The four suites of music here sound incredible, capturing the grandeur, aggression, and power of their symphonic punk with perfect clarity. And it feels incredible, too, as it endures passages of oppressive darkness to step at least toward a new dawn.

Sumday is all glorious, throbbing heart.

With Caligula, she has created a murderous amalgam of opera, metal, and noise that uses her classical training like a Trojan Horse, burning misogyny to ash from its Judeo-Christian roots.

Combined with an expert use of space rare for such a lo-fi record, UMO manages a unique immersive and psychedelic quality without relying on the usual array of bong-ripping effects.

Impressively, Eagle maintains a coherent aesthetic across 12 tracks by ten different producers, a muted brood that resists the default loudness of mainstream hip-pop. There’s a lushness to the production absent some of his earlier work.

The UK trio is hard, fast, and viciously catchy, but above all scary.

On both sidelong tracks, they take their time to establish a vibe, each member finding the right time to add another layer.

A creeper, an album of broad gestures that reveal vivid, flickering details over time, its pleasures unfolding as what it actually is gradually erases speculative notions of what it might be.

The tracks on this album coalesce and morph, more than they progress. They get more traction from a good drone than from an elegant harmonic resolution. There’s a process of real-time exchange and dynamic micro-attunement that only jazz musicians can achieve, but not many of the cathartic peaks you might expect from a jazz performance. What matters is a vibe.

It’s Eitzel’s heaviest album, but it’s also, in a peculiar way, his sweetest.

With The Something Rain, Tindersticks provide a wholly convincing reminder that they are, by definition, an incendiary device.

For many listeners, his mannered delivery may prove as off-putting as Oberst's own vibrato, but for these songs, it sounds fittingly evocative, as if only he could sing them.

The Creek Drank the Cradle is made of small epiphanies.

Despite Friedberger’s singular phrasing and voice, there’s something inviting and comfortingly familiar about Personal Record’s approach to pop melody.

1990s bring hooks, sneers and, well, intoxicants to spare, with the punched-up sheen of a production budget to boot (helmed by ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler).

These 23 tracks cover a lot of ground musically and critically, tracing her massive hits in the mid 1960s and following her as she weathers professional upheavals and changing pop trends. Start Walkin’ does not, however, include Sinatra’s very first singles, when she was a teenager trying to find her voice.

Everything about this song -- and this entire album, for that matter -- suggests this heart's still got a lot left to burn.

If you think intelligence in indie lyrics must come at the expense of coherence, take in a couple of these impeccably linear narratives.

Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava stakes its claim as the band’s most agitated yet fiercely funky record.

We Will Always Love You overflows with heart, enough that it buoys even the top-heavy moments, and the bittersweet mix of emotions feels remarkably appropriate for the current moment.

Though reference points like Daft Punk and Prince have rightly been thrown around, Radical Connector is in fact a strange album that doesn't sound like much else.

If Hippies has a flaw, it's only that it overstays its welcome by just a few minutes.

East of Eden, in that sense, isn't so far from Studio's West Coast: a masterful, hypnotic album that draws on a world of influences but is ultimately limited by none.

There's also the fact that you won't hear another record like it this year, possibly ever-- all the comparisons that can be made to Tom Waits, Lambchop, Grandaddy and Vic Chesnutt will only tell a small part of the story.

Its six songs shine just as bright as those on Talk Tight, but they cast longer, darker shadows.

The music is undeniably alive, even though--or perhaps because--the band that made it is all over.

Brisk, 47-minute runtime aside, Post Self is a daunting listen, as well as an essential one, even by Godflesh’s sterling standards.

The tracks on The Concretes are easily their most accomplished, fluid statement to date.