Occult Architecture Vol. 1 is a good record that’s at its best when Moon Duo fully give in to these seductive inklings, like on “The Death Set” or “Creepin.’”

The new album stays focused on wringing as much feeling as possible out of narrower terrain. And No Home of the Mind is the earthiest Bing & Ruth record yet. You can smell the sweat that went into it.

The variety of genres and sounds that emerge within her compositions give Lipstate’s work a multitextured feel, but in moments I found myself wishing for more concision in the way such ideas are digested.

On Unfold, they’ve wondered aloud if the spell of their long-form magic works when stunted by the limitations of physical media and shuffled by the will of the listener. It does.

While Elwan may not herald any grand stylistic breakthrough, it does manage to synthesize some of the group’s most recent experiments in a way that helps distinguish it within their overall catalog.

While there are a few livewire moments that recall Meatbodies’ most exciting work—the triumphant riff from “Touchless,” for example--Alice doesn’t exactly come out swinging. It’s a more sedate record; mellow grooves and acoustic strumming make up its core infrastructure.

Lowly’s previous work hovered in a state of somber, slightly edgy, but otherwise unremarkable introspection. The music on Heba is exponentially more rich.

Tasteful and restrained as Fennelly’s playing is, here it doesn’t have quite enough energy or movement to sustain such a runtime. That said, the expanded palette and membership bodes well for future explorations.

Terrible Human Beings can still be cherry-picked for catchy singles bound for algorithmic playlists, but it’s impossible to overlook how much of the Orwells’ appeal is bundled into their persona as enfants terribles.

It’s another down-the-middle, crowd-pleasing Ryan Adams record at a time when that crowd was expecting him to bring the heat.

Retired from the road but still quite active as a musician, Sakamoto’s mission isn’t novelty, but an expressive palette he has carefully made for himself with a ship-in-a-bottle-like focus.

Ultimately, DROGAS Light reaffirms, rather than fundamentally alters, Lupe’s place in the rap pantheon.

The music on Blue is always lovingly crafted, and the album’s lack of musical pretense makes for an enjoyable, if predictable listen.

Memories Are Now, perhaps more than anything she has done in the past, is closely engaged with the present moment, yet so lyrically and musically idiosyncratic that it never sounds overtly political.

It’s Surfer Blood’s first album since their debut that doesn’t invite you to think about what could have been. It simply makes the most of what is.

In the sure hands of Pinhas and his comrades, Reverse is big enough to contain emotional multitudes.

Lewis gives the briefest glimpse of a supremely raucous affair, then shunts you out of a side door, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Life & Livin’ It signs off with a stiff jab to the nose, hinting at what could be if Sinkane’s next journey takes them deeper into the mud.

Borders functions as a gateway between traditionalist dance forms and the artier end of the electronic-production universe. It also offers new ways of understanding both by reflecting each against the other.

Unlike its predecessor--where the weight of the past sometimes bogged down the tempos, too--Little Fictions moves.

hile he become incrementally more skilled over the years, not much else has changed. Throughout I Decided., Sean conflates the passing of time with growth and progress. Nothing on I Decided., however, suggests that he has gained perspective worth sharing or to which he should devote a whole album.

An exceptionally personal album from someone known for his intimate songwriting.

After the Party might actually be too well-designed for jukeboxes, as the relentless, face-to-the-glass production results in the sad cowpoke shuffle of “Black Mass” and the Meatloaf-inspired “The Bars” clocking in at about the same volume as everything else, denying a dynamic range that’s needed on a record that lives up to its title by sticking around one or two songs longer than it probably should.

Syd has perfected a pose, a slouching shrug and studied distance that makes her appealing, if a little remote. On Fin, it’s better defined than it ever has been.

Because Remiddi also sustains an ear-pleasing flow between those songs, it may take a few listens to recognize and appreciate what an artistic success Microclimate actually is.

It’s as exuberant as its predecessor, with some honest grit flaking against the more mannered sentimentality; it keeps a popular hearth warm and has a kicking, striving spine.

Constructed from old demos, Mowing casts a drowsy, hypnotic spell that unites the genres and subgenres it visits.

While there isn’t quite anyone who possesses Sagar’s style in the wide world of indie rock, he’ll have to add a few more tricks, lest he fall into rote routine.

The smartly paced set switchbacks between minimalist drum tracks and deeper, more atmospheric house, and it climaxes with two previously unreleased Audion cuts and an interlude.

Like their first two records (2013’s Worse Than Dead and the following year’s The Tyranny Of Will), the band’s latest effort doubles as a vehicle for violent, nihilistic escapism. And it’s a compact one at that, clocking in at 18 tracks in 30 minutes.

Blending folk, new age, and silence, Not Even Happiness is a balm. In both sound and sensibility, it strives for clarity, that ultimate marker of enlightenment.

If there’s a drawback to this psychic dredging, it’s a slightly limited emotional range. Crutchfield frames scenes vividly, yet we rarely feel the weight of the mutual devastation, the perverse thrill of love discarded.

