There is a ton of evidence of his genius at work here.... As an album, though, The Further Adventures of Lord Quas doesn't cut it.

Recalls last year's fine Halo Benders release, The Rebels Not In, the album Martsch recorded with Beat Happening's Calvin Johnson and former Spinanes and current Built to Spill drummer Scott Plouf. And that's not a bad thing at all.

Though there is an overall whiff of the 1980s about Vapours, it sidesteps the traps of either sounding trendily vintage or indistinguishable from the rest of today's Reagan-era impostors. It works best, however, to think of the album as a return to "Return to the Sea," only, as its title suggests, in a hazier, less opaque form.

Bronson's biggest strengths are a goofy sense of humor and a refreshing lack of self-regard: at its best, Well-Done is like spending 45 minutes with the affable, roly-poly guy who cracked you up at your high school lunch table.

On her follow-up, Paradise Gardens, these clouds clear to reveal her most immediate, adventurous music to date and the always razor-sharp songwriting that lurked behind them.

The prismatic, black-lit aura of their fascinating, endlessly explorable debut Psychic doesn’t try to stop anyone from making that connection and if you spot Jaar’s stated influences of Can and Richie Hawtin, that’s fine too: rarely has a record held such appeal for the high-minded while welcoming the simply high-minded.

The result is Manchester Orchestra’s most confounding, thrilling, and unintentionally loopy album yet.

The joy of being a collective bleeds into every bar and hook. For a change, it’s a Brockhampton album that isn’t telling you what to think or feel; it just sounds good.

In other words: Sure they're funny, but are these songs supposed to be any good? Surprisingly, yes.

Tromatic Reflexxions sometimes seems to work like a Fall album, wearing you down with its relentless energy.

Heart Ache suggests a sense of ambition and movement grander than that of any Jesu LP. Dethroned, meanwhile, suggests a deliberate move toward the middle, with relatively compact song structures and dynamic and textural variety. If Broadrick can unite those ideas into one 40-minute Jesu blast, this band might finally have its full-length masterpiece.

It's pretty good. That much anyone aware of Johnston's past highpoints probably could have predicted.

You may not love all the moves Orcutt makes, but together they quicken your pulse and pressurize the atmosphere, much as a good horror film makes even calm moments seem one second away from shock.

At its best, Sleep feels like compositionally rigorous new age music. It’s a place in which you can settle for a while, with or without a pillow, and emerge only when you are ready to rejoin the restive world.

The ensemble’s playing and the leader's compositions make Junun an easy stretch--though, crucially, not a condescending one--for listeners otherwise unfamiliar with the great variety of methods often obscured by "world music" market-speak.

City Lake is a glimpse at the raw materials before all the splinters have been sanded down--and it is all the more exciting for them.

The directness with which it speaks to its audience makes it easy to imagine Celebration inspiring a lot of its younger listeners to start a band. For anyone else, it’s just an inspiring testament to indie rock’s continued vitality.

Rooted somewhere in the corporeal fantasies that have always propelled dance music, Hesaitix unravels an imaginary realm that feels genuinely new in form.

Thirty years in, the Chemical Brothers are still digging their own purely escapist sonic rabbit holes. At a time of great cultural and global insecurity, there's never been a more tempting time to get lost in their sensory overload.

Forward motion makes So Full Upon Her Burning Lips more than just a return to a classic sound. There are enough surprises here that what could’ve been just a comfortable glance backward.

Yes, this music gets dull--it’s supposed to. I can’t imagine listening to it all the time for the same reasons I can’t imagine trying to cook an entire meal using only a garlic press. But in their limited pursuits Bohren captures a mood other music either struggles to or just doesn’t bother with: Not sadness (too acute), not angst, but a sumptuous, all-purpose melancholy.

With Trouble, Russell, Morley, and Yeats have dug one foot deeper into the thick, sludgy, noise-strewn topsoil they’ve long called home. Call it a trench, if you will, but it isn’t is a grave.

The more voices he lets into the frame, the fuller and richer the results, and More Life bursts with energy and lush sounds--more guests, more genres, more producers, more life. It is as confident, relaxed, and appealing as he’s sounded in a couple of years.

SOUND & FURY is miles down the road from any of his previous albums.

British producer and Transglobal Underground vet Nick Page, aka Dub Colossus, got the ball bouncing with A Town Called Addis, an intriguing conflation of reggae and dub sensibilities with Ethiopian pop. It's an ingenious idea made more interesting by its roundabout mode of composition.

Her ambitions are bold, but the album has a sense of polished remove that prevents it from scaling real emotional heights.

The occasional bluebird-embroidered country-folk tune pleasantly drifts by, but most often, Found Light is riveting, and even its plainer moments are essential to its narrative arc.

Swanlights might be Antony's richest album yet, with musical and thematic charms that take their time to take their hold.