In a year in need of centering and a sense of calm, Phantom Brickworks lives up to its name; it feels haunted while also offering up a hope to rebuild.

Joli Mai is loaded with effusive energy and expertly executed ideas, but alongside the specifically tailored Fabriclive 93 mix, Daphni’s new album feels extraneous--an unnecessary step for a DJ quickly reaching the height of his powers.

Largely, Revelations leaves us waiting for the subtly brilliant moments its title suggests.

As sharp, urgent, and exploratory as they’ve ever been, The Dusk in Us is quintessential Converge, given the grand new purpose of salvation.

A superbly refined collection of songs, carefully crafted and smartly cast. It doesn’t have the longer thematic crescendos of TC, but is even more ruthlessly listenable, stacking hooks on top of hooks and flitting between an array different, pop-viable aesthetic frameworks.

Plunge is riskier than anything she has made before. It is sometimes harsh, often dissonant, frequently audacious.

The two formerly bonus tracks sound like just that: addenda, inessential and fairly unenlightening. ... The best thing about Punk Drunk & Trembling is Thorpe’s falsetto vocals, which shower the song with drama, torment and soul. His voice makes you believe in his words even as you marvel at his powers.

The structure of All American Made works in a strange way, grouping like-minded songs together and moving at a galloping, constantly shifting pace. It hits its peaks at the beginning and end.

Mirror Reaper simulates that totality of grief, but it also transcends its own function as a eulogy.

Screen Memories strikes a chord in a way that most blatantly political albums never quite manage. As society crumbles, John Maus’ commitment to being John Maus is inspiring, tapping an unexpected synchronicity with our doomed world.

Subwoofers are admittedly very cool, but by volume 4 (“Subenstein (My Sub IV)”) of K.R.I.T.’s magnum opus of adulation for the bass speakers, the conceit has worn a little thin. Still bumps, though.

By feeding her perceptions of a vast, uncaring universe through these tiny, delicate sounds, Schott comes closer than most to capturing our vulnerability as living creatures--animal or human--and the senselessness of suffering.

A direct thematic line runs from the album’s first full song, “Appointments,” to “Claws in Your Back”’s riveting finish.

Corgan settles for an album that’s tastefully cordial but about as suspenseful as a round of bumper bowling. There are a few moments when everything clicks, when the passive pleasantness gives way to active pleasure, most of them involving a smartly deployed string quartet.

Pacific Daydream, in spite of its name, mostly just gives you a feeling of being nowhere.

There’s no telling where these well-worn songs will go next. In this sense, the album--as much a kind of private sketchbook as anything--is curiously in keeping with his photographs. Even in music, he rebels against the obvious.

The whole album has a casual, freewheeling vibe, but it’s a testament to King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s unity that it holds together so well.

While the vocal credits might have promised a more straightforward pop route this time around, It’s Alright Between Us… ends up being one of Lindstrøm’s most disjointed and ambiguous projects.

Shot through with seemingly innate bravado and the experience of a childhood spent near the pulpit, Shane had a pitch-perfect sense of when to stir up the dance floor, when to bring things down, and when to bring them up again.

Too much of Going Grey seems oddly unwilling to risk offense--the concepts of “Far Drive,” “Everyone But You,” and “Grand Finale,” songs about various lovelorn states, could be the work of any pop-punker with a passing AP English grade, feeling as perfunctory and indistinct as the hyper-compressed, airless music surrounding them. Stella’s still got his tics, but by this point, they can feel like shtick.

Like Smashing Pumpkins did at their peak, Bully tease dimensionality out of their music by emphasizing the similarity, and then the space, between Bognanno’s voice and the guitars that squall around her.

Though it is certainly a darker listen, III is largely about the same concepts as its predecessor: unquenchable desire that eclipses reality, the ruthless blow of rejection, and the struggle to remain afloat even when “humanity equals misery.”

Anthology is a bold, often dazzling throwback, a grand suite rendered in crystalline keyboards and lavish synths.

The Saga Continues is full of competent if forgettable rapping straight out of the Wu-Tang manuscripts, and each Wu rapper does a serviceable job mustering up shades of their primes, in function. The verses don’t do what they used to, but at a distance they move in the same ways.

Morrissey’s words and delivery were never more deftly idiosyncratic or grandly moving; Johnny Marr’s guitar overflows with sparkling melody while his arrangements sustain a balance between spareness and intricacy. Rhythm section Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce supply foundation and frolic, proving once again how indispensable they were to the group’s magic. ... The demos contain differences that will interest the diehards.

Each song on Glasshouse has its own distinct aesthetic; unlike her previous albums, 2012’s Devotion and 2014’s Tough Love, there are no songs here that could be confused for each other, none that seem an afterthought carved from the greater mood of the album.

It’s an album bursting with ambition, alternating between moments of intimate beauty and stretches of dense, disorienting fog.

Like one of Lynch’s filmic worlds, ken is elegant and perverse, a reflection on where we came from, and the unbelievable place we seem to have ended up.