As a whole, Reefer has proven its capacity for producing sunshine hits, but only time will tell if it will be able to push itself past the spaced-out beaches of Maui and towards more diverse soundscapes.

If nothing else, Astronomy For Dogs should be heralded as a step in the right direction after six long years of wandering.

The Walkmen are that rare band that can stretch into all manner of different shapes and retain their oneness with the rock gods, and they've held onto the zeal that made them stand out like a diamond among the other jeweled NYC bands with impeccable resumes in the early aughts.

Its framework and color scheme may possibly end up as just a passing diversion for Halo, but it will still remain a captious rendering of where her craft and human-craft could one day go.

While it’s not as compelling as Endless Summer, it’s the closest Fennesz has come to returning to that plateau.

Despite the janky piano, dissonant woodwind arrangements, and Angil’s sometimes abrasive vocal delivery, it all works well. You haven’t heard this album before, and that is very refreshing.

Cantu-Ledesma’s ensemble (that’s 11 in total, including greats like Mary Lattimore, JAB, and Roger Tellier Craig) achieve an elegant cascade here that’s more stoicism than stupor and more calm than stagnancy.

For those smitten with the notion of the dark, mysterious West and its expanding, crushing, absorbing, destructive, albeit beautiful tendencies, there's much to enjoy on Ancestral Star.

Come With Me If You Want to Live never relents under the weight of its side-project status, nor does it pale significantly in comparison to more “serious” metal acts, nor is it in any way a piss-take.

It’s a fun ride, to be sure, but once the high wears off and all that’s left is the darkness, you can catch a faint glimpse of oblivion. Hopefully we get to peek deeper into the chasm the next time around.

We get tiny tastes of levity, but scarcely the sort of wit we’re used to.

Ghostory is well on par with the strident ephemera to which followers of this project have become accustomed.

Whereas The Fiery Furnaces used to suffer from a lack of restraint, they suffer here from having too much.

From a group as self-satisfied as Oneida, there is a pervasive feeling that, having completed such a grand statement, they will feel consummated and move on in accordance with whatever insatiable rock 'n' roll muse they have been following all these years.

As social commentary, it feels ineffectual and dated, its tone resembling someone’s morally mediocre guy friend who is eager to reconcile his own shortcomings by engaging a willing interlocutor. As music, though, the album glistens. Unfortunately, these two registers can’t be unwound, and so the listener is left liking the music despite, not for, its paratextual inflations.

The concept understood, no longer intriguing, no longer as unique as it's presented, runs out of interpretations on the final induction of every theory and concept highlighted.

To the band’s credit, the album does warm-up to the listener with consecutive listens, but Blitzen Trapper will have to play some reputable live shows in order to distinguish themselves from the indie rock masses.

This is not going to appeal to a wide swath of people, but DJs who take advantage of the late hours of a petering-out dance party to play dubstep and spacey ambient techno will surely appreciate the vibe here.

The intensity of their work comes from a great deal of poise and restraint, but as is the case with Deep Politics, this tact can also come across as strangely normative.

Although the music doesn’t always conjure it, there’s power in the album’s consciousness.

While Nguyen continues to write upbeat songs about passion gone awry and her band continues to do its part in complementing them, Know Better Learn Faster just doesn’t quite reach the bar she set for herself last time out.

Is Frauhaus! a groundbreaking musical statement? Absolutely not. Is it in the spirit of great, similarly-minded albums from contemporaries past and present? Resoundingly, yes.

Like the craft of the best tracks here, the album itself describes a smooth and clearly bookended parabola, an unexpectedly rainbow bridge, but one that, unlike the most well-known of these, is a pleasure, not a revelation.

In the absence, though, of the gritty murk of TRST and the intimations of a world of malformed sonic objects outside the techno-primitive beat, there’s a quality of the streamlined on Joyland that calls out for irritation.

It’s an honest delivery, but they are essentially preaching to the choir.

Some tracks are stunning, others pass by unnoticed. The fact that we have them is beautiful enough. The chaos swallows you up.

For now, Flood Network shows the growing pains of acclaim, responding with a thoughtful ebb, a skim across the sand before the flood.

Poppy and breezy to the point of being nauseating.

I, myself, will likely revisit 10,000 Days for plenty of extended listens, partly because I'm a percussion whore and partly because I want to be able to enjoy it with my Super Metal Friendz. But this is Soy Tool, a rubbery substitute for the real thing.

This album is a must for Decemberists’ fans and even a fairly pleasant diversion for casuals, but Colin Meloy Sings Live! is exactly that and nothing more: a few interesting veers among a bunch of Decemberists songs stripped of their playful pretentiousness.

