Torres has traded away some pieces of the humanity that colored his earlier work in favor of a conversation about something elemental that's still waiting to be discovered. That doesn’t make for an immediate record. It makes for one full of enigmas, of beautiful and undefinable things that promise further revelations to come.

On Big Boat, they come up with a few winning moments.

The rest of the album’s expansive epics are built on a shaky foundations, with too many songs that contain too many concepts for their own good.

Fires Within Fires is a piece of music that’s too skimpy to be a full-blooded Neurosis LP and too bloated to be a lean, concentrated Neurosis EP.

The truth is, if Head Carrier had arrived as the umpteenth Frank Black solo album, little about it would seem amiss. But coming from a band whose legacy was built on shock-and-awe transgression, Head Carrier feels overly pleasant and pedestrian.

That's the fascination and the frustration of Supersilent: it's like they keep destroying the lineaments of form just for the pleasure of vouchsafing them to us again.

A Seat at the Table, her third full-length album, is the work of a woman who’s truly grown into herself, and discovered within a clear, exhilarating statement of self and community that’s as robust in its quieter moments as it is in its funkier ones.

Without sacrificing extremity, they all captured the spirit of metal, not just the sound.

Guest voices mesh well with Machinedrum’s enlightenment through repetition, bringing a bit more flexibility and unpredictability than your traditional diva loop.

Hval is a clear disciple of Kraus. On paper, Kraus moves fluidly from reference to reference, dense with ideas; Hval’s music is like this, too, and never more than on Blood Bitch.

The most difficult part of making instrumental, non-dance electronic music for an audience beyond your typical avant-garde connoisseur is injecting it with a sense of narrative, a story, an energy that replaces vocals and conventional musical structures to give the tracks an augmented dimension. S U R V I V E are very good at this. They may be one of the best bands currently employing those skills, and RR7349 is their most succinct example yet.

Atrocity Exhibition finds Brown back behind the lens, capturing raw emotion with grainy 16mm.

Quietly adventurous, wise, and a welcome late-career turn, Blue Mountain builds an ethereal home for a rhythm guitarist who was tempered in the chaos-friendly environs of Dead.

Campaign outpaces his recent efforts like $ign Language and Airplane Mode but, still, mostly just preserve Ty’s musical bottom line.

He doesn't reveal many new tricks, but his knowledge of his own palette is masterful in every moment. More poetic and thoughtful than ever before, Jaar maintains an ability to fit seemingly disparate sounds together as if they were always meant to find each other.

22, A Million sounds only like itself.

The album as a whole is more suited for seated, solitary brooding than for anything as lively as moving your body.

Certainly Cohen’s music is serious and often melancholy. But there’s a lot of joy in the way her songs illustrate and embody her thoughtful verse.

The Healing Component would have benefitted for a couple of those brighter moments to keep things moving, but it’s a small gripe.

They’re just the latest to move these pieces around--to use distortion pedals and droning vocals to unpack the mysteries of the universe. But there’s a confidence that with time they could be the ones to finally solve the puzzle.

If You See Me may lack some of the tension and menace of Wye Oak’s best records, but that’s a fair tradeoff for an album this personable and at peace with itself.

Kool Keith trades verses with an array of guest stars, packaged with bare hooks and brisk running times. In most cases, he pulls his collaborators into his own orbit.

Heavy on ballads and low on energy, Banhart sometimes comes in danger of scrubbing away any remnants of his once-magnetic personality. Occasionally, though, Ape approaches sparse brilliance.

It’s exciting to hear the freedom of Jóhannsson’s compositions in autonomous music, and with Orphée he’s reasserted himself as not a just an elegiac film score guy.

[A] muddled, occasionally fascinating album.

It cribs largely from dancehall, but stops short of adopting any of that form’s humidity; these diaphanous tracks are a long stream of cool appraisal.

The band’s music on Shape Shift is less straightforward than Transgender Dysphoria Blues. As a noisy, digressive follow-up to an anthemic rock record, it’s more a parallel to their audacious sophomore album As the Eternal Cowboy, and its relationship to their rumbling folk-punk debut Reinventing Axl Rose.

Corpse overcomes its moments, due in part to concision and earnest songwriting.