It walks the line between naive and savvy, between earnest and winking, confessional and oversharing, bratty and bold, experimental and inexperienced.

It sounds less like a young producer enjoying the fruits of quick success than a restless experimenter figuring out what to do next. Lucky for us, the woodshed is destination enough.

Dionysus is an album of radical ambition, a work of scholarly pursuit and musical depth that explores European folk traditions, the boundaries of language, and Latin American bird calls.

Amid slashes of industrial noise and chilling silences, the two artists take turns offering similar surreal speeches about gazing up at a black airplane, a pitch-black sky, vomit, and a bird of paradise--sinister appeals to the unknown, to the unavoidable end times. These interstitials give Isa a dimensionality that seems to break a fourth wall of the record.

It’s thrashy if not entirely thrash, it’s dirty and smeared at the edges, and they remain sick of your shit, with their definition of “your shit” an exponentially expanding, spiteful blob. Even without changing much, they’re still the freaks underground metal needs.

While the final result is less cohesive, and could benefit from trimming two or three songs, there’s no denying Gibbs’ versatility.

They may have slightly diluted their sound this time around, but at least they’re struggling on their own terms. The highlights suggest there is an arena-friendly Hinds out there, still waiting to emerge in full.

For all its craft, Getting Into Knives is too casual of a collection to sit alongside The Mountain Goats’ statement albums. But while these may not be Darnielle’s meatiest songs, the rich instrumentation turns them into one of his most welcoming records.

It sags in the fourth section, where Taylor perhaps overcompensates for the brevity of K.T.S.E. with one too many ballads. Still, for an album that lives mostly in the slow- and mid-tempo, it frisks and frolics.

Marnia isn't the single touch that shatters, it's the long, steady stare that gives way to embrace.

It’s essentially a recreation of past glories that never quite hits those heights. As a piece of the Tangerine Dream continuum, however, Raum satisfies: Its unashamed drift and scale pay a tribute to a world where music is huge, omnipresent, and never ending.

Too many songs proceed from point A to B with little variation or depth. Those tracks seem to equivocate between the collagist Fog and the pop Fog, reconciling their tensions instead of exploiting them.

Watching such an undeniably talented artist blindly follow such an errant muse can be endlessly compelling, and the failure of these two albums to capture his visions and ambitions with any adequacy possesses the pull of true tragedy.

So yes, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers is just another Califone album, but it's also a reminder of just what a special thing that is.

Ultimately, this is the type of record this band is suited to making, and it richly rewards repeat listening--details and melodies that seem buried or understated eventually come to fore, slowly revealed in a mixture of organic warmth, welcome variety, and subtle complexity.

Even if Cease to Begin is a little creaky and uneven and even if it never finds the resting spot the album title promises, Band of Horses do guitar-based indie very well--well enough, at least, that the next generation of American indie bands may bear comparisons to them.

After an iffy start, Toward the Low Sun thankfully picks up a head full of steam in its closing stretch--hopefully, this momentum won't dissipate over another seven-year layoff.

The difference, as between fellow Merge band the Rosebuds' debut and sophomore albums, is a greater engagement with the prevailing indiepop aesthetic rather than long-dead flower-cliché epochs, though without quite the songwriting chops of Bell and guitarist Jeff Baron's other band, Ladybug Transistor.

Slow, sugary, and perhaps a little too safe, this is not quite the return that Cinematic fans will want it to be.

Some Cold Rock Stuf makes more sense as a collection of scattered concept pieces than a unified statement.

Staying on just this side of a Corona beer commercial, it sounds like a continuation of Bergsman's realizations carried over from East of Eden, in that a change in latitude brings about a change in attitude.

No Poison No Paradise, his latest, features some of the ugliest-sounding, and therefore best and most fully-realized, music of his career.

Younge’s soundtrack evokes Sly Stone’s improvised funk and buffers Bilal’s ruminating ballads, and the LP falters when it strays from that sound.

There's something more naturally personal about Pythagorean Dream, in the way its multitude of vibrations emanate from Chatham alone.

Its mystery isn’t a gimmick, nor a playful riddle to be solved, but an abstraction awaiting interpretation.

Watching and listening as Masters has spun off in as many different directions as he has only makes this album feel even more special; a brilliant, vivid snapshot of an artist and a band at the very beginning of a fascinating and unpredictable journey.

From end to end, Rakka thrives on instability and the fear it fosters. Its beats lock into a grid for only a minute or so at a time, allowing you just enough space to settle into a groove before dropping you into some cacophonous abyss.

In directing his anger inward, slowthai loses some of the urgency and incisiveness that made his debut so compelling, along with the contrast that made that album’s vulnerable moments so striking. But he’s undoubtedly honed his craft, sounding slicker as he retreats from placard rap to the journaling process that got him started in the first place.