This is music that proudly exists as sonic information, music that invites you to meditate on how a simple tone with a halo of white noise, pulsing along in medium tempo and working through different melodic combinations along a major scale, makes you feel.

Stretching the sinews of their sound almost to the breaking point, Religious Knives find a balance between the repetitive rhythmic skeleton of krautrock and the psychedelic keyboard thrusts of early Doors.

This is not the music of men trying to be cool; it is the work of veterans unafraid to express mature emotions with an appropriate level of musical depth and nuance.

Demain Est Une Autre Nuit feels not just a good fit for the label's vintage-modern aesthetic, but a culmination of something. Perhaps it's simply that this weird, mannered synth music is no throwback, but merely a style ahead of its time, and one that only now is coming of age.

Unlike the meticulously pleasant Songs for Christmas, which more or less sounds exactly like what a casual fan (or detractor) might expect a Sufjan Stevens Christmas box set to sound like, the music inside Silver & Gold can be as downright strange as its accompanying accessories.

The collision of genres fashions a delicate niche, but Planet X’s most striking moments are its most deconstructed.

Tortured Poets’ extended Anthology edition runs over two hours, and even in the abridged version, its sense of sprawl creeps down to the song level, where Swift’s writing is, at best, playfully unbridled and, at worst, conspicuously wanting for an editor.

What makes their self-titled debut rise above mere pastiche is how capably they strike a balance between meaty vintage metal and crisp, stoner-rock melodies.

What sets Sentielle apart amongst Fell's work is the residual synth pools that tremble like oil on water. They are sparse and alien, but they reflect light in a way their host matter can't.

The alternate takes and the lively banter plop you right there in the studio as the artistic process unfolds. It’s what differentiates Freedom Jazz Dance from past volumes of this enthralling series, which were all live concerts that showed how Miles’s groups evolved on the bandstand.

Like all of their work, it’s capable and tuneful and reveals a young band of skilled songwriters that put all their faith in their guitars, even if it’s often hard to pinpoint where their own vision begins and their taste ends.

The album unfolds and reveals itself like the rolling hills of Tuscany, the outer-reaching moments tempered by Simon’s delicate touch and deft ear. Tongue creates a world built from the snug comfort of rain and the quiet joy that comes from solitude.

The back half of the album becomes harder to pin down, as Ras G switches up styles every few minutes.

Happiness Begins is by no means an extraordinary album, but it’s a respectable showing from a group that has long deserved more respect than they’ve received.

If anything, the four songs leave you wanting more from this collaboration, offering up brief, blurry glimpses of their Texas landscape rather than the expansive vistas that they might arrive at should they ride together a little longer.

The rhythms on HERE represent a departure from her previous efforts and indicate a willingness to experiment with her sound but the lyrics, which rarely betray a sense of adventure, cancel out most of this good work.

There's an impressive coherence on Derdang Derdang, showing how well ABO has developed an original and guiding aesthetic.

A huge success, a fresh-sounding record that doesn't feel too obviously indebted to anything that's come before it, much less like anything Out Hud have made before.

Although it makes no apologies for the bits and pieces it takes from her contemporaries, No Mythologies to Follow doesn't work because it assembles the right ingredients in the right amount--it works because a likable persona is something you just can't teach.

BNQT (pronounced “banquet”) is not a push outside the comfort zone for those involved, but further indication of restlessness from a collection of indie rock lifers, each of whose primary acts made their dent in the blog-rock boom and find their relevance dimming. At that, the optimistically titled Volume 1 serves more to elaborate on its characters than it does to recapture past glory.

After Run to Ruin, it's difficult to hear Nastasia pull back to a songwriter-with-guitar style.

A Cross the Universe isn't close to anyone's definitive idea of what a document of a live Justice show should be, but it's a diverting, sometimes-bizarre look into the first phase of fame for an aughts-era cult pop phenomenon.

Some of Commune is pretty splendid.

Power of Anonymity is a masterclass in the sleight-of-hand that we call techno; there is virtuosity in the music's very attempts to sneak past under the cover of darkness. It may pass unidentified, but it will not go unnoticed.

The strangeness and slightness of Instrumentals 2015 is admittedly refreshing in our age of overdoing it, and it does fit with the whisper that is Pearce's overall career arc, but when placed next to Flying Saucer Attack's best music, it still comes off like a faint echo.

Though these heart-in-her-hand lyrics take center stage, the production across EYEYE is both entrancing and bizarre. The album balances mourning and meditation, filling its vast, gelatinous sound field with phantom backing vocals, floorboard creaks, spaceship synths, and eerie, carnivalesque melodies.

Wrangling together dozens of technical ideas and arranging them with idiosyncratic flair, NNAMDÏ enters this challenging middle zone without compromising his priorities. It’s what makes Please Have a Seat the best he’s ever sounded.

This is DeMarco’s most direct and confident expression ever—OK with being a little sad, happy to have the chance to get over it.