I simply cannot imagine what it would be like to see these guys live, but follow up that New Order at your next dance party with some Congotronics and people will be bouncing off the walls.

Even in the project’s continued restless but shrewd eclecticism, this album lives up to its title with an epic, spring-clean screed of passionate grievance in the face a recently re-accelerated, ancient malignant patriarchal tyranny that’s only just starting to get called out for a reckoning at its extremities.

It’s in her artwork’s texture that Hval’s voice fascinates.

On The Suburbs, their third album, Arcade Fire sound more like a band than ever before.

Many of the songs continue to showcase Stevens' avid and passionate banjo-plucking, accompanied by similar harmonized vocals that resonate with beauty and commitment.

At first, you’re itching for her to tear into such a juicy beat. But after a couple of listens, you realize it’s a tactful deference that allows her to be in the mix without commandeering it. She could if she wanted to, but she’s passed that.

Freedom is not a “challenging” listen, but choruses or hummable melodies are few; rather, the album progresses at a loping, steady pace, as if somehow delivered by natural rhythm.

As a Bon Iver release, 22, A Million is the band’s most impressive record to date, surging forward with oddities that, while certainly nothing new to adventurous listeners, bridge the gap with satisfaction.

This is mind-meets-body music.

While albums like Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and To Bring You My Love found her looking inward--Let England Shake sees her peeking beyond her inner observations into the complicated web of English politics.

Fractured, inconsistent, broken, torn, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES aims toward the stylistic grandness of High Pop, and in that inconsistence, it achieves it. ... It’s incredible.

At points, listening to Bécs is to hear gauze become gossamer, and feel it too.

On this album, Garbus attempts to do this in a sophisticated and admirable way, and in the very form of her music, she offers a potential solution of a sort.

thank u, next builds on Sweetener by switching modes of scale. It’s less about looking at the world than being by yourself, more focused on the textures of memory than our actions stemming from it. ... thank u, next is also Ariana’s most stunning vocal album.

Mirrored is a marvel, dastardly and wholly original as it is, and one of the year’s finest.

Ultimately, Bon Iver, Bon Iver is the sound of growth, of growing pains, and the sound of grounding, of tearing new ground. If it aches, it aches like any natural growth, with beauty and wonder.

Yet as much joy as you can hear in Hercules and Love Affair, it’s impossible to separate the melancholy from the mix.

James is still at the reigns, and Syro is proof that he is still very much the king of his own tangled domain.

Craig has become so good at his craft that one might be tempted to call Centres a magnum opus--it’s certainly grand enough.

Teens of Denial vaults through references to stand alone, rapturous and sincere--a fuzzy framework from the floor of all we know.

These songs are history, and have now become it again, renewed.

The M.O. is so resolute, the beat so constant, that even after 17 years it is unimaginable to think that a new GAS album would sound like anything but this. As with the forests of Voigt’s childhood, it’s a comfort and a moment of disquiet to confront something so perpetually, hauntingly still.

This is an unfettered, deservedly ecstatic victory lap that’s riddled with in-jokes.

Although by the record's second half the brassy, treble-kicked sound wears a little thin, there are enough gems to keep the release fresh through the end of its 35 minutes.

They are radically transformative and marvelously sublime.

In House of Sugar, Alex Giannascoli relinquishes the ownership in authorship, providing a venue for those voices that regale him to decompress, elongate, saunter. It is roomy in House of Sugar, where possession recedes into usufruct.

Halcyon Digest might be an easy listen, but it takes effort to digest. Brief moments of transcendence break through the album's cracked, depressed facade, though even those are fleeting.

Jlin has provided us with evidence of veins untapped, an obscure map of zones still to be colonized in the name of the dance. If you care about footwork at all, you need to hear this album.

While nothing wholly spectacular, 'Sno Angel is no less an exceptional effort from a charmingly earnest, yet still somewhat self-conscious, lyricist and singer.

A memorable, impermanent joy, it restores, rather than disturbs, the equilibrium--a feat of engineering in the service of artistry.

Such is the exquisite control he holds over his music, his vision evident even in the weakest moments of Space Is Only Noise.

While LCD Soundsystem is grounded in the past, quality and talent make it an album deserving to be listened to for years to come. Talk to me in a few months, but I think this one won't be beat.

One of the most masterful things about the album is the way it flows, highlighting fugitive detail the way clothing highlights body parts, abandoning the traditional ups and downs of verse/chorus structure. Double Negative owes this poise to its intentional construction--a collaboration and a transferring of creative heft

Drawn In Basic is an enjoyable electronic pop record, one well-suited to late, sleepless nights. With echoes of a distant club resounding in its subdued beats and hushed vocals, this is a dreamy record of lullabies for the dance-floor set.

