Colonial Patterns is a fine album title, suggesting so much yet giving little away.

Party Music is an effort both entertaining and politically motivating, a feat which many have attempted but few have successfully pulled off.

The album crawls from the speakers like a stabbing victim and gives up a great moan; it's a difficult listen, but the rewards are great.

Even if everything here is already familiar to Analord watchers, it's a welcome return.

Erase Errata might not be as playful as they once were, but they're much better.

Whether inspired by lovers, each other, or the warmongers of the world, Kings of Convenience's latest is ultimately just what its title says: a bold and beautiful assertion that we are better off together than apart.

Consider OH the "most Lambchop" of Lambchop releases, as it swings through almost every tone in the band's history of influence-collisions, arriving at a soul of its own.

Matters of mistrust, isolation, and uncomfortable togetherness dominate Tramp, rolling through every track like a sick, creeping fog.

This version of Earth has simply given Carlson more room and more assistance to explore, well, darkness and light--in his own time, of course.

An album that pushes Minus’ musical vision outward while burrowing deeper inward lyrically.

Black Encyclopedia of the Air is another withering salvo in Moor Mother’s lifelong war of attrition, expertly disguised behind the shadow of a white flag.

Few rappers could bring such an engaging sense of energy to a project so focused on preaching to the converted.

The band's best release since 1996's whoopass and splashy Firewater, though it just sounds like uninviting racket the first time you hear it, and it continues Firewater's preoccupation with alcohol.

Five Spanish Songs never feels like an vanity-project indulgence, but rather a clear, concerted effort on Bejar’s part to communicate why Luque’s songs are so special to him.

There's something about the visceral, elemental nature of Niki and the Dove's production that takes you right there, shivering and pulling the collar of your coat close as wind whips under the viaduct.

It's a torn and somewhat confused record, but a more decisive one wouldn't have suited them or their subject matter.

The adherence to krautrockin’ repetition remains, but the proto-punk engine has been replaced by electronic loops and glacial synths. Suddenly, a band that once sounded most at home in strobe-lit basement dives now sounds primed for a late-afternoon slot at your roving summer festival of choice.

Morbid Stuff is 37 minutes inside a sweaty venue process your worst feelings when a half-assed meltdown just won’t cut it.

Skinner has an obvious talent for forging damn sharp hip-pop hooks that supercede his inherent verbal handicap.

In some ways, Ultravisitor is the only Squarepusher album you need to know about. It contains instances of every idea, texture or beat he's presented until now, and unlike recent releases Do You Know Squarepusher or Go Plastic, little of it sounds stale.

Civilian opens with the sound of ambient chatter, a room full of voices quickly washed away by steeled guitar and electronics. It's a shift at odds with the polar dynamics this Baltimore-based duo has sworn by in its half-decade career.

When these guys are on, it truly is the wrath of the righteous. However, Songs for the Deaf vacillates constantly between soaring heights and mind-numbing lows, making for a true hit-or-miss affair.

Leo's still exceptionally adept at saying a lot in a small space but there are more than a few lines that feel a little too forceful no matter how many times you run into them, sitting slightly askew next to the richer images and more pointed jabs here.

None of these are musical or artistic epiphanies, but it's Lif's realization that his problems are commonplace that makes Mo' Mega more interesting than his other stuff.

Cohen will never be able to escape the context surrounding Bloom Forever, but he refuses to let himself be defined by tragedy. His bold, distinctive debut album stands a million miles from the celebrity circus, and will endure far longer than mawkish titillation.

Not only are the dimensions bigger than ever, but the songwriting’s more varied.

While this new batch of songs is pleasant and often charming, they're not as memorable or passionate as Barlow's best.

The end result is a delectable pop record, with Koushik's heavy ambiance and amorphous production combining to nudge his songs to their tingling crescendos.

The shifts within and between tracks lend Deface the Currency a sense of perpetual surprise: Even after its contours become familiar, the particulars of the improvisation remain lively and kinetic.

Cat's Eyes is the rare side project effort that feels as (if not more) fully realized than the band from which it borrows members.

Like one of Lynch’s filmic worlds, ken is elegant and perverse, a reflection on where we came from, and the unbelievable place we seem to have ended up.

Ripped and Torn is the sound of a band making music with the care and attention of a kid standing over a Risograph, printing up the interviews his friends have typed up for their zine, leaving fingerprints on every page.

Deep Politics, their latest, is among their richest, most expansive offerings to date.

It’s still a Napalm Death record through and through--which means shredded eardrums and tinnitus for days. After all this time, we’d expect nothing less.

Monkey Minds’ sharp, late-act turn into politicized proselytizing may seem jarring at first, but then it’s an accurate reflection of how politics can suddenly intrude upon our lives and upend our worldview.

Surrounded by young artists, it's remarkable how well Jansch avoids buying into his myth. The kids add spirit without the avant tendencies of their regular gigs, and Jansch seems rightfully at ease and assured with this new band.

It is, if anything, even denser, more dimly lit, more seamlessly contoured [than 2013's Cupid's Head].

