Sonescent slips between Reynols’ brilliant Blank Tapes, where you imagine musical shapes coming from re-recorded sleice, and Ned Lagin’s immersive Seastones series, where there’s so much music you have to tease out the hidden figures.

While it sounds like it was taken from the same creative burst that birthed London producer Zomby's recent LP Dedication, here that album's glum funereality gets an almost dance-friendly makeover.

A restful wash of clean, simple lines, unfractured beats, and neon-tinted melodies.

It's all delivered with sheer glee, and some of it is among the most wicked fun committed to record in 2015.

Worldwide fortifies Snooper’s sound by forcing the stiff loops of a drum machine to warp under the weight of their ricocheting guitars. Studio time didn’t kill the punk band. It granted them space to play faster and looser without losing any of the fun.

It’s startling to hear Cola so energized, and the band carries that momentum through the whole album. There’s a newfound confidence to sprawl out in unexpected, noisy ways.

I Love You, It's Cool is admirable in large part because its ambitions are every bit as subtle and difficult to quantify as its pleasures-- you don't have to call it "adult indie," but it feels like conflicted indie rock for adults.

It’s a break-up album, less focused on wordplay and punchlines than universal truths. And while her songwriting continues to avoid the obvious path, her arrangements decidedly do not. ... The best moments are when Clark fights through the heartbreak to find her own footing again.

The good news is that the band's official debut (following the 2007 collection "Wind And The Swell") is still a solid art-pop album at its core, and importantly, more "American Gangster" than "The Crane Wife."

It’s hard to tell if Moon Beach is meant as a continuation of Vile’s past work or the start of something new, but that uncertainty is also what makes it feel so exciting.

Raveena’s luminous sophomore album, Asha’s Awakening, is a throat-clearing moment for the singer, drawing on both Western and South Asian inspirations and collaborations for a blend of dance-friendly R&B songs and soothing ballads, each of which stands on her distinctive, quiet strength.

U.S.A. is a good-not-great Southern rap album, overlong and weighted down by too many inept slow tracks but boasting enough furious, kinetic dance tracks to make it worth your money.

Bauhaus can hold their head high, mission accomplished; but with no victory-lap tour, no more studio albums, and several awesome new tunes pointing at an un-actualized future, it all feels rather anti-climatic and lacking closure.

We the Common's best songs are its most dynamic.

Communicating also features some of her most direct lyrics and singing to date, and much of the album will undoubtedly resonate with listeners struggling to make connections or find meaning in their lives, despite their best efforts.

Jurado is back to doing what he does best-- pairing simple, sprightly arrangements with mobile vocal melodies.

Unsurprisingly, this is heavy listening.

Equally inspired by The Raincoats and Jacques Brel, The Power Out veers from one inspired genre tribute to the next, if it never quite cements the band's identity.

From the self-deprecating shrug of a title to its brief run time, the aesthetic details of Anyhow suggest a musical trifle. But the reality is a work of profound detail, fascinating musical textures, melodic twists, and stylistic ambiguity that is more diamond dust than pocket lint.

These are love songs to a community and a lineage that taught Paul how to survive.

Here's the first full-length Broadcast product that pulls back the veil and lets us hear big stretches of what it's like when they're trying sounds out, getting abstract, being well and truly difficult.

Loneliness aside, Come Home to Mama is not a somber affair. Credit's partly due to new producer Yuka Honda from Cibo Matto, who freshens up the sound considerably.

In his own dogged, idiosyncratic way, he's keeping a neglected strain of dance music alive here, and while the joys are subtle, the more attention you give the mix, the deeper they feel.

Hiatt’s candid emotions feel earned; her open-hearted melodies and punchy hooks play out like a series of unguarded moments.

The profane marriage of old and new, big ugly riffs and shrieking noise, beauty and brutality seems like the clearest marker indicating where Full of Hell may intend to head next.

Marcielago serves as a capstone for Marci’s decade, a mix of evocative soul samples and stripped-down loops paired with his trademark gnomic flow.

Fortunately, whether she's sifting through the anguish she's caused her mother and the trouble she's having finishing her album, or realizing that good sex can make for bad boyfriends and that even sucky jobs serve some cosmic purpose, she generally cuts through the crap without pretending to have easy answers.

Like the debut, this album is only eight songs, but floaty interludes like "In a Bubble on a Stream" or "Juju" allow attention to drift more freely, closer to TTA's super-limited 2006 ambient excursion Escaping Your Ambitions.