Yehezkely, with her limited range and slightly detached delivery, effectively bridges that gap between the music's indulgent/escapist tendencies and our desire to connect with it despite that distance.

This album's strengths-- its intimacy, its containment, its subtlety-- are not the qualities that made Sleater-Kinney great, but it would be ungenerous to dismiss this because it's not as thrilling, confrontational, or exuberant.

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.

Really, though, its the earlier track "Lost in Time" that best sums up the record's appeal--on one level, it's about the dancefloor as an escape, while on another, it winks at the group's time travels.

Even when he focuses his unflagging talents within fixed bounds, Lekman's still one of the most distinct and observant writers in indie rock today.

For the second time in one year, both on a large label and on their own, they've released a record ruthless and rewarding enough to animate that image.

Anamai may not be as pummelling as a HSY record, but their metaphysical weight makes up for it, producing an even more striking result than Mayberry’s other band.

Toting a whole gleaming new set of synthesizers and some surprisingly complicated riffing, Gales transforms the band completely. The experience is sort of like catching a show you used to watch on a CRTV in high def for the first time.

The album plays to his strengths. It is more playful than his last LP, and also more finessed.

Lanois and Funk demonstrate that even the briefest pause can reveal a more becalmed state of being lying just beneath all the noise and bustle.

Even as its musical forms and source material remain familiar, Renegade Breakdown is a work of knowing misdirection, a way of staking out new creative territory that’s challenging, idiosyncratic, and proudly uncool.

The Weavers have no trouble sounding like themselves, but another voice in the room might have helped them flesh out some of the underexplored ideas on Primordial Arcana. Like the still life that adorns its cover, the album can be beautiful, but it’s fundamentally inert.

The rapping on GHETTO GODS features less filler and empty showmanship than EarthGang’s past releases, but their writing remains anonymous.

Even on the merely good ones, there’s always the sense of someone living in Clark’s lyrics, making decisions about how to transform those feelings into melodies and rhymes.

For the first time in a while, it sounds like they’re listening to what’s happening in clubland and asking themselves not what they can poach for the charts, but what they can bring to the table.

Their voices complement each other so naturally and so gracefully that it’s easy to forget how much craft there is in these songs, and how much ingenuity they put into their vocals.

Minor quibbles and missteps aside, Body Talk Pt. 2 is a perfectly solid-- and occasionally awesome-- record.

This record is carefree and instantly likable--even if it doesn't seem to care what you think of it.

Shocking Pinks' DFA debut is an auspicious one by a young artist who knows as much about loneliness as he does noisy pop classics.

With Hit After Hit, he's made 11 more charming and knowingly primitive bursts of sunny fuzz. He's got plenty more left in him.

Shrines is not about range, instead offering subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. You might think of the album as a sculpture, and each track offers a different vantage point... compulsively listenable.

Ultra Mono charges into the discourse like a hobbyist at a rally. It’s not listening, just shouting. Not radical but restless. Not bad, just unnecessary.

Even though Anchor is a truly disappointing work from such an inventive mind, it’s not enough to suggest that he’s reached the point of creative bankruptcy.

The Albatross darted fitfully and stretched out in all directions, while Dealer pulls all of Foxing's influences inward. Inverting his typical role of making burly post-rock bands sound delicate, producer Matt Bayles (Isis, Caspian) boosts Foxing's fragility.

As it is, Häxan occupies an odd slot in Dungen’s hard hitting and respectably consistent discography: a labor of love that is less than essential, rewarding but not attention grabbing, remarkably ambitious and yet strangely ephemeral.

Who Built the Moon? feels like the sort of album where Noel spent way more time mapping out the sounds than writing the lyrics. But “Keep on Reaching” whips up enough manic, soul-stomping gusto to forgive its obvious Stevie Wonder swipes (”Keep on reaching out for that higher ground”), while “Be Careful What You Wish For” oozes enough creeping menace to elevate its title from clichéd phrase to prophetic threat.

Those first three albums have always been easy to put on and enjoy, and now we have a fourth to go with them.

It takes only a few listens to realize that this album is its own beast. Even with healthy doses of unruliness and a few far-off wanderings, this is Magik Markers' most coherent, self-contained effort to date.

Whether it's a unique opportunity to peek into a talented musician's creative process or a throwaway collection of sonic gags depends on your tastes.

Without sacrificing extremity, they all captured the spirit of metal, not just the sound.

In the Same Room is spacious and restrained, at times offering concentrates of the songs’ emotive fundamentals. It’s also further occasion for Holter to sharpen material or else mine it for new meaning.

Shutting Down Here never sacrifices the knotty complications that make his work far weightier than a mere genre study. This is a personal record, after all, and knotty might just be a big, welcome part of who Jim O’Rourke is.

With its inviting ambiance, unhurried vibe, and ebullient group harmonies, Time Skiffs readily conjures warm memories of AnCo’s late-2000s halcyon days. But the album possesses a personality and methodology all its own.

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.