It is heavier on quality than most Bright Eyes albums I could name -- both musically and lyrically.

Cosmogramma is futurist in form, rather than content. Reliving the future's past through a constellation of references to cosmic jazz, psychedelic funk, hip-hop, and techno, the music of Flying Lotus never fixates long enough to crystallize; any groove that spontaneously emerges is quickly subverted, churned up in favor of a creating new maps and new vectors.

Kiasmos has the feel of one of those albums that electronic heads will continue to celebrate with each passing decade, a work incomparable to any of its contemporaries that elevates the conversation for them all.

No longer a statement and certainly abandoning the vanguard, it’s still some sort of map of some sort of territory, a specific body and a specific sexuality in a specific sonic present/presence.

From All Purity at once epitomizes Indian’s sound and represents a leap forward into new levels of intensity.

Explosions In The Sky are the only instrumental post-rock band that matters, and The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place is proof.

It hits very close to musical documentary with very few of the abstraction perils that usually haunt artists in converting ideas to their medium.

It sits in the top tier with other indie folk/rock live albums, like Bill Callahan’s Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, Ryan Adams’s Live at Carnegie Hall (the full version), the Elliott Smith bootleg Live at Studion, and, of course, Kozelek’s Live at Biko. But there’s something worthwhile about these albums that goes beyond their technical mastery and the songs they contain.

For all its signs of progression, the record is never heavy-handed with its ambition. Its unforced attempt at making sense of the fraught present, at finding shelter without resorting to convenient escape, is a rare and, dare I say, sincere feat.

Unlike the greatest movements of his previous albums, Wings of Love’s diversity is its greatest fault, as 14 tracks visit musical fads long forgotten and ill conceived.

Simple Songs works as an antidote for clutching at straws by adding a layer of depth to an otherwise indiscernible character; it offers insight into the workings of a prodigious mind, and it comes off sounding triumphant.

Popular Problems, his 13th studio album, has everything of which a latter-day Cohen album is popularly known to be composed: the amelodic, magical croak of Cohen’s own finely aged voice; the hyper-melodic shine of his singers, who have become as integral to Cohen’s project as he himself; a loose, blurring approach to genre and tone.

Hecker's freshest exploration of the life of rave death comes thoroughly recommended.

Its best songs are the ones that maintain the spark of originality that has always threaded through LCD Soundsystem’s work,.

Between the overlong, overstuffed songs and arrangements, ridiculous album concept and lyrical conceit, there's no room left for the vicious, hurtling energy that first impressed me on Hidden World's best songs.

[Modern Jester] is, admittedly, a comprehensive representation of his course thus far, but the amalgamation of Dilloway's diverse temperament presents something untried and, for want of a better way to put it, pretty ****ing violent.

All At Once suggests, in both form and content, that the human tragedies we keep dipping into can be healed by listening. Its you’s and I’s relate to each other, struggle toward dialogue. Even in rankled romance, listening is vital, probably even more so. The songs and styles wheel freely, matching their subjects.

Way Out Weather is a sonically dense record--Gunn’s de facto opus by breadth and scope--but lyrically it is impersonal, preoccupied by small pleasures and moments of private reflection that, while individually beautiful and poetic, do not suggest a self-aware attempt at making a masterpiece.

13 Moons is a celebration of fading detail, a reminder that we’ll only ever continue to forget.

What’s revealed by this new project--call it an album, EP, compilation, mixtape, outtake, sketch--is a fiercely independent artist escaping the trappings of hip-hop conventions, both mainstream and otherwise; he seeks ascetic salvation through intense introspection and, in the process, created a great release, no matter where it’s filed.

Poison Season is nothing if not willing to shrug off a few of Destroyer’s newest fans if that means staying true to what the band has done so well for the better part of two decades. More so than on Kaputt, all of the classic Destroyer motifs are on full display.

An incredibly compelling collection of inventive folk-tinged melodies.

Knock Knock is full of surprises, and Koze is floating, in a meditative stance, watching over your shoulder as you revel in its resplendent glory.

The songs here tend to go nowhere for a quiet couple of minutes before bursting randomly into tightly composed melodrama, which could be mistaken for actually going somewhere.

Envy certainly do their fair share of the legwork in making the split a success, but it’s the surprise of Thursday’s evolution that provides the richest reward.

All jokings aside, this record is downright GNARLY despite its hang-ups, impossible to wash from the soul and probably the thickest, grittiest substance you ever did see.

It's human connection despite the odds that has been at the heart of Bush's music from the beginning. With 50 Words for Snow, she casts the theme in a bolder and bleaker light than ever before.

