Lullaby for Liquid Pig is deceptively potent; in just thirty minutes it divines your most closely held memories, guiding you farther and farther back with endless, heartbreaking choruses.

Where others in this vein opt for a hazy, nebulous cloud of half-remembered dreams, Manitoba's music is direct and unassuming while still remaining evocative.

Just as fuzzy and unpredictable as its namesake suggests, with high, hissing vocals, archaic-gone-futuristic blips, pedal steel, keyboards, glockenspiel, and a barrage of other noisemakers helping to build a thick, spacy stretch of soft 60s psychedelia.

It's a damn good pop album, with a little muscle behind its melodies to boot.

Via a confluence of experience, ambition and glossy production, Engine Down have arrived at a palatable music that, with a little more refinement and promotional support, could cement their place in the mainstream cultural canon.

What separates the album from previous Luna product is not so much instrumental alterations as the newly unabashed sentimentality of Wareham's lyrics.

As a backing mini-orchestra, Elf Power and the Strums may not be as inventive as Lambchop or as dark as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but they give Chesnutt just want he needs: a relaxed and less rehearsed environment.

The sonics are familiar, as is the trajectory.

It’s the rare occasion that Hermansen’s ambient interests align so neatly with his disco instincts--a small step, perhaps, toward a new era in his exploration.

Liminal Soul is a little more modern, and dead serious in contrast with Pure Moods’ chintzy gloss, but both albums feel designed to put you back in your body and back in the real world.

Frigid, militant, and rhythmic.

This is a mammoth collusion of synth gasps and distorted swirls, darker and more urban than its meadow-bound predecessor.

You can feel their newfound focus and commitment here, racing through every new crest Hernandez hits or each burly refrain Hill bellows.

This isn’t his grand final statement (that was Blackstar), it’s a cool little postscript tagged onto an earnest, unthrilling tribute.

Elephant Eyelash sounds less crisp and less striking than the folk-plus-beats arrangements of 2003's Oaklandazurasylum, but it brings more heart; where that earlier album's lyrics crackled with the anxiety of beating yourself up after a bad day at school, Elephant Eyelash soars like the last songs on prom night.

The sounds of Touareg and Afrobeat and Ghanaian Highlife are rippling through the eight songs here, each a rollicking, warm reflection of appreciation.

The songs on here are surprisingly strong, such that any of them could have appeared on a proper album at any point in Beam’s decade-plus career. But the collection never sounds like the sum of its parts.

Music Complete certainly doesn’t do anything to diminish New Order’s formidable legacy, but it doesn’t necessarily expand upon it either. That being said, it still sounds like classic New Order.

If not all its experiments yield consistently entrancing results, Comb the Feelings is the sound of Grooms basking in the first radiant glimpse of a future that, not too long ago, it didn’t think it’d live long enough to see.

If there’s a weakness with Blind Spot it might simply be its brevity, or perhaps the marked absence of the kind of swaggering sonic guitar bombast the band unleashed in old songs like “Sweetness and Light” or “Superblast!.” Regardless, Blind Spot feels like an assured--albeit somewhat tentative—way for the band to dip their toes back in the water

Children of Alice is different from its predecessors. Its nostalgia feels less escapist than therapeutic, and its composure amid the mundane and deranged is more of a promotion for mindfulness.

This is functional music that highlights the simple pleasure of artfully arranged sound, the kind of gorgeous and evocative record that fills up the room and shifts your perception for 37 minutes and then brings you gently back to the surface.

I’m Up doesn’t muster up the highs of the Slime Season series—the infectiousness of “Best Friend,” the sublime structuring of “Draw Down,” or the woozy euphoria of “Raw”--but Thug manages to compile many of his best attributes into a tightly-wound 38 minutes.

In his synthesis of varied styles, Hayashi’s compositions feel less genre-defying and more genre-unifying.

Soberish succeeds largely because Phair is no longer asking for tolerance. She is simply, fully, being herself.

The album has an ASMR sense of stereo space, full of louvered shapes you can almost touch. Counting Sunsets is very pretty, but there’s always something tense to give the beauty character, like the wowing frequency stuck at the spine of “Sunset VII.”

So while Too is at times brave, that doesn't necessarily make it compelling.

You'd be forgiven for expecting little more than fan-bait out of a release that gathers the band's between-album singles and rarities. But the big draw of Wooden Shjips is the way they go about streamlining multiple strains of psychedelic rock with the single-mindedness of a band more interested in refinement than experimentation, and there's plenty of refined material on Vol. 2.