It's this sense of fearless overreach that unites This Ain't Chicago's best moments, with producers capitalizing on house's additive structure by piling on every trick they can think of to create top-heavy epics of bristling sonics and contradictory moods.

The allusions thrum just beneath the surface of these vivid songs, as if to suggest that specific moments of music can get us through hard times or even just move us a little further down the road.

There's something more deliberately approachable about the melodies he uses here. He meditates in the spaces in between phrasings, allowing the more volatile segments to linger like light trails in your vision.

Soft and subtle, Superwolf is the kind of record that unwinds slowly, and is best enjoyed over multiple listens and, unsurprisingly, many glasses of wine.

The world might be an unrelentingly bleak place right now, but Amnesia Scanner find new strengths under pressure on Another Life. In more ways than one, they’re only just finding their voice.

It’s tricky to praise music so clearly based on form and balance. Comma isn’t filled with a mind-warping atmosphere you’ve heard nowhere else, it’s not an invitation to meditate or do yoga, and it probably won’t make you cry. It offers something ineffable that I can best call a “presence,” and its ability to center you in the here and now is, in its own low-key and meticulous way, overwhelming.

Young may be famous for his maelstrom guitar, but in this case the apocalypse sneaks up on us with a whisper, Young's voice steeped in decades of watching the world go to hell.

With its handsome hard-cover packaging, clear-plastic paper-stock photo galleries, candid liner-note interviews (conducted in early 2007), and ridiculously detailed Pete Frame-drawn family tree poster, the set provides a handy opportunity for newbies to play catch-up on the band's history-- and for anyone who first came into contact with the Mary Chain via the closing credits to "Lost in Translation," only to be scared off by "Psychocandy's" torrential noise.

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.

Follow-up Swisher doesn’t abandon the beauty of the duo’s earlier work (“Andrew” and “Rei” could easily be lifted from last year’s album) but it uses it more judiciously. This shift makes Swisher less immediately captivating but somehow more involving than its predecessor, establishing the ultimate core of the duo’s aesthetic somewhere deeper and altogether more mysterious.

Tones of Town may lack the swooning immediacy of its predecessor, but it still sounds like a labor of love.

All the emotions Bridges mines in looking back are flattened into another textural element in the mix, a move that results in an album as comforting as a cool summer breeze—and just as ephemeral.

The dusty melancholia of Lucky Shiner feels earned and lived-in. It's a far cry from just naming your new bedroom-pop band Double Dare.

Closing track “New Moon,” whose title signals the completion of a cycle and rebirth, might have come off as meandering and repetitive at the beginning of the record. But in its final moments, once you’ve adjusted your ears, Bachman’s delicate gestures sound at once extremely private and cosmically vast.

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

On Overload, the pop song structures, coupled with the economic, purposeful instrumentation, yields her most concise and moving set to date. A dozen restless years into her recording careers and Muldrow is still reinventing rhythm and blues for the future.

Even as she extends herself as a songwriter, and as she grows more comfortable in the spotlight, she hasn’t found a way to build on the full extent of her mystique.

Vol. 2 leavens its heavier moments with songs that celebrate the simple joys of love and marriage and family, without lapsing into sentimentality.

Thanks to their gently intertwined voices, most name-drops or direct references, like the shout-out to stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen on “Olympus,” don’t feel forced.

Nearly every track on LP3 pushes out toward the five-minute mark, and where previous American Football songs were internal journeys, this album’s travel to new vistas in all directions.

Tassili is a very different album from any Tinariwen have recorded before, and they're proving to be a band of considerable range as they build a catalog of varied and excellent albums.

Tension and anxiety don't always have to be cavernous and austere, and Black Sun reveals a way for dubstep's vanguard to express their more ominous impulses in a way you can still dance to, no matter how the steps change.

Along with wry, sometimes melancholic observations worthy of Richman or the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt, these elements make for Lekman's best record, one likely to captivate even those who were skeptical of his previous releases.

For Smith's first four albums, Outside Society is an abridgement that doesn't really do her justice.

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

On Power, Lotic re-harnesses their production proficiency toward a trickier goal than what they’ve attempted in the past. In the center of their elaborate electronic constructions, they’ve staged their deeply human terrors and triumphs, and traced the way the power structures of the world flow around them.

A Treasure is the first entry to put the spotlight on a less celebrated stretch of his career. As such, this choppy compilation of Harvesters tour highlights allows us to reassess some of Young's 80s output outside its contentious context.

Sounds and ideas repeat constantly, yet Street Horrrsing never feels redundant.