In the past, he’d mix his voice to fit within the instrumental; on Process, he makes it the focal point. Co-produced with Rodaidh McDonald, Process brings to mind James Blake while nodding to mainstream hip-hop.

They transform a solid album into something of an emotional journey, and hint strongly that beneath their low-key snarling, Fufanu have grander things on their minds.

What elevates Stellular from just another decade’s nostalgia exercise is that longing.

Live in Paris is the victory lap leaving us wanting more.

You half-expect the thing to fall apart under its own weight. But it never does. Mr. Tophat has a gift for this kind of balancing act, and on Trust Me, he manages to share the spotlight with one of his country’s famous pop stars.

That was a problem on Psutka’s last couple of albums, too; his concepts are stronger than his editing skills. Still, taken in moderate doses, it’s a strangely moving portrait of ecological collapse translated into sound.

The leap in range and ambition from their 2015 EP Bodies and Control and Money and Power is huge: There hasn’t been a punk debut this certain and poised since Savages’ Silence Yourself.

At times, Gods of Violence plays like an unresolved tug of war between quintessential Kreator and grandiose symphonic metal--often in the same song. If you like both styles, you can expect to be in hog heaven. But if you prefer one over the other, you're left to skip over certain sections of songs.

Ultimately, Godfather is a thoroughly enjoyable record, one that manages to leverage grime’s elemental sounds in a way that feels vital and forward-looking.

On Culture, their world is richly rendered, full of hopes and paranoia and unbridled joy.

Thomas’ music is one long effort to reach across the void and connect. He’ll never reach everyone, but with every album he gets a little closer.

Like McGregor, he set an impossible bar, and even if he doesn’t clear it, the fall leads to something arresting nonetheless.

Though it clocks in at just 28 minutes, This Is Steve is generously overstuffed--with gorgeous melodies, compositional quirks, sonic details, goofy ideas, and messy feelings.

Refreshingly, SweetSexySavage is at its best when it’s most exuberant, giddy in the face of haters and common sense alike.

In lieu of new Replacements, Anything Could Happen is a decent replacement.

While four songs clocking in at 14 minutes is slight by design, Ariel is wise to accentuate Mering’s voice.

Jardín represents a soft rebuke to the star--as well as a rich, buffed debut from an adept young artist.

Voyager’s attempts to pay homage to disco ancestors while paring his maximalism way back make it all feel like a dance night in an unfurnished room, all speakers and no lighting.

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

While Life Without Sound isn’t their strongest work, it’s got the seeds that could lead to their next definitive statement.

With Fright, both have found new sides to themselves: Greenberg tapped into his inner metal kid, but Berdan has taken the self-apocalyptic energy of his past and turned it into a weapon for redemption and moving forward, much like Negative Approach did in the ’80s.

While Haxel Princess was full of goofy and relatable teenage dispatches, Apocalipstick shoots daggers. Now 19, Creevy sounds wizened and ready for battle.

Whether it’s the jarring track-to-track juxtapositions or within the shape-shifting songs themselves, Ty Segall shows that, nearly a decade into the game, the only predictable thing about Segall is his ability to continually surprise.

Near to the Wild Heart of Life ultimately lacks the urgency of the band’s best music. The tower hasn’t collapsed, but it’s starting to wobble.

It’s music to be escaped into, whether on dance floors or alone somewhere, filled with a little less despair.

His most fully realized work yet, and also his most original. Bookended by a pair of gentle, ambient-leaning cuts, the record mostly ignores the dancefloor in favor of resting pulses and humid atmospheres.

Listening to Music to Draw to: Satellite, it’s hard not to wish that Koala would lean just a bit more on his core skills, though there’s admittedly something admirable about his willingness to be seen as a novice, rather than a master.

New Start proves that the prowess of footwork’s first family is intact, and Taso might just be the glue that holds it all together.

It’s an album that seems to exist primarily to be disliked, and it couldn’t seem prouder of itself for achieving that sad goal. Credit Joan of Arc for this, though: 20 years in, they’re still finding new ways to alienate and infuriate.

The Ornaments are yet another in a long line of floppy-haired guitar bands flying the flag of a purer pop past, but they’re also, unmistakably, one of the better, least pretentious ones. Sometimes it pays to be grateful rather than cynical.

These pendulum shifts--from frustrating to fascinating and back again--play out within the songs themselves.

While this sense of riveting discovery isn’t fully achieved on “For David,” the album nonetheless offers a stunning journey into a vast, ink-black void.

Even as it draws on new and old songs, 50 presents a startlingly current and nearly apocalyptic vision of America; it’s album full of brimstone and brine, perhaps more perfect for this moment in history than we’d like to admit.

Some of Fair’s bug-eyed mantras feel even more impactful when the music can swell in tandem, but there’s also the threat of just sounding like a very good rock band than like the joyful mess that they can be.

Machine Messiah, though, is the rare Sepultura album where the vibe of the music doesn’t consistently match its central themes.

