For the second time in one year, both on a large label and on their own, they've released a record ruthless and rewarding enough to animate that image.

Anamai may not be as pummelling as a HSY record, but their metaphysical weight makes up for it, producing an even more striking result than Mayberry’s other band.

Toting a whole gleaming new set of synthesizers and some surprisingly complicated riffing, Gales transforms the band completely. The experience is sort of like catching a show you used to watch on a CRTV in high def for the first time.

The album plays to his strengths. It is more playful than his last LP, and also more finessed.

Lanois and Funk demonstrate that even the briefest pause can reveal a more becalmed state of being lying just beneath all the noise and bustle.

Even as its musical forms and source material remain familiar, Renegade Breakdown is a work of knowing misdirection, a way of staking out new creative territory that’s challenging, idiosyncratic, and proudly uncool.

The Weavers have no trouble sounding like themselves, but another voice in the room might have helped them flesh out some of the underexplored ideas on Primordial Arcana. Like the still life that adorns its cover, the album can be beautiful, but it’s fundamentally inert.

The rapping on GHETTO GODS features less filler and empty showmanship than EarthGang’s past releases, but their writing remains anonymous.

Even on the merely good ones, there’s always the sense of someone living in Clark’s lyrics, making decisions about how to transform those feelings into melodies and rhymes.

For the first time in a while, it sounds like they’re listening to what’s happening in clubland and asking themselves not what they can poach for the charts, but what they can bring to the table.

Their voices complement each other so naturally and so gracefully that it’s easy to forget how much craft there is in these songs, and how much ingenuity they put into their vocals.

Minor quibbles and missteps aside, Body Talk Pt. 2 is a perfectly solid-- and occasionally awesome-- record.

This record is carefree and instantly likable--even if it doesn't seem to care what you think of it.

Shocking Pinks' DFA debut is an auspicious one by a young artist who knows as much about loneliness as he does noisy pop classics.

With Hit After Hit, he's made 11 more charming and knowingly primitive bursts of sunny fuzz. He's got plenty more left in him.

Shrines is not about range, instead offering subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. You might think of the album as a sculpture, and each track offers a different vantage point... compulsively listenable.

Ultra Mono charges into the discourse like a hobbyist at a rally. It’s not listening, just shouting. Not radical but restless. Not bad, just unnecessary.

Even though Anchor is a truly disappointing work from such an inventive mind, it’s not enough to suggest that he’s reached the point of creative bankruptcy.

The Albatross darted fitfully and stretched out in all directions, while Dealer pulls all of Foxing's influences inward. Inverting his typical role of making burly post-rock bands sound delicate, producer Matt Bayles (Isis, Caspian) boosts Foxing's fragility.

As it is, Häxan occupies an odd slot in Dungen’s hard hitting and respectably consistent discography: a labor of love that is less than essential, rewarding but not attention grabbing, remarkably ambitious and yet strangely ephemeral.

Who Built the Moon? feels like the sort of album where Noel spent way more time mapping out the sounds than writing the lyrics. But “Keep on Reaching” whips up enough manic, soul-stomping gusto to forgive its obvious Stevie Wonder swipes (”Keep on reaching out for that higher ground”), while “Be Careful What You Wish For” oozes enough creeping menace to elevate its title from clichéd phrase to prophetic threat.

Those first three albums have always been easy to put on and enjoy, and now we have a fourth to go with them.

It takes only a few listens to realize that this album is its own beast. Even with healthy doses of unruliness and a few far-off wanderings, this is Magik Markers' most coherent, self-contained effort to date.

Whether it's a unique opportunity to peek into a talented musician's creative process or a throwaway collection of sonic gags depends on your tastes.

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

In the Same Room is spacious and restrained, at times offering concentrates of the songs’ emotive fundamentals. It’s also further occasion for Holter to sharpen material or else mine it for new meaning.

Shutting Down Here never sacrifices the knotty complications that make his work far weightier than a mere genre study. This is a personal record, after all, and knotty might just be a big, welcome part of who Jim O’Rourke is.

With its inviting ambiance, unhurried vibe, and ebullient group harmonies, Time Skiffs readily conjures warm memories of AnCo’s late-2000s halcyon days. But the album possesses a personality and methodology all its own.