Compared to 2013's Innocence Is Kinky, Apocalypse, Girl is less noisy and more thematically united.

Akin to scrolling down a Tumblr dashboard, A.L.L.A as a whole lacks coherence but features some impressive displays of aestheticism.

This is a great album, and it's incredible to see Fernow again broadening the scope of the noise genre.

Infinity Machines is a painful modern masterpiece, and it's urging us to listen to the voices in our heads.

Not only is Black Age Blues Goatsnake's best album, it is an instant classic of the stoner-doom hybrid and an earthy, electrifying endgame for rock & roll itself.

On paper, then, the concept of an album that comes so consummately out of this context may not be the most appealing. In reality, Herndon's second full-length proper, Platform, which does just that, is one of the best records you'll hear this year.

Algiers isn't incitement to revolution, it's a call to self-interrogation, to consider your reality and the reality of those around you.

In Colour is ultimately too tidy and, Young Thug features aside, afraid to take risks, and is therefore all the more beige for it.

Dalton famously believed that a singer shouldn't have to raise her voice to be heard. These minimalist arrangements, whether it's Isobel Campbell affecting a slight twang to match her guitar or Larkin Grimm legitimate twang (and the album's only banjo), are a fitting tribute in themselves.

In many ways Sub-Lingual Tablet is, like any Fall album will be, a stranger and superior record than most released in any given year. But by The Fall's own standards, this time that's just not good enough.

As musical accompaniment to Turnbull's visual imagery and bronze icons, 23 Skidoo's soundtrack juxtaposes perfectly in sparking off coloured patinas and twisted moulds to their mutual benefit.

Across the album, lyrics leap suddenly out like car lights in a dark tunnel, illuminating unpalatable truths with the sarcasm on full beam.

Dumb Flesh on the other hand feels like a direct continuation of the last superb Fuck Buttons album, Slow Focus, albeit a good deal warmer than its overpowering austere chilliness.

So not an out and out album of doof dancefloor bangers, this is more the evolution of an artist, at comfort in her environment, and holding her own.

Tal National's sound fabric on new album Zoy Zoy is intricate and colourful. The music turns in wild and unexpected directions as psychedelic hues emerge and patterns form that may not have previously seemed possible.

Simple Songs is the most emotionally direct of O'Rourke's pop-oriented releases for Drag City, and the least likely to distance the listener with a cruel joke or winking musical allusion.

With Sallows, Mayberry and Psutka have crafted something deeply human and eerily, beautifully contradictory, like meeting someone you already know for the very first time.

This is garage rock yes, but not teeth grindingly basic 4-4, it's four to the forest floor, bouncing off the superfuzz pedal and rebounding into space, and from their multifarious albums, Mutilator Defeated At Last is undeniably a star.

It could so easily have turned into a mess, but Mbongwana Star have made probably the most consistently listenable album to emerge from Kinshasa's rapidly evolving new genre.

Anxiety's Kiss will be the record that will garner this humble band the respect they so justly deserve.

That remarkable square for detail is pedantic verging on obnoxious (charmingly so), but makes this his most captivating effort yet.

Live albums are inevitably products of a particular time and place, and Live At The Orpheum sometimes sounds like a band still testing its limits, pleasingly proficient rather than definitively awesome. But it's hard to think of any other group of their vintage that still sounds so vital and forward-looking.

II tweaks the Metz formula just enough to stand as an improvement over the band's excellent 2012 self-titled debut.

Now everything is dark and obscure, ghostly, as if moving in slow motion, bursting here and there in a few powerful and desperate explosions, mainly when Soko and Argento get to sing.

For all that it created and shaped, of course, nothing entirely feels like it's simply planned out and fully structured--elements emerge in the mix, parts quietly but directly drop in, emphases shift from beats to swirling, quiet loops or the reverse.

Here the instruments muddle together foggily and somewhat awkwardly. Fortunately, the songs themselves are strong enough to be of great comfort to those who felt lost twenty years ago and found some degree of solace in Troublegum.

Insides mostly works pretty damn well, and will certainly appeal to fans yearning for the good times hinted at all those years ago.

The demand for our awe at an accomplished--yet unfinished--triumph is confusing. The feeling each song inspires is indeed that of a religious service, one in which the endless standing up and sitting down leaves one a little exasperated. And fatigued.