A Broke Moon Rises isn’t pastoral like Bon Iver, and it doesn’t trade in the woe, guts, and glory of an Explosions in the Sky. It’s folk rock as an aging human in all its requisite fallibility and disgrace, pushing through torrents of doubt and disillusionment to a place where their essential spirit can take wing.

This is an album less about immediacy and more about subtlety. It’s not rocking in any traditional sense, but it reveals itself gradually, building in complexity with each turn.

A middle-of-the-road release that, because of the context of the band's end, is the most heartbreaking release of the year so far.

Semblance’s rigorous and inventive improvisations attempt to bring synth music up to date, despite the unavoidable cultural allusions that threaten to render it an ironic pastiche.

The bad news is that Tears isn’t as gripping as Kingdom’s earlier work (notably 2013’s Vertical XL). Tears sacrifices the ping-pong polyrhythmic beats that made his earlier material so compelling and replaces it with something simpler.

At its best, ISAM enters the realm of pure abstraction without losing its sense of purpose.

Using a combination of brilliant textures and powerful, atypical chord progressions, Mogwai paint a picture equivalent to an auto-stereogram, popularized in those Magic Eye books 15 years ago. You almost need to loose your focus to let the music really sink in.

It’s a trippy album, but it doesn’t trip into too many psych clichés, or perhaps it has fooled me simply by tumbling into all of them.

Rosie Thomas is just a little too ordinary.

Stridulum was just a warm-up for Conatus, giving Zola Jesus the opportunity to gain confidence in traditional song forms so that she could burst out with a compositionally and emotionally varied set next time out.

Talbot Tagora are the latest Left Coast noisemakers to keep your eye on.

For this record, the Brewises again borrow generously from late-60s and early-70s psychedelic rock (not to mention the first British Invasion), all pervasive vocal harmonies, whining guitar tones, bouncing bass, and crisp, dampened drumming.

More or less adapting his own approach to sound with the sonic atmosphere and materials provided to him by the filmmakers, he managed to create a work that, guided by their vision, ties a satisfying knot between the two disparate ends of his catalog. Lacking the singularly textual and conceptual punch of his recent work, it’s both a practice in versatility and a sign that there’s still something of an enigma to Oneohtrix Point Never after all these years.

All this studious box-ticking and attention-to-detail comes at a price, which is that II becomes more of a tribute to the music of yesteryear than, say, a work of art that’s relevant to the world surrounding it.

Life is Sweet! depicts a gifted artist taking a very solid step on the road to self-discovery. He's just wrestling with the palpable anxiety of influence at the moment.

The result is an experimental pop album that's easy to appreciate, but difficult to fully connect with.

The shift in styles more readily exposes the band's strengths and weaknesses.

Every strong point is matched by a weaker one, but there is never an extremity of either.

It's a solid reminder that it's tough to grow your rock up, but worth working toward, and Fantastic Explanations is a solid record demonstrating the results.

All these flowery production choices can at times be quite seductive, despite the glaring mishandling of the vocals astride them.

The album may sprawl too widely, but its second disc makes a strong argument for the continuity and self-awareness of the whole package.

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

Cowboy Worship isn’t a cohesive work the way Love was, despite its material actually being a bit more polished in places. But hey, for an EP, this is almost 30 minutes of good-to-great music, and that’s more than you get from a lot of LPs these day.

A little more feeling would have gone a long way towards elevating The Camel’s Back into memorable territory. As it stands, whatever magic the album might have mustered has been smothered in the womb.

There's nothing here that so sheerly encompasses the tragi-gorgeous indie nexus as earlier tunes "Already Over" or "Spectator and Pupil," though "When To Let Go" comes close.

You could diagnose I, Gemini as a frustrating text, a scattershot indulgence that only occasionally succeeds as a collection of songs: it is.

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.

Yet if “Shattered” and follow-up “Guaranteed Struggle” are Dälek at their cacophonous and incensed best, subsequent tracks like “Masked Laughter (Nothing’s Left)” and “6dB” reveal a band cultivating a lighter, more introspective side.

Elverum is reveling in his honest moment of awe. In doing so, he has sloshed away the Norwegian frost with a mittened hand, a frost that kept these songs so chilling.

We Will Always Be rewards your attention, but only so far.

So, no, this isn't the sound of The Dears taking it to the next level, but the level they're on is still pretty solid.

Chemical Chords is a fine album by Stereolab standards, even if it does nothing to improve upon the band’s by now all-too-familiar sound.

Foundations of Burden is special, there’s little question of that, but the precocious virtuosity of the performance doesn’t change the fact that the material is far from challenging.

