While it doesn’t always work, it’s Yves Tumor’s use of field recordings that gives Serpent Music an ambulatory quality.

The Altar has a lot in common with Goddess, including its fatal flaw: its attempts to position Banks as edgy or dangerous, despite all musical evidence to the contrary.

Ruminations is Oberst’s most emotionally legible work since Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, also defined by its similarly cloistered worldview and sonic cohesion.

Cody finds a more grown-up Joyce Manor, but every track contains enough blunt expressions of existential despair to tie them to their angsty past.

Crooked Man’s overall vibe is the timeless aspiration of people who share great parts of their lives on dark dance-floors. All these songs boil down to the idea of community and its desires and rules, a set of signposts to keep the party going in the right direction.

Day Breaks grows a bit tedious near the middle, and it's easy to forget it's playing if you aren't paying attention.

Taylor’s graceful accountability and invigorating songcraft makes him an anomaly. His own dose of perspective arrives at the end of the plainly gorgeous Heart Like a Levee.

As with The Things We Think, it feels like the sound of a curious band still working out how to make music as distinct as its influences; whether lyrically or sonically, they come across as either unknowable or proudly workmanlike.

Departed Glories’ strongest individual tracks are uncompromisingly abstract. ... Less profound, on their own, are the tracks that let edge-of-intelligibility vocal collages in the manner of Julianna Barwick do most of the work. But they play a flattering role in the album as a whole, which is how it should be heard

Opeth have gotten better at self-editing with Sorceress; still, their jammier tendencies fail them in the album’s lackadaisical middle, showing they may just be a little too cool.

Requiem is a double album, granting the band the real estate to stretch out more than usual and, at times, you wish they’d go even further.

Revolution Radio otherwise rarely escapes the Green Day archetype, an established language that, here, feels inelastic and calcified.

Torres has traded away some pieces of the humanity that colored his earlier work in favor of a conversation about something elemental that's still waiting to be discovered. That doesn’t make for an immediate record. It makes for one full of enigmas, of beautiful and undefinable things that promise further revelations to come.

On Big Boat, they come up with a few winning moments.

The rest of the album’s expansive epics are built on a shaky foundations, with too many songs that contain too many concepts for their own good.

Fires Within Fires is a piece of music that’s too skimpy to be a full-blooded Neurosis LP and too bloated to be a lean, concentrated Neurosis EP.

The truth is, if Head Carrier had arrived as the umpteenth Frank Black solo album, little about it would seem amiss. But coming from a band whose legacy was built on shock-and-awe transgression, Head Carrier feels overly pleasant and pedestrian.

That's the fascination and the frustration of Supersilent: it's like they keep destroying the lineaments of form just for the pleasure of vouchsafing them to us again.

A Seat at the Table, her third full-length album, is the work of a woman who’s truly grown into herself, and discovered within a clear, exhilarating statement of self and community that’s as robust in its quieter moments as it is in its funkier ones.

Without sacrificing extremity, they all captured the spirit of metal, not just the sound.

Guest voices mesh well with Machinedrum’s enlightenment through repetition, bringing a bit more flexibility and unpredictability than your traditional diva loop.

Hval is a clear disciple of Kraus. On paper, Kraus moves fluidly from reference to reference, dense with ideas; Hval’s music is like this, too, and never more than on Blood Bitch.

The most difficult part of making instrumental, non-dance electronic music for an audience beyond your typical avant-garde connoisseur is injecting it with a sense of narrative, a story, an energy that replaces vocals and conventional musical structures to give the tracks an augmented dimension. S U R V I V E are very good at this. They may be one of the best bands currently employing those skills, and RR7349 is their most succinct example yet.

Atrocity Exhibition finds Brown back behind the lens, capturing raw emotion with grainy 16mm.

Quietly adventurous, wise, and a welcome late-career turn, Blue Mountain builds an ethereal home for a rhythm guitarist who was tempered in the chaos-friendly environs of Dead.

Campaign outpaces his recent efforts like $ign Language and Airplane Mode but, still, mostly just preserve Ty’s musical bottom line.

He doesn't reveal many new tricks, but his knowledge of his own palette is masterful in every moment. More poetic and thoughtful than ever before, Jaar maintains an ability to fit seemingly disparate sounds together as if they were always meant to find each other.

22, A Million sounds only like itself.