These songs have more muscle than the typical McCombs song, with “Wheel” chugging like V-12 pistons, and “Satan” smoldering with sticky saxophone smears. This befits their subject matter as well as the vibe of the album, on which McCombs plays with genre more explicitly than usual.

For all its artfully-deployed discordance, AZD maintains a musicality that holds the listener close.

With Harmlessness, the World Is a Beautiful Place have accomplished a rare feat: a lofty, loaded album with the grace and momentum of a far leaner one.

Beyond the Bloodhounds isn’t a blues record per se, but in the grand tradition of the blues, it creates space to look your demons in the eye and acknowledge their foul existence without necessarily doing much about them.

It is a mostly great show, though not all dynamite.

It's a record just as baffling as it is beguiling.

While the sounds of these bands will certainly be familiar to fans of Konono, there is a remarkable amount of variety on the disc.

Even at its most inexplicable, there’s not a moment on Dolphine that feels careless. As her imagination roams, Birgy understands that sometimes irrationality is necessary to make sense of reality.

The intricacies of this Earth -- Carlson's harmonics and harmonies, Davies' careful builds, Blau's unexpected bass maneuvers, Goldston's adventurous versatility -- demand attention and immersion.

As wild as a Danielson record can get, his compositions are always meticulously recorded and arranged, and his work ethic is palpable on every track--it's not that these songs feel over-labored, exactly (although they certainly don't seem spontaneous), it's that it's easy to hear all the ways in which Smith is consumed by his work.

Hebden’s arrangement of Sound Ancestors shows deep and intuitive engagement with Jackson’s weed-scented sensibility, which has no use for presumptive distinctions between the beautiful and the funky, the silly and the profound.

As a whole, though, Surgical Steel succeeds brilliantly in its return-to-form mission.

With these production qualities, the band is just comfortably abrasive, snagging against the mix of bent-string guitars and strange, trebly percussive clamor.

Post Plague is just another stop on an increasingly adventurous course through the genre map.

Despite its heavy conceptual burden, No era sólida never crumples under its own weight. It shows rather than tells, guiding you through its prickly, unstable moods with a mystical sort of grace.

Craig’s music is not concerned merely with his gadgets or the way he wants his voice to be. Thresholder is, instead, a summary of the way his voice might be heard or ignored or interpreted in a universe where activity and entropy only increase without bound.

As a piece of music, it eschews the richness and lushness of those albums, a sound that's felt on the verge of becoming stale. 1977 could be called a palate cleanser, but it's way too torn-up to be that.

With Love is like a pocket book of poetry, a series of short thoughts only tangentially related. Zomby is the elegant menace, capable of beauty and great affect but too stoned or disinterested to fully commit.

In only two years, Wand has mirrored the maturation of the genre itself, moving from the youthful verve of “Tutti Frutti” toward rich, emotional terrain.

As the less ambitious of the two albums, Hypnotize is at once more aggressive and more restrained.

Blue Rider is short--eight songs, 35 minutes--but it slows everything down around it while's playing, coaxing half-formed feelings out of their corners and giving them space to exist.

Friendly Fires is teeming with ideas, and although the record's consistent sound can be exhausting--there is no release, no relaxation in tempo--it's encouraging to locate a new band with too much passion, so much that it can hardly execute its ideas on one page.

His lyrics' power stemmed from the imagery and humor he used to render in full color a world that for most rappers exists only in black and white. To the tape's considerable credit, Gucci disappoints here only when compared with himself.

Natural, the latest in the group's long line of records, is, per Tweedy's dictum, truly post-apocalyptic folk, music for when the lights go out and hope burns only dimly. It's the Mekons unlikely "unplugged" bid.

Her songs remain as focused as ever, and she uses these other musicians with the same consideration with which she uses various techniques; nothing is simply spectacle. More than anything else in Williams’ catalog, Acadia is open to tangents, wild ideas, sudden realizations, and sustained moods.

Sure, fans who swear by Skeletonwitch’s early work might take a while to warm up to anthems like “Temple of the Sun,” a tightly constructed barnstormer in which the band dares to toss clean-sung vocal harmonies into the mix, or “The Vault,” a Pallbearer-esque doom experiment that grows more blackened with each wailing note until its entire soundscape is torched to a crisp. And yet, even when their creative lodestar shifts its orbit, the Ohioans’ cornerstones remain intact: their virtuosic riffs, their robust production (once again courtesy of Converge guitarist and board wizard Kurt Ballou), their endearingly adversarial presence on-record--and, most of all, their diabolical joie de vivre.

While a cynic might see New Gen as merely a reflection of Caroline SM and Renz’s taste and grassroots network; an optimist might say it’s an underground scene collectivizing for its mutual benefit. Nevertheless, it’s one of the more impressive collections of underground talent of late.

The production on The Block Brochure series roams a little wider and farther than the Revenue Retrievin series did, which helps when approaching such a seemingly undigestible block of music.