The question that all improvisers have to answer is whether something you play once can be worth listening to more than once. Experience and forethought ease the answer toward yes, and Drumm has both at his command.

Coming from such a creative bunch, the straightforward character of Crystal Fairy is surprising, but the strong, pre-existing rapport between its two pairs of players helps.

NOW bleeds with the awareness that tomorrow is never guaranteed.

Electric Brick Wall is a far more coherent synthesis of those disparate influences, and possibly her strongest record since the Trux’s peak.

Dalliance is the sound of a good band tightening to the point where they become something greater.

The album’s second half slows down a bit, but it maintains the focus on songcraft and mood.

Unlike her song-based previous albums, All Thoughts Fly is instrumental, performed entirely on pipe organ. Its lush soundscapes find transcendence in the eerie and the sorrowful, much like Sacro Bosco itself.

Many artists of Wreckless Eric’s era and tradition have imitators, but few of yesteryear’s outliers can catch up with their descendants, let alone best them. amERICa is that rare record.

Although it's unfocused by design, Everything is still unfocused. Which is not to say it's inconsistent: a major improvement in this regard over Trainwreck-- which meandered off into ambient oblivion on its final four tracks-- Everything is markedly well assembled.

Full of slippage and lacunae, whipping itself from moment to moment and then fading, ORCORARA 2010 is so absorbing as to make the world outside it seem bizarre, and in this it has political power.

Despite a few stumbles—”WASP” and closing track “Walking On Air” are the album’s most generic offerings—her frenetic fire-and-ice routine is impressive. She’s grown up without losing her freshness, refining the skill and intensity that got her here in the first place.

Odd instrumental touches crop up throughout the album, and there's a welcome layer of grit and murk to even the prettiest songs here.

As the languid classical guitar that dots the album brings it to a close, it hits that this 44-minute opus is perhaps more inviting, and more melodic, than anything Jenkinson has done in a long time.

By combining American punk, British art-rock, and Swedish smarts to beef up their already muscular sound, they've not only developed a distinctive sonic personality on Das Not Compute, but they've developed a pose into a stance.

This is not by any stretch a turn toward the accessible, though there are a few great pop moments.

The album’s just a little over half-an-hour long, and it’s all of a piece, conveying casual imagery that meanders from the hands-in-pockets wistfulness of drifting and kicking on trash cans (“Knockin’ on Your Screen Door”) to turning on the TV and looking out your window. Throughout, he has a virtuoso grasp of understatement.

Some of Happier Than Ever’s quieter tracks drag—“Everybody Dies”’s dreary grasps at existentialism barely leave an impression. That said, as the beat change on “My Future” shows, Happier Than Ever’s best songs are the ones where Eilish and Finneas allow one small idea to mutate into two or three bigger ones.

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.

On Every Acre, McEntire’s patient observations of the land provide her with a new footing: one full of possibility and promise. It’s in the commitment to stasis that McEntire finds the fortitude to begin anew.

Remember the Life Is Beautiful isn't a triumph simply because it so elegantly captures the Balearic style; it's that it so elegantly captures its spirit.

So Z abandons the Skynyrdisms of It Still Moves, but that album's lessons remain intact: Compared to those on previous albums, these tracks have more guitar crunch and tighter song structures.

Magma’s not nearly as esoteric as the albums that preceded it--and considering how Gojira’s progressive tendencies have distinguished them from the get-go, the catchiest tracks on the record arguably take the biggest risks.

If Darcy’s lyrics require putting in some work to decode them, the band makes musical immersion easy by consistently striking the familiar balance of dissonant sound, disjointed melody, and bone-dry production that defined indie rock’s late-’80s/early-’90s golden age, before synths, string sections, and festival-baiting choruses became de rigueur.

The lyrics don't match the usually upbeat sound, and that disconnect helps make the band even more interesting.

She tells these stories in a honey-rich voice that can sweep from powerfully belted notes to playful talk-singing.

Their 13th album, La Isla Bonita, is among their most accessible, reaching for moments of escapism that never entered the frame on 2012's Breakup Songs.

A nostalgic return to happier times this ain’t; more like an indictment of the current malaise via a defense of the dancefloor at both its holiest and most profane.

For one reason or another, Modeselektor seem unwilling to trim the fat and here again, are a handful of just-okay songs that probably should have been lopped off. Cut some of them and you've got a great record instead of just a darn good one.