It's packed with ideas, some of which work beautifully and some of which are just a joy to hear play out, but most of all, it's still a whole other world of pop music--an absolutely unique, enchanting, and irreplaceable vision of how the stuff can work.

It’s a master-level maneuver that underlines the essential theme of the three-disc set, which is that after a quarter century of pushing music into the future, Carl Craig’s still not done.

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.

There's enough stylistic extension here that Katy finds a way to transcend enough signifiers to call herself pop above anything else.

Like the debut, this album is only eight songs, but floaty interludes like "In a Bubble on a Stream" or "Juju" allow attention to drift more freely, closer to TTA's super-limited 2006 ambient excursion Escaping Your Ambitions.

Perverts is an awful lot to take in one sitting, and it often feels split between two distinct aesthetic modes: the wistful chill of slow but structured songs, and the brutal unmooring of eerie ambient collages. Both styles converge thematically on the same tortured core, but the switch between them can cause whiplash.

Whether it's the lush power-balladry of "Beg For the Night" and "Be Mine Tonight" or throttle-pushing rockers like "You Call Me On", Confess is defined by its melodic and emotional immediacy.

Versatility, it turns out, may not be Clams’ strong suit, though that’s hardly a problem; as the first half of 32 Levels demonstrates, there’s still plenty of room left for Clams Casino to grow into his own sound.

Throughout the album, he’s haunted by both the things that have and haven’t happened to him, what he has and hasn’t done, ruminating over a tight 32 minutes across eight tracks that feel haunted even at their hardest.

This album is more for Naeem himself than any listener. And when it hits a sweet spot, drifting somewhere between manic experimentation and somber fury, Startisha shines.

As Chopper reaffirms, Kiwi Jr. may never be the kind of band that deals in linear narratives or grand conceptual statements. But like the background bit actors that fill out the frames of a big-screen epic, their songs amass minor details to major effect.

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

Oberst has traded in a lot of his post-adolescent trembling for a calmer, less unbridled melancholy, but Conor Oberst is still packed with disheartening realities, and Oberst refuses to temper his pessimism, even when it starts to feel heavy and contrived, more like a narrative tic than anything else.

Songs in A&E is certainly Spiritualized's best work in 10 years.

While some moments are absolutely stellar, I Might Be Wrong is only a shadow of what a Radiohead live album could have been.

The record is experimental in the truest sense, each of its tracks signifying a possible point of departure.

Forgoing the bitterness that made 2006's What Are You On sound so tinny and doomed, We Live in Rented Rooms, despite its endtimes stoicism, may be Cornog's highest-fi album to date.

If you’re in this emotionally combustible state, you’ll relate to You’re Gonna Miss It All directly and deeply. If you at least recognize it in retrospect, you can just as easily appreciate its wealth of infectious songs that are both sharply observed and sharply written.

Don’t mistake their expanded palette for a lack of focus: as always, Darkthrone keep these eight songs’ latent chaos on a tight choke-chain, timing the hellish tremolo riffs as carefully and slowly as an October surprise.

More so than Forgiveness Rock Record, Hug of Thunder presents Broken Social Scene as a rock band making rock songs, a coherent montage rather than a patched-together highlight reel.

His music is heavier and more complex than it used to be, the arrangements harsher and stranger. And then there’s his singing: Once a competent and breezy instrument, Walker’s voice has evolved into a throaty speak-sing that sounds depleted, as though it’s been scooped out of itself. These shifts give the record a deeper emotional resonance than anything else he’s put his name to.

Ferndorf as a record isn't something to get you hearing music in a new way or an open up a new world, but it does succeed very nicely for what it is.

Nothing has established their voice by transforming that anxiety into languid, slanted harmonies. The Great Dismal takes stock of their career, finding vaporous beauty in shrugging off their inner demons.

Under Stellar Stream is filled with such fertile repetition.

This is a solid debut album.

These new songs are shadowy and spacy, a little bit lost, maybe even a tad sexy despite themselves--all brighter and richer than their predecessors.

Here's the first full-length Broadcast product that pulls back the veil and lets us hear big stretches of what it's like when they're trying sounds out, getting abstract, being well and truly difficult.

It's a dense, patient work that could only have been made by someone who's done this before.

The production on The Block Brochure series roams a little wider and farther than the Revenue Retrievin series did, which helps when approaching such a seemingly undigestible block of music.

Cheatahs might not be a very ambitious record, but it is kinda ballsy.

Artistic restraint is a new concept for WHY? and it’s understandable if Moh Lhean as a whole feels slightly tentative at points.

Warmth stands to resonate with those seeking a transportive experience whose peaks and valleys never overwhelm.

Watch Me Fall is neither a reinvention nor a holding pattern for Reatard--walking the line between them is tricky, but he continues to make doing so look easy.

Eskimo Snow just feels like the right kind of album for an incredibly gifted and increasingly prolific band like WHY? to release as a quick palate cleanser, reaching an endpoint of a certain sound rather than trying to top its predecessor's unmatchable extremities.

There is no guiding conceit to Easy Come Easy Go, no criteria that connects all of Faithfull's sources, which frees her up considerably to find the hidden passages between these disparate songs.