With Hang, Foxygen have proven their capacity for lavish spectacle, but they’re still at their best when they give themselves the freedom to roam.

All told, Migration is an impressive improvement over The North Borders, and easily the most listenable record of Bonobo’s fifteen-plus year career.

Its 11-track, 35-minute runtime proves an abrasive, acerbic listen from start to finish.

This agreeable sameness infects much of the score, turning the voices of two inimitable musicians into hack work for hire, churning out glossy tones for images of cheap thrill and intrigue.

At least half of The Blood Album’s songs feel virtually interchangeable and the other half sound like AFI wrote this stuff in the time it takes to play it.

As an album, I See You has the eerily seamless wholeness of the self-titled debut, a smooth and polished object with no visible edges.

With the exception of James Blake’s “Colour of Anything,” which here sounds like an outtake from the Virgin Suicides soundtrack, Morrissey and White fare better with the more recent material than with the old.

Like an solid frame to a complex painting, Levi’s score concretizes and helps control the artistic experience of the film. In effect, the score may not supersede its filmic anchor, but is sure does make the entire endeavor more beautiful.

The Return of East Atlanta Santa leans on this lighter, more playful side of Gucci’s personality, proving along the way that back to business doesn’t have to mean an absence of fun.

Unusually for such an introspective album, the guest spots are welcome respite.

Each note acts like a pebble dropped into a pond, sending out ever widening ripples that slowly decay, but not before certain tones linger and swell until they more closely resemble drones. Listen closer and certain small frequencies emerge and flutter higher like down feathers in a draft.

Pete Rock and Smoke DZA have forged something we still need, too: a great, modest New York rap album of concrete beats and blood-in-your-mouth bars.

Musgraves’ album summons up the mid-’60s era nostalgia of A Charlie Brown Christmas, gliding naturally from her established Western-swing throwback aesthetic to kitschy exotica and vintage pop, with an expertly curated song selection that leans on campy novelties, classy standards, and a stocking’s worth of originals.

The 87-minute runtime is both ridiculous and somehow necessary; if the redundancies were cut, some of the self-importance would be lost. The extended monotony allows you to get lost in Cudi’s ego and your own head, clearing room amid the nothingness to discover and create meaning.

Not the Actual Events turns out to be so slight, at just five tracks with no dramatic shift in form. It’s the least essential non-instrumental album the band has released.

It isn’t quite as punchy as RTJ2, which was brutish in its tactics, with nonstop bangs and thrills, but RTJ3 is a triumph in its own right that somehow celebrates the success of a seemingly unlikely friendship and mourns the collapse of a nation all at once.

Her skipping cadence and ability to dance around words while establishing that each one is equally important are poet's skills, making you listen to every word without ever seeming overdetermined or obvious.

These many mismatching, criss-crossing threads create an incredibly convoluted 77-minute slog that is as tough to listen to as it is to digest.

To make mood music out of already gloomy materials is easy; on Wonderland, Demdike Stare spin the most unexpected stuff into music for haunted dancehalls, and the results are wickedly compelling.

A front-to-back listen through Patterns of Light can feel like a tour through all the places where pop radio and esoteric thought crossed paths during the ’70s, and a tribute to the ways both music and physics strive to explain a universe that can sometimes feel stubbornly unknowable.

Each of the six tracks generates a be-here-now flash of present-tense psychedelia, hallucinations by way of overtones and volume.

Williamson has evolved subtly over her two records, and Heart Song lifts her finally and definitely out of the world of “folk” into something deeper, more uncanny, and out-of-time.

Musically, it is hardly satisfying, as the fleeting enjoyable moments are swallowed up by a great deal of frustrating mediocrity.

Even on some of the stronger tracks, Zimmerman seems to be going through the motions.

A classic tour from start to finish, the set’s only drawbacks owe more to the format than the music: Various incomplete or missing songs, a few over-saturated vocal tracks, five CDs worth of grotty audience tapes, and the fact that Dylan performs nearly the same set lists in nearly the same order at every stop of the tour, from Long Island to Stockholm. Thoroughly consistent, especially by Dylan’s later live standards, the repeated performances from the 22 represented shows might be seen as feature, not a bug.

The ark-like box should provide serious leisure-time satisfaction for both longtime Floyd freaks and aspiring heads alike.

The title track, which closes the album with a missive for those young girls, is anchored by his personal anxieties, making for some of Cole’s most affecting writing to date. ... At its lowest points, 4 Your Eyez Only rehashes Cole’s worst tendencies.

WORRY. is stuffed with so with many sugarcoated melodies it’s almost headache-inducing. Yet there isn’t a single insubstantial lyric here.

The Hamilton Mixtape has managed to drain away the edge and danger from a Broadway show, a curious inversion and just more proof that you can’t Xerox Miranda’s inimitable work.

This album may not be their most compelling release to date, but it remains the work of two uniquely complementary musicians set on an ever-evolving path.

Defying all bureaucracy, borders, and strife, this concert and this orchestra proves that art at its very best is a grand gesture of empathy above all.