It is music with palpable warmth, not nearly as cold as your average techno track.

While James is here less austere than on Cheetah EP and less eccentric than on landmark release Richard D. James Album, Collapse nevertheless proves to be a serviceable Aphex Twin release at this point in his career. His knack for finding interesting textures and layers hasn’t been compromised nor has his willingness to build off of previous styles in his oeuvre.

Stadium here is an exposition of time, in this stadion, this measureless measure, or rather, time is here exposed.

It’s as wicked as Twins at a fraction of the cost, as weird as Melted but twice as pretty, oozing acerbic coffee, acid mud, and gasoline.

If you think you’ve heard songs more successful at melodrama and heavy mood than “Bad Magic” or more successful at the naked, perennial mode of “pure beauty” than “Requiem For Forgiveness,” I want you to forget them, because you are kidding yourself.

Canary is less unified, but there are great songs here.

Through tackling the repercussions of vocal processing and by demonstrating some of the most profound uses of it, Love Streams gives credence to the act in a way that vilifies the most obscure uses of it, even when the end results yield little more than the evaporated phantoms that we continue to chase in our everyday lives.

But no matter how much I sit here listening to Broken Social Scene, and no matter how special most of these tracks are, they lack the cohesiveness that made You Forgot it in People, and even Feel Good Lost, something to get ecstatic about.

This is intensely human music.

Quarter Turns embodies a shadowed and daunting environment with such an abundance of beauty that it bears contrast rather than resemblance to that damning abode, for the former remains an uncontrollably agreeable environment, despite its grim and unnerving allure.

Bazan has built his career on the merit of his honesty, and Curse Your Branches finds him exerting that idea more forcefully than ever before, creating a record that beautifully, paradoxically, and soulfully explores the beauty and strife of admitting "I don't know."

While not as immediately consumed fully as a whole as Rejoicing In The Hands was, when given time and taken apart to be put back together anew, Niño Rojo clearly states the depth of Banhart's presence, if admittedly, not quite making a clear purpose just yet.

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 invites its listeners into that silent continuum that makes music whole.

We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed is an immensely enjoyable, plain-sailing cluster of energetic, singable melodies.

Over the three preceding records, the band has built up a loyal following by creating dark, gritty, but tuneful music. This album slots in nicely to the band's catalog as yet another release with undoubted new wave pop sensibilities fluttering amongst more damaged, foreboding vibes.

Through his exuberant, alien compositions, Deacon seeks to manifest for us the wild places of his country, the barren plains and arid deserts, and in the process, reminds us that they are things worth preserving.

While the center of Blackshaw’s compositions will likely always be guitar, he has shown with this album that he can write music for several different instruments and do so incredibly well.

It’s great to have a thematically consistent and well-executed Thee Oh Sees album.

Wrapped in a overwhelming number of influences, Oh No vaults across an infinity of cultural milieus to find itself.

The first time I listened to Now Only, it was raining and I cried for 10 minutes; after it ended, like a body after an exorcism, I felt lighter.

A danceable yet heavy album.

A finely observed, immaculately produced work, full of diversions, hooks, and charm.

Grief’s Infernal Flower is heavy in the best, most gratifyingly melancholy way.

There’s little apparent by way of concept, lyrical wit, and aesthetic quirk — qualities that illuminate the work of many of Duterte’s colleagues — but ambience, style, and ingenuity are well at work, making the album a vibe-y classic worth hanging onto.

The Monitor more than cements Titus Andronicus's place in the indie rock arena. At its best moments, it reminds you of just how durable--and dangerous--a beast like rock 'n' roll can still be.

Wide Awake! is the album in which America’s most consistent punk band once again distill their myriad influences, this time with a whole new list of reasons why their minds never push the brakes.

To the outsider, this album certainly feels like a defining statement, one that has considered each and every molecule that this abstract marvel might assume.

Field of Reeds may initially come across as inhumanely taut, straining, and indistinct to begin with, but this is the sound of precociousness finally arriving at a purpose.

The entire first half of Eagle shows Callahan as a much more evolved and mature musician. He appears more comfortable expanding his musical space, and he exercises tasteful restraint with Beattie’s strings.

If Tempest was hellfire apocalypse romance, prophesied steampunk armageddon, then Shadows in The Night is the revelation of the true nature of the American songbook.

BSP aren't going for a concept album here (or concepts at all, really), but you'd be forgiven for expecting one given how beautifully the collection of songs coheres into a singular piece of work and retains momentum through its movements.

Harvey Milk never quite match the achievement of their canonical works, but, nevertheless, they've succeeded in stretching the running joke without dissolving into self-parody. Or perhaps more aptly, they've delivered on the promise of self-parody with a record of genuine insecurity, unsettling pessimism and inherent, indisguisable humanity.

A Vintage Burden is well-executed, spare, and in the simplest terms, makes wonderful Sunday morning background music.

That she is able to incorporate these technical talents into solid songwriting is what makes This Is It the success that it is.

This is easily Saint Etienne's best album since 1998's Good Humor.

It's perhaps not as immediately satisfying as their early work and not nearly as charming as their intimate mid-career efforts, but, after several careful listens, the album feels as powerful and urgent as anything else in their discography.

Too Many Voices is an immersive experience that builds on the artists’ past without once holding them back.