Traditional Synthesizer Music feels not so much traditional as a refresh: a suite of music that is crafted and ferociously complex, but at its root a pure and primal thing, high on its own chaos.

The problem is that the strangely smug We Don't Even Live Here feels more like P.O.S. preaching to the converted than attempting to make a believer out of anyone, lacking any palpable resistance necessary to justify the constant underdog pose.

In A LA SALA, each member of the trio has several opportunities to shine while making each track sound individual, and it all comes together cohesively because Khruangbin know where their strengths lie.

Vanishing Point is both an anachronism and, if you’re on Mudhoney’s wavelength, a hilarious bulwark against everything that’s annoyingly ephemeral about contemporary underground culture.

If Dälek didn't have all this discordant float working for them, they'd be one of the most irritating rap groups in history.

Oversteps finds them working in a comparatively less rigid fashion, almost organic compared to something like Confield. Focusing on creating tension and release within their compositions, they're still incorporating new designs, not merely repackaging the previous products.

[Guitarist Dave] Chandler's prowess as an axeman cannot be given enough emphasis: his writhing, twisted, screaming solos, and devilishly heavy riffs funnel blood and mercury into Saint Vitus' heart, as Wino's pipes lay down the soul.

1000 Days is a heartening record, a record that sees a young band picking up steam, playing with their influences more deftly than on their prior LPs, and bringing a thoughtful approach to old and well-traveled sounds.

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

Blush is a record of impressive variety, both in sentiment and sound. Some of the riskier arrows fall far off the mark, but more often than not, Hawke hits her targets with verve and style.

Requiem for Jazz is a complex record, requiring sustained attention and careful thought. Though it lacks the fiery rage and visceral immediacy of 2020’s LIVE, its nuanced critique of jazz’s role in Black history is an important and necessary continuation of the conversation that Bland began over six decades ago.

If Smith’s earlier albums tended to flush the sound field with twirling synthesized figures like so many kites in the sky, Gush turns up the gravity and clears out more negative space. Each sound bears more weight and locks more readily into prolonged grooves.

Return to the Ugly Side is clearly designed to be experienced as a single piece, complete with an opening instrumental overture that recurs later in the album, and seamless flows in and out of tracks.

Tiga's still not a dancefloor chameleon like Basement Jaxx and he's not yet as pop-oriented and clever as say, the Pet Shop Boys, but Ciao! at least sees him glancing in those directions.

Think of Sports, then, as a freshly taken Polaroid with a lit cigarette stuck straight in the middle of it-- a burning hole bridging the distance between then and right now.

Totems Flare regains a measure of hospitality from its predecessor, but it brings only one new idea to the table-- Clark's singing, which is only partially effective.

Dominated by shuffling drums, slow southern rock guitar licks, and pedal steel, the music on Mount Moriah is unobtrusive and reserved--at times almost too much so--but there are some fine flourishes in these songs, which feature members of Megafaun, St. Vincent, and Bowerbirds

English Electric, the British new wave band's second full length since the reformation of the classic 1980s lineup in 2006, neither escapes from the quartet's past nor fully aims to.

The latest Horseback album, Piedmont Apocrypha, compacts this meandering trajectory into a five-song narrative that's inclusive, intriguing, and unquestionably creepy.

There may be no artist more committed to the line as a creative medium than Nisennenmondai; projected through Sherwood's spacetime-distorting lens, their vision of infinity becomes all the more engrossing.

The album is at its strongest when it leans into its own mysticality, sounding old-fashioned and contemporary simultaneously.

The mindset of Skip a Sinking Stone is best entered with the intent of total immersion and allotting a similar amount of Mutual Benefit music to more conventional song structures and interludes can feel like a vision quest stopped too frequently for bathroom breaks.

What The First Family does do well is situate the listener in a time and place that seems galaxies away from the one the Beatles would birth two months later when they put out Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

There’s always a risk that an album like this one will be received as novelty music, but the compositional integrity is there, and the music is engaging purely on the level of sound.

The songs he summons from the synths offer proof that there were more songs left in him, but he's still digging in the same mine. Ad Infinitum might be the sound of an artist challenging himself, but it's not the sound of an artist challenging his listeners.

Reflections--Mojave Desert is arguably his most ambitious recording to date, if only because he availed himself of the Mojave Desert itself as his recording studio. Clocking in at under half an hour, the soundtrack shows Floating Points in a transitional phase.

There’s a fine line between escapist and naïve, though, and Nelson and company aren’t afraid to toe it. The extent to which listeners enjoy this record depends on how much they buy into the fantasy of Nelson and his famous pals clinking Coronas around the pool while the rest of the world goes to hell. If it feels a little hollow, well, that’s by design.

They're pop in perhaps the most literal sense of the word-- their songs POP out at you, glowing bright blue-green like a Nike tracksuit.

It's a feat the band manages to pull off again and again, track after track, over the course of Skeleton, and the true heart of the record: making the familiar seem fresh and giddy pop seem like indie manna.