A transcendent accomplishment.

The theatrical tricks -- and they are tricks -- are more interesting this time around. But by and large, it's more of the same.

Even though Glass has a lot of physicality to it, it’s gentle in the ways in which it fills our space with its presence. It’s a record one loops for the evening and unconsciously forgets about it, only to wonder what is missing when it stops playing.

Third is a carefully rewarding record with enough inspired turns to entertain throughout.

The biggest problem with Late Registration though is Kanye's verses; he's not a great MC, but he doesn't know it.

This album is easily taken as it is, a good side portrait of the parts of America that are somewhat still in the throes of modernity (if we all aren’t to some degree).

Equally informed by universal human crises as it is by contemporary imbroglios, the album aims to disorient, alienate, and dismay the listener. The band is usually able to do all three in a single song. Often in one line.

Stay Positive offers up plenty of reasons to let go and believe.

Even if her catalog was small, the 25 tracks on this set won’t likely leave anyone wanting.

At the end of the day, Bleach is still the weakest of the band’s full-length albums, but there’s enough good stuff to merit a spin.

All My Heroes Are Cornballs serves as an electronic manifesto for his fans, guerilla warfare of the auditory kind. Umberto Eco would be proud.

Every member of this band is wholly present and firing on all cylinders here.

Murs fails to gain any ground regarding his approach to rhyming and lyrical ingenuity. Yet, Murs 3:16 is far superior to The End of the Beginning, due to the tight and refreshing skills of producer 9th Wonder.

While Helplessness Blues is sparser and more restrained than its predecessor, it's also spotted by unexpected flourishes that are almost experimental by the band's traditionalist standard.

It's sucker punch after sucker punch of syllable-swapping fun.

The songs on Twin Cinema are simply of a higher caliber than anything the Pornos' individual members can create by themselves or had created together before.

Benji, Mark Kozelek’s sixth album as Sun Kil Moon, is as abrasive as Pharmakon, as hauntingly emotive as Dean Blunt, and as disorienting as Oneohtrix Point Never.

You can hear him trying to figure things out, and that’s the most lasting and vital aspect of New Moon.

This new album is relentlessly dark, disjointed, and disturbing. While there exist elements of his pop past -- gorgeous string sections, delicate guitars, bombastic drums -- there's nothing like a song here.

Brown cathects his trauma into his songs, redirecting his pain to a productive, pedagogic end.

Although the limitations of Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009 will make parts of the collection appear inessential for casual listeners, this music will certainly be welcomed by Tindersticks fans and soundtrack buffs.

Overall, Smother seems to be missing purpose. I hear those careful ruminations on relationships, and I hear the pain that evidently went into this, but it leaves me cold.

Were brevity the chiefmost virtue of popular music, "Baby Birch" would be a turgid waste of time, rather than the deft and skillful creature it is. The same sentiment goes for the rest of the album; there is a depth to the material here that rewards--nay, demands--repeated scrutiny.

The result is a piece of art that had too much pressure ascribed to it, that found its creators trying too hard to make a masterpiece when they could have followed a more natural progression.

While still retaining that exacting focus that has made Dirty Projectors the unplaceable enterprise that it is, Bitte Orca is merely the sound of an extremely talented group of musicians tweaking and, to an extent, reinventing their approach, stepping a little further away from left field.

The Soft Bulletin provides an exquisite soundtrack to have blasting in the car at night.

Good luck finding a better straight-up indie-pop/indie-rock record this year (save TV On The Radio) that's as uninhibited, unique, and flawlessly all-over-the-place as I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass.

Blackheart is ongoing and nearly seamless, unselfconscious in its refashioning of 80s guitar licks, steel drums, 256-bit EDM, flutes, and trap snares.

This is music at its most carnal.

Despite it being a massive departure from their previous efforts, there is almost nothing to dislike about Crimes.

For all its flaws, Old Ideas remains Cohen's strongest work for some time.

The band's strongest offering to date.

Huerco S. claimed he wanted to make something timeless. Both genuinely and emblematically, he’s done just that.

No album will ever move you quite like it, and if it weren't for a slight misstep, it would be perfect in almost every way.

On Elemental, Demdike Stare give us glimmers of melody - looped chimes or listless piano figures - shivering out from the cloud of reverb, but for the most part what we get are dub shadows of songs, low on contrast and grainy with dust particles, uncanny echoes and malevolent drones.

Ed Askew will continue to write, observe, reflect, and create visions and words. This result is timeless enough to remain there if one wants it.

This is music for that, a form of attention, a voice answering a voice.