LP3 is a rewarding listen, and you’ll have a taste for it if you enjoyed the less powerful moments of "Classics" or Evan Mast’s previous textural work as E*Vax. Just don’t expect to find yourself headbanging and air-guitaring alone in your room.

Live, Hunx are utter trashy goodness, a trip to Dreamland, but recorded here, there’s a fine line they wobble back and forth on, like the tyres of a dodgy fixie, where the humor can wear thin and wear out its welcome.

No matter how likable all 10 of these songs may be, there's something missing here.

Reassemblage already feels peculiarly familiar, but the residue it leaves behind is oddly intangible.

If the too-often twinned strands of listener preference can be unwound, hopefully it will be remembered as the most-heard Isis album, not the greatest.

The Teenagers have not made a great album, but it is better than many will want to admit.

Pattern To Excel emerges in fragments, almost painlessly, with every inch of space filled, all the darlings still written.

EDD are probably too traditional a band to ever record a straight-up punk record. But it would have been nice to hear an entire album powering through with the intensity of the more rocking half of Riot Now!.

It tends to, er, drag, but the producer's deft touch with wonky textures remains thrilling.

It is an album of specks dancing in the dust in an amorphous bubble of babble and bawling thoughts, yearning to be unthought.

Ghost Games is nothing so profound, but it certainly is something to bring out of the closet once a year or so.

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.

Physicalist is indeed a luscious, bubbly record to behold; just don’t expect its preordained patterns to hold many surprises.

Part rumination on engaging with the pop icon and part deep end even after eating the meal, Reputation keeps the ball in the air, argues for moving forward, even if it’s herky jerky.

To be a little more complimentary, Bespoke sounds like darkly magnolia-lined city streets, like late afternoon, like crisp hotel beds. Darlington may have tailored the album from existing sonic cloth, but at least this time the seams are a little more skillfully sewn.

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.

The playful experimentalism and inherently subversive nature of Dead Petz is enjoyable (in a sickly-sweet way) throughout, yet it’s experimentation is akin to playing absent-mindedly with a shitty synthesizer iPhone app.

If Departing sounded as if absurdly-energetic drummer Paul Banwatt was holding back, then Mended With Gold corrects this modesty a bit.

Although as a dub obsessive it saddens me to say it (indeed, it saddens me to say anything critical of anyone as seminal, interesting, and all-round sympathetic as Styrene), it's mostly the reggae tracks and uninspiring deejay cameos that let the album down.

It's a joy to hear him in such audibly great spirits, even if his most cognizant album effort in decades isn't some kind of miraculous knockout

Truly, though, I like to think that The Bridge takes the best of early- to mid-’90s hip-hop from New York, the synthesized sound of the last five to ten years, an interesting blend of MCs, and an ear for a slammin’ beat, and puts them together in a package that isn’t necessarily mind-blowing, but that is at least complete, well-intended, and meaningful.

Despite its honed brunt and conceptual integrity, the album just doesn’t quite achieve enough to raise it above its similarly disaffected peers.

Ghil is an album that’s shaped by ideas, but driven by a sound that’s often disengaged.

There is a creeping charm to tracks that seem initially off.

This is expertly crafted music, but perhaps too intent on being discomforting: the music intentionally aims to unsettle you.

Wyatt processes his music through epic terms, even in its mildest moments, and if Union and Return isn’t a final destination, it is still undeniably a stepping stone, a vista for us to gaze upon with Wyatt as he campaigns on towards total, purified elevation of the mind and body.

L’Ami du Peuple is a predominantly rewarding album, despite the occasional misstep and despite its unambitious stylistic orthodoxy.

If you're a sugar-pop junkie or a [Architecture In] Helsinki-lover, check this one out.

Sagittarian Domain is a noble quasi-failure, an enjoyable and driven jam that, despite its reliance on certain tired tropes of its obvious Krautrock influences, nevertheless succeeds when it focuses its exploration on texture.

The album’s strongest cuts reveal an undeniable energy and excitement on the behalf of its creators, but those moments are much too sparse to draw in many from outside of Putnam’s cult of true believers.

While the concept is admirable and ultimately quite touching, its forays into disorientation, uncertainty and exoticism can make for a rather patchy album.

The first business-as-usual Burma release.

Formerly a more stolidly post-punk outfit, their bread and butter on Remember the Night Parties are the kind of R.E.M.-meets-Superchunk anti-anthems of “For the Khakis and Sweatshirts” and “Return /of Burno.”

Each track feels more like a costume change than a true exploration of new waters, as the group's newfound love of blustery free-for-all psych ultimately has more to do with the members' broad record collections than their ability to function as versatile musicians.

Ironically, the general listening population--if they’re paying attention at all; hey, there’s a chance!--will find this to be Mercer’s most accessible, enjoyable work to date.