Warning, even if it takes a few listens for the finer points to sink in.

“Only One” highlights Jenkins’ facility for understated sophistipop; she’s a masterfully silky interpreter of hurt, a canny channeler of failed love in the softest possible tones. But the album’s very best song is its most atypical. “Delphinium Blue” is mostly synths.

The vibe is luminous pastels, elegant sway, adult-contemporary electro, and an uncombed, unselfconscious attitude that circles right back around to being cool, and Avalon Emerson’s got it.

Even amid all these choices, Squid’s spinouts are orchestrated stunts, never heady jam-band accidents. More than a canonized style, it’s their level of control that sets them apart.

Because Flowers doesn't maintain the urgency of Echo and the Bunnymen's early records, it's not the place to begin any investigation into their trippy delights. But for us old-timers who remember reading NME before the editorial policy changed to shameless oh-so ironic hyping of teen pop acts, Flowers stands as a gorgeous bouquet of memories.

Bottom line is that Mogwai are an insanely powerful live band, and these sharp recordings play like a unified set rather than a scraped-together compendium of disparate sessions.

On Farm to Table, he’s saying many of the same things he said on Live Forever, but more with his chest, with his feet planted even further apart, his gaze more level with ours.

Blackheart is the singular, visionary work that she's been hinting at since she struck out on her own post-Diddy in 2011.

The Slow Rush is an extraordinarily detailed opus whose influences reach into specific corners of the past six decades, from Philly soul and early prog to acid house, adult-contemporary R&B, and Late Registration.

On their third full-length, Weekends of Sound, the band showcases their strengths and improves upon their weaknesses, making it their most accomplished work to date.

Odyssey isn’t just full of ideas; it’s full of good ideas—rich, challenging, and inspiring in their largess. A decade into the new jazz boom and seven years on from Garcia’s debut EP, Odyssey shows ambition and style.

Rosebudd’s Revenge isn’t as seamless as Marcberg or Reloaded, suffering from some fidelity issues and perhaps being a bit back-loaded, but it’s endlessly, almost impossibly entertaining.

In addition finding new ways to snarl in their music, the lyrics go beyond mere cleverness into sharp, thoughtful introspection, making Travels a document of a creatively restless band out to prove something to themselves, and not just the fans they’ve picked up along the way.

It’s beautiful and devastating in that way that all the best albums are, and that in and of itself is worth some attention.

Captures a portion of the wispy bedsit magic that used to mark some of The Field Mice's best work and boosts it with the lush, "Hazey Jane II"-like chamber-pop of Belle & Sebastian's first flourishes of glory.

It’s short and cohesive, an enjoyable and uncomplicated 33 minutes of sheer exhilaration, filled with stings, itches, and cold chills. In one form or another, the collaboration comes as a surprise to all of us, arriving suddenly and carrying within the electricity and satisfaction of a good scare.

Beyond emotional acuity, the Linda Lindas also understand the power of a great hook. Arriving at under 30 minutes, Growing Up moves at a tight, bouncy clip, pogoing between power pop and punk, political statements and tributes to cats.

It isn’t 03 Greedo’s magnum opus. But until he’s free of the deprivations of an unconcerned carceral state, it’s close enough.

In creating space for such a rich spectrum of expression, Self and his many families of collaborators have created a timely and timeless document of the kinship possibilities that await when ears and hearts stay open.

While there's rarely been a correlation between the accessibility of a given Fall album and the profile of the label releasing it, the lean, brute-force rockers on Your Future Our Clutter suggest that the Fall might actually be taking this upgrade to Domino seriously.

Throughout Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, Liv.e is becoming an unmistakable and singular artist. Even when it feels like we’re merely privy to what’s inside her head, her thoughts resonate outward.

Exercises is chilly, spacious, and oddly out of time.

The element that makes Family of Love sound like the work of an almost entirely different band is the massive leap in production value.

As their odd tics, off notes, and bevy of stops and starts build up, the logic of their approach becomes clearer and more addictive. In that sense Napa Asylum, with 22 songs stretched over 45 minutes, is probably the best Sic Alps full-length so far.

On Reservation, Angel Haze shows herself to be the rare rapper who has copped a great deal of contemporary popular hip-hop and R&B and come out the other side as purely herself.

Throughout Sometimes, Forever, she and Lopatin expand on the ’90s palette that has characterized previous Soccer Mommy releases. Bolstering the lingering imprints of Liz Phair, Sheryl Crow, and Sleater-Kinney is a healthy dose of Loveless worship: glide guitars and tendrils of haze.

Dawson grows as a singer throughout these songs, sometimes with humorous results.

This is the rare album that reveals new depth within a catalog that already seemed so deep and ruminative while proclaiming rather unlimited possibilities for a band nearing the end of its first decade.

While her recent records have used their sprawl to navigate a wide array of styles and moods, she now finds a range that pulls her into focus. It is roots music, bursting from the ground, changing form in the light of day.

Her early folk tendencies and pop structures served a similar purpose, a means to explore the off-kilter rhythms and ambient melodies that lulled her into a trance as a child, pulling us in along with her. Halo suggests a self-realization that is often breathtaking.

If Carnage’s feverish first half sometimes recalls David Lynch, its austere second is more like Terrence Malick.

As messy and thoughtful a take on house as we're likely to hear this year.

It's as much the arrival of The Jicks as it is the rebirth of Stephen Malkmus: The band has become a grounding force he can push and pull from, a safety net allowing him to take risks.

Most of the lyrics here dwell on relationships, which Badu handles with a confidence and informality that most of square-ass, tax-filing society just hasn't caught up to and probably never will.

There's a propulsive quality to much of the beat-oriented Pain, but there remains a relative sense of privacy.

At its best, Lost Songs' take on post-hardcore imagines an alternate history where indie rock's first-wave originators got to rule the modern-rock radio landscape of the 1990s, rather than just serve as an increasingly diluted influence upon it.

This comp makes one thing perfectly clear: for a host of bands so readily compared to the same tiny stable of influences-- "sounding like a modern-day Gang of Four..."-- there sure is a hell of a lot of diversity between them.

The songs are instantly welcoming, flickering with enough hope and tenacity to outlast Kasher's heartbreak.

Sun’s Signature is among Fraser’s most illuminating and eloquent music to date, the work of a flesh-and-blood person rather than the chimerical Cocteau Twin of myth.

The result is an album that creates its own world, one it feels like you could reach out and brush with your fingers.

In the same way the band’s first records felt like off-kilter interpretations of, say, King Tubby and krautrock, these new ones recast, not retread, what we’ve already heard. Seefeel have still got it, and are still finding new things to do with it.

Emma Maatman’s vocals are the real standout on Free Energy, and one of the band’s most successful adjustments is pushing her gorgeous, expressive tone to the fore.