Even with the subtle narrative running through the record, McMahon’s songs gain resonance less from their lyrics than from the forward pulse of his music.

You can hear the sideman straining to push past Davis—the man primarily responsible for realizing that Coltrane could be Coltrane. In turn, Coltrane’s stratospheric rise would soon lead Davis to raze his sound to its foundation and build it up anew in the years to come.

The way he colors the film’s world leaves it wide open, with room enough for gentle movement and subtle triumphs. His light, playful motifs buoy the narrative without crowding it, and help paint a rich, fulfilling portrait of a girl on the edge, ready to fly.

Cinema takes in Czukay’s solo and collaborative work outside of Can, the iconic avant-rock quintet he co-founded in 1968. Starting in the early 1960s and ending in 2014, the set lights a path through his sprawling, winding oeuvre and confirms Czukay’s status as one of the great weirdo geniuses of the 20th century.

There is palpable anger in her voice on Sex & Cigarettes, but beneath it is a deep sea of tranquility, and it’s the latter tone that defines her performances on this album.

Vessel is not the first album I would suggest to an uninitiated Frankie Cosmos fan. Still, as with any great book or television series, you want to continue following along, even if the best place to start is at the beginning.

Sometimes, the veteran Detroit rapper transcends his natural Buddenism, avoiding corny punchlines, esoteric lyrical easter eggs, and bars that lead him nowhere. At other times, he doesn’t.

Haley Heynderickx may not have a garden just yet, but if beauty can cure uncertainty, this album should be enough for now.

It’s a perfect union if anyone finds the former too glossy and the other too gritty, but in occupying this middle ground, nothing here would qualify as potentially divisive protest music. In fact, there’s nothing divisive about Twentytwo in Blue at all.

Hormone Lemonade is the work of a band who couldn’t write a bad chord sequence if they tried, allying rare melodic nous to dazzling rhythmic instincts. Rather than being trapped by his past, on Hormone Lemonade Gane draws upon it in brilliant new ways.

There’s a stark immediacy to the production on Longwave, rendering the band’s simple arrangements and basic chords without a shade of embellishment. They’d much rather use negative space than a dynamic flourish.

Boarding House Reach is a long, bewildering slog studded with these moments, which seem to be directly antagonizing you.

The band’s defeatism takes on a new tenor: battle-worn, sincere, and not quite so antagonistic. That may mean that New Material lacks the punch of their feisty debut, but it also lends these songs a soothing quality.

The Neighbourhood is as ponderous as any forgotten post-grunge also-ran record selling for one cent on Amazon.

The way she’s able to inject these quietly pretty, happy styles of music with an underlying weariness and a clever touch is what makes No Fool Like an Old Fool stand out among the many musicians currently borrowing similar sets of sounds.

Across six tracks that clock in at over an hour in total, Long Trax 2 tends to melt in and out of the background, making it an ambient album that almost makes you want to wiggle a little, or a house album content to exist as wallpaper.

All That Must Be doesn’t quite live up to its own heartstring-tugging goals; too often, it’s just kind of comfortably glum.

Though it can feel a bit too calm and sedate, the album also reflects the group’s greatest and most instantly recognizable strengths. Their sound might suggest that they’re wound up in nostalgia, but that’s never been the case: They are able to tap into a performative naïvete.

Across 11 tracks clocking in at 72 minutes, Romance offers a comprehensive yet concise survey of the best of Oneida’s vast and varied catalog--transfixing ambient loops, expansive krautrock jams, and even straight-ahead rock, while taking less time than ever to get to the point.

They’re still making some alluring music, yet their albums have never sounded more disjointed.

Jericho Sirens releases the pause button as if Hot Snakes had been locked in freeze-frame for the past 14 years, instantly thrusting them back into action.

Throughout the length of Ventriloquism, in Ndegeocello’s hands, no cover is ever mere lip service. A cover is an act of scholarship, an act of criticism, an act of intimacy. An act of love.

The songs on Cocoa Sugar are unquestionably Young Fathers’ most accessible. They have a sense of a narrative flow and an overarching theme, but they’re still knotty and confounding.

These songs are both more urgent and exploratory than the last albums by either band, though they were both very good. There’s a real sense of shared wonder here.

Now Only isn’t as easily categorized as its predecessor. These songs arrive with such urgency, such purpose, that it feels all-encompassing: part-memoir, part magnum opus.

Beyond simply making surface references to scramble suits and fields of blue flowers, Essaie Pas connect to something deeper--real human emotion.

Pulse and Quartet feel plucked from a vacuum, a place where flickers of dissonance yield to waves of redemptive harmony and where the chord always comes back to sparkle. In a world of increasing entropy, these are two too-tidy self-reflections, Reich on what made Reich great.

LONER is a singular artistic statement, from its unforgettable album art all the way down. It represents for her a major change--a change she totally commands.