With 1989 she has succeeded in leveraging the most cordial and familiar of pop music outpourings to something that feels like a statement, a work of note and the sinew of some kind of emotional connective tissue–binding tastemakers, rock critics, guys I work with and my 12 year old cousin; irrevocably and unexpectedly.

He lacks the humour, more explicit angst and emotional confidence of John Grant and lacks Garneau's devotion to melodrama and pop. He is hardly Stephin Merritt. He exists independently as a cultural explorer as well as simply a very fine, very sensitive songwriter.

Nothing Important is a remarkable record--at times deeply, painfully intimate, but also witty, bawdy, surreal, disquieting, nostalgic, brash and fearlessly individual.

The Silver Globe is arguably her most sonically adventurous work to date.

Seeds is the most streamlined, most polished, most sharp-edged album of their career. And yet it manages to retain their trademark schizophrenia.

The passive listener will find 11 slices of instant utter serenity on Sea Island, while a deeper listen reveals a starkly depicted, and often dramatic ocean voyage, haunted by memories from back on dry land.

[Stott's] sound is so much more finely honed, well defined, better executed, yet left frayed around all the right edges.

Ypres is an eloquent meditation on such complacency, on valour and its misuse, as well as a memorial to the battles, and war, that was meant to end them all.

Where the album is most successful though, is in its achievement of capturing the raucous, unhinged live sound that the band create when they set upon the stage with a whirlwind of noise.

[Wyatt's guitar work and his synths] manage to coalesce with his guitar on the album's strongest moments: as one becomes indistinguishable from the other. It is this coherency which arguably marks Lets… out as Wyatt's strongest work to date. He has created a rewarding sonic landscape that is consistently poignant, without ever being cloying.

Give this album time and an open heart, and you'll get an album that initially seems slate grey blooming into colour. In The Seams is Saint Saviour's best yet.

Ratcheting up the glimpses of honesty found on The Redeemer, it is his most transparent collection to date.

Clark is an album of unsettling beauty and exceptional skill.

Which is the thing all the way through DSU, the parts that you recognise, that feel familiar (or rather Alex G's creation of a comforting sense of familiarity) make everything else seem richer for happening around it.

Harris deploys silence and sound artfully and masterfully throughout Ruins. And the closer you listen, the more intimate it becomes.

Ultimately, The Endless River is another Floyd album about the inability to communicate--it doesn't "say anything" or "go anywhere", but maybe that's the point. While it's unlikely to win the band many new admirers, the casual Floyd fan will find much to enjoy here.

Not interested in following in anyone's footsteps, Arca borrows back the skeletal remains he made to West and creates new albeit strange life. Gorgeous and ghastly, Xen is no clone, but it may too resonate through generations.

Run The Jewels 2 is a great listen because of the artistry on display, but it's the pent-up frustration that takes it into the stratosphere, that makes you want to hug your loved ones and thank god for each breath while you set fire to the neighborhood.

Gone are the solemnly brooding Knife-like synthscapes and the ethereal soprano. In their place are sickly synths, wobbling queasily around the mix; relentlessly shuddering beats hammering at your skull from the inside; crunching electronic distortion and sinister skittering rhythms.

There's something very satisfying about listening to a woman whose career has been marked by deeply ambivalent encounters with the machinery of the music industry--who was briefly being touted as the next Marianne Faithful under Loog Oldham, and whose work was later forced into a folk mould on Diamond Day--finally seize the means of music production and create an album on her own terms.

In the early 1980s Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten broke new ground in their obsession with the body as a site of painful affliction, and traces of both can certainly be found in the grinding, reverberant noise that stalks Bestial Burden. Yet the album easily transcends its influences, forming a bleak, distressing narrative of a self on the brink of collapse.

ATOMOS is certainly a sensitive and thoughtful piece of work on its own, but the ultimate success of the listening experience is in its ability to stir an emotional reaction, and impose a state of thoughtfulness on the listener--and presumably on the dancer too.

As the album's outlook nosedives towards irreversible melancholy, Nobody Wants To Be Here And Nobody Wants To Leave becomes increasingly hypnotic.

Flatland feels perfectly formed out of the clay of a multitude of styles, and, with rhythms this tight, it's something of a triumph, even if it reflects nothing back but strobe lights.

Much has been made of these vocals, and they certainly do stand out on the recording. That said, any serious listener has heard both precedents and antecedents (Leon Thomas, AMM, about half of both the Nonesuch Explorer and ESP-Disk catalogs) for Coltrane's approach.

All in all, there's enough to see and hear to make this one museum worth queuing up for.

Though it's not masterpiece by any means, the fifth installment in Slipknot career is praiseworthy overall, especially given the circumstances surrounding its creation.

TOD are, miraculously given their longevity, still managing to remain interesting.