The old Francis, the quirky, quipping storyteller, triumphantly returns on Human the Death Dance... to his unique blend of diaristic, down-to-earth meditations, eerie soundscapes, and loopy abstraction.

On HEAL, it’s not just the lyrics that are memoiristic, but the music as well.

One night in January 1979, Bauhaus ventured into the bat cave and came out with a unicorn.

The album isn’t quite the overwhelming achievement that Ten Freedom Summers was, though the refined ensemble playing of Smith’s newly convened “Golden Quintet” is consistently ravishing.

Mixtape Pluto seems to grind every cliche and caricature sketch of Future into pulp, then mold it into something odder, more alien, more jagged and delightfully misshapen.

Sure, stylistic and mechanical hesitations pepper these seven songs, but even those instances feel mostly like the charming reservations of a brilliant beginner.

Native Speaker is by nature elliptical, never seeking out a final word even as it converses with itself, almost as if it's meant to be played as a loop, something that can begin as soon as it ends.

With Devour, Pharmakon furthers industrial music’s decades-long history of seeking truth about the self in noise and negation, of boring holes in the propaganda that assures us everything about the system is working just fine.

Avi Buffalo have every reason to be sure of themselves; this sneakily complex, unsappily sentimental, thoughtfully naive debut is a very early success.

When it's firing on all cylinders, Sirens' Call offers manic pop thrills that either recall the group's heyday, or slyly recalls the noise made by other people that were touched by New Order

The band has lost none of the adventurousness of Lament, but the songs are more direct and immediate, weaponizing Bolm’s hoarse roar in service of the strongest and most surprising hooks of their career to date.

Much of Hyphenated-Man has that kind of blunt, unblinking tone. It sounds like Watt is using Bosch's figures to confront some hard truths, but he does so in a spry, often joyous way.

Veirs is maybe the gazillionth iteration of the quiet voice and plucked guitar, but she serves as a potent reminder how variable and compelling that combination can be.

Radiohead's eighth record, The King of Limbs, represents a marked attempt to create a considered and cohesive unit of music that nonetheless sits somewhere outside of the spectrum of their previous full-length discography.

Where 2001's Bright Flight leaned into full-bore country, emphasizing Berman's voice and lyrical content, Tanglewood Numbers is a band-oriented rock record-- crashing, amped-up, aggressively ramshackle.

Down There is less accessible than latter-day Animal Collective and harder to wrap your head around, but it isn't a callback to the more difficult sound that marked the band early on.

Where Living With Yourself found McGuire sticking to moody, simple melodies, Get Lost inches up the volume a little.

On Secret Love, their first album in three and a half years, Dry Cleaning are operating in a more intuitive, integrated way, investing the songs with pronounced dramatic cues, properly sung choruses, and playful call-and-response.

“Breakthrough”, “masterpiece”, “bold leap”--those aren’t words that really seem applicable to With Light and With Love, or Woods for that matter, but they’re allowing themselves to be extremely likable for a larger crowd.

Well-paced and cleverly sequenced, it is, in many ways, a throwback to the great records of the 1970s, and fresh enough not to sound like one.

As a singer, he's remarkable and distinctive, and on Cellar Door, he explores the range and impact of his voice to great effect.

Ashworth takes us on a joyride with a succession of mostly doomed outlaws and derelicts, with a couple of side excursions into familiar disaffected-slacker-ballad territory. It all adds up to easily the most mature and thematically ambitious Casiotone release to date.

Where SS1 felt rambling and uneven, there is a clear sense of purpose to SS2, applying the cohesion of Barter 6 to SS1’s pop promise.

More than any Markers record before it, the trio seem to be communicating deep within the subconscious, tapping into soul that's been hiding behind the noise for years.

If you've liked anything Toth has done in the past, whether that's the tunes he's written or the textures he's conjured, Blood Oaths offers both, perhaps better than ever before. If you've dismissed him, though, this is the sound of one musician's prolific and mercurial path, reaching delightful new highs.

Case remains her own best muse, a strong, feminine presence who demands you meet her songs halfway (she calls herself a control freak in every article I've read), but her band deserves credit for creating the ambient, dark-night setting in which her tales of murder and animals sound natural and compelling.

Even the least-crucial songs feature a tough backing band and a powerful, raspy performance from Candi.

His music nurses a profound ache, and he's now made enough of it that it's become a whole corner to visit, a unique transmission that feels like its own sentient being. As an artist, it's hard to aim higher than that.

There's plenty here for musicians to analyze and dissect with envy, but first and foremost, this is an album for the body and the soul.

Without abandoning the conundrums that made Obsidian so emotionally indelible, he’s embellished the worlds of his songs with color from the dreams in which he’s immersed himself over the years. The setting may not be real, but the sentiment rings true.

Part of the revelation of Boots No. 1, then, is witnessing Welch’s music made mortal, to hear her navigating her many influences with a young artist’s enlightened uncertainty, and to hear imperfect recordings that may not necessarily conjure universes on their own accord so much as they recall old-fashioned country music that’d sound at home on the radio.

