While still destined to divide his audience, with the excruciating and brilliant NYC Hell, 3:00AM, James Ferraro has quietly and calmly made some of the most affecting and intoxicating music of his career.

The sound of Psychic is meticulous and luscious.

Kilo exchanges pure visceral impact for control and composition, but in doing so it focuses its own energy into a sharper edge.

Uncanney Valley is an enjoyable and accomplished record.

It's not quite its own thing yet still, but it's the sign of a band gelling well, with Crain's collaborators Dan Quinlivan and Rob Frye happily in the same sphere while aiming beyond it.

Chance Of Rain sinks its hooks in deeper.

Ultimately, Aventine is a triumph of carefully sustained mood; of a sadness that is not so much overbearing as it beautiful, and one that lingers in the silences between listens of this unusual, unusually compelling record.

Threace possesses a wholly immersive sense of itself, and a free floating kinetic energy that is out of step with most contemporary riff-based music. Its command of sonic hypnosis is all the more impressive considering its brevity.

Though a double album of 80 minutes, Reflektor feels shorter than The Suburbs, and better paced.

This LP's strength is as a document of change rather than a retrospective.

There's a huge lack of definition, and even with the volume cranked high, the dynamic surge previous albums from the group have led us to expect is absent.

Restless Idylls doesn't transcend, or greatly advance the template set out by Tropic of Cancer's past work, but it refines that template to its purest and most evocative expression to date.

It's a pretty indulgent affair (Halstead has acknowledged this) with most songs clocking in close to or exceeding the five minute mark; the last couple of tracks are disposable.

There is no getting around the fact Big Wheel And Others is a slog on first listen and will always remain so for some. Yet McCombs is nothing if not a songwriter who knows catchiness: somehow, each of these songs is memorable for its structure and compositional bite, though some are better than others.

This time Numan struggled with depression in the past few years (which nearly broke up his marriage). This all comes through in the lyrics, which are mostly good (one particularly haunting line: "I don't believe in the goodness of people like me"), even if they lay it on a little thick sometimes.

A History Of Every One deposits its listener right up close, and seemingly the improvisations are adapted to take that into account.

A stirring evocation of childhood, community and the nature of memory, The Silver Gymnasium suits being pored over as much as it does driving on a sunny day--and it suits both very well indeed.

Lousy With Sylvanbriar is a drab, insufferably uninteresting album.

Here, it seems like 65dos are challenging themselves in a way that they are finally happy with, evoking the confidence of 'Exploding and matching that with the energy and intensity of The Fall of Math.

Their distinct blend of hypnotic African blues provides a glimpse into another world with profound concerns about the fate of their people, nomadically shifting across the desert in search of an elusive peace.

Virgins is Tim Hecker at his most thought-provoking and enigmatic.

In general, the album's tracks take more risks, and surprise in a way that we've not quite heard from Hebden before.

Seasons of Your Day is a no-frills, no-fuss album from a band cocooned in their own impenetrable dreamworld, untouched by the passage of time.

From its funereal ballads to its hook-infused jams, Innocents is uniformly satisfying and catchy as hell, suggesting a fascinating possibility--if this is the album that he has waited his entire life to make, then at the grizzled age of forty-seven, Moby is only now entering his prime.

It sits together as a cohesive body of work rather than a fragmented collection of club moments.

Idle No More is evidence that this band is serious (sometimes) and it's in it for the long haul.

With Master, they've made their biggest leap forward yet, with the band members leaping across genre divides with a confidence and sure-handedness that shows them at the peak of their powers.

Days Are Gone, their long-in-the-baking debut album, is properly great, sounding effortless and breezy in a way that only something worked over like a jewel can.