The album, as intended to be heard, deftly captures the whiplash mood swings of a volatile relationship, showing how giddy exuberance and bitter despair can intertwine.

Reign of Terror is evidence that these kids never stopped Armageddonit even once they got punk cool.

Interstellar succeeds in expertly appropriating its forebears instead of regurgitating them.

Open Your Heart improves the band's focus even as it widens its range, ditching the harrowing, hacking-death-cough stuff and reaching for something more.

While his 2010 solo debut Mshini Wam (translated as Bring Me My Machine Gun) was promising in a guided-by-M.I.A. kind of way, Father Creeper is downright epic.

Its slightly peculiar over-reliance on technology only makes it more human, more lovable, and more rock and roll.

Synths push this from kraut-psych-cruise-control curiosity to unabashed triumph.

Toward the Low Sun is what the Dirty Three do best: enigmatic instrumentals that redefine the notions of power in a power trio, a three-headed beast that trades off thoughts with nuance and grace, like a Cerebus dancing a waltz, then knocking back a beer at the bar.

Death-metal firebrands still blaze.

Consistently spirited and glowering, a discomforting album that never leaves his narrative comfort zone, equal parts impersonal and important.

The songs are catchy and nuanced, and the rage that defined them a mere seven years ago comes across here as measured, simmering frustration.

Blööz, blahs and mad-stonerpunk.

The pervasive sense on Visions is of a young woman carefully pushing out of her own introversion, which makes the moments where she sings from the gut instead of the throat ("Circumambient"), or strives for human-on-human sensuality ("Skin"), all the more thrilling.

Synth-driven grooves that feel communal and cosmic at the same time.

TEN$ION, by contrast [to $0$], hews a little too close to the fake-gangster thing to be nearly as fun.

Black twists prog and BBC radio samples into hissing, even "hypnagogic" hip-hop, then hands the results over to Brown, who shouts suicidal thoughts and sex boasts with wild abandon.

Lovingly fastidious and packed with special effects.

Deeply felt, gorgeously rendered folk-pop songs.

The man could turn a Sesame Street sing-along into a deathbed confessional. "With piranha teeth / I've been dreaming of you," he moans here with typical cheeriness on opener "The Gravedigger's Song," a throbbing, reverb-heavy swirl that... feels like the sort of love song someone might write just before pushing their lover in front of a train.

The result is a nightmarish mess, but it's no relapse into disarray.

Libraries seems huge, a cathedral of the grandiose emotional desperation that Phil Spector and Brian Wilson once framed so dramatically.

It's not perfect--it's too long by a third, David Lee Roth often sounds like a 2 A.M. drunk doing David Lee Roth at karaoke, and a Kinks cover wouldn't have killed them. But the album clearly aspires to both be part of the canon, and, if need be, serve as an entry point.

Rich Forever, the mixtape teaser for his forthcoming God Forgives, I Don't, is quite successful at doing nothing new at all.

A perfectly pleasant contribution to the mysterious forces driving indie pop these days.

Layers of strings and piano (the droney "Old Statues") or ghostly backing voices (the haunting "As I Lay My Head Down") are usually enough to keep Tamer Animals from feeling too domesticated.

Mogis never allows the arrangements to pull focus from the Söderbergs' vocals.

A 20-minute appetizer that's short, sharp, and impressively tart.

Dawson keeps Thunder Thighs from becoming too precious or intense.