O'Neil's certainly made her share of enrapturing, enveloping music. But I'm not sure she's ever made one quite as transportive--or, for that matter, as alive--as Where Shine New Lights.

Disbanded in their prime before they grew stale or flat, they still feel pregnant with promise, tantalizingly unfinished; like an actor cut down in youth, they've remained an irresistible lure to the imagination of pop romantics ever since.

The contrasting styles don't always sit comfortably, but individual tracks sparkle with creativity and the newfound dark side is a surprisingly pleasant fit.

As extroverted as these songs sound, you really never get a full sense of Hooray For Earth's personality.

With Disaster Trick, Horse Jumper of Love subtly expand their sound without losing the instinctual, otherworldly interplay of their melodies, dizzying guitar lines and serpentine rhythms blurring together in a narcotic ooze.

Detractors will be sure to note that In a Safe Place can feel numbingly repetitive at moments, but all that expansive diddling contributes equally to the record's allure: Like rolling past the North Pole or through West Texas, this record plays with its own redundancies, building an entire universe from strange, barren pieces.

Re: ECM stands out not just for its depth but for its variety, for the sheer number of musics it incorporates.

Still Life is steeped in Dylan's back-to-basics period at the turn of the '70s, carefully adorned but never skeletal; from the beating-heart bassline that sits underneath "Drowning" to the drunken horns that close out the eight-minute "Amen", Still Life is sumptuous, slightly rickety, offhandedly gorgeous.

Crain and company use Ra’s music as the platform for some of their most accessible, pop-adjacent music yet. They’ve never sounded so interested in melodies, chords, and song structures as opposed to hypnotic loops. This rigorousness belies the album’s stoner-bait trappings, and if these interpretations are usually unrecognizable until the melodies come in, they’re at least honest and thoughtful about how to bring Ra’s music into a synth-centric context.

Don’t Lose This sounds like an excellent entry point for newcomers and casual fans, a gateway to exploring the Staples’ vast catalog.

Diaphanous of texture but heavy of spirit, Safe revolves upon this tension, the pressure point of a soul under strain.

The music hammers with industrial heft, vibrates with nervous pulse, and envelops with tactile atmosphere. Even when her songs achieve moments of transcendence, they still strike you directly in the gut.

ADULT. still do a convincing showroom-dummies impersonation, but they’ve never sounded more human than they do here.

La Forêt... backs off dramatically from the pop side of Fabulous Muscles to expand upon its quiet, murky dimension.

blue water road is Kehlani’s most mature album, as well as their most musically and thematically challenging.

The record keeps moving. Sometimes it moves with warmth, and sometimes with motorik rhythm.

These 15 tracks were certainly worth the almost-decade-long wait.

The result is some of the most direct, spontaneous music in James’ catalog. Tracks feel less like songs or compositions than tone poems, mood pieces that flow naturally from one to the next, like clouds changing shape high overhead.

It's got the breadth of a comprehensively adventurous band, able to balance a steady motorik churn midway between Kraut and deep soul while letting the pull of improvisational tangents and dub distortion shift the picture.

Though Duffy’s voice and sensibility guide the record, the fingerprints of their musical community are all over Blue Reminder, including (among others) Uhlmann on guitar, bass, and percussion; Perfume Genius’ Alan Wyffels on piano, Wurlitzer, and flute; producer Blake Mills on organ and guitar. Together, the band shapeshifts across a range of sounds.

What LIVE DRUGS AGAIN proves, more than LIVE DRUGS, and maybe more than any of their studio albums, is the band’s force as a symbiotic unit.

Communion plays out like a kind of fever dream, a delirium of cold sweat and disturbing visions in which there are only brief moments of daylight before you're plunged back into the maelstrom once more.

There are sonic Easter Eggs for a thousand listens here, and it would take six pairs of headphones and an equal number of high-grade strains of weed to track them all down. Happy hunting.

It is more concise (conveniently, coincidentally, half as long as Ashes Grammar) and less wily than its predecessor, often relying on comparatively sturdy and rock band-y arrangements.

Suitcase is crammed with classic Pollard moments-- those unique occasions where poorly-recorded, sloppily-delivered songs somehow become transcendent pop genius.... But perhaps the greatest problem with Suitcase is simply its size. At 100 songs, it's practically impossible to comprehend in one sitting.

If English Tapas at times veers towards formula, it’s at least Sleaford Mods’ own formula, and one that continues to serve them well.

She colors her songs with vibrant shades, drawing out tragicomic absurdities with sly panache. The result is direct but disorienting, like a grim domestic scene painted by Matisse.

Powers has forged a sound of his own, too: scattershot and emotional, attention deficient and frantically detailed. As its filigree twists expand into every available space, Insula suggests there are still acres left to explore in this increasingly virtual territory.

While folklore seemed to materialize from nowhere as a complete, cohesive vision, evermore is structurally akin to something like 2012’s Red, where the breadth of her songwriting is as important as the depth.

That ability to blend the real and the absurd, the cartoon and the corporeal, distinguishes CupcakKe from any other rapper. There’s a pulsing power in the center of her songs. It’s the sound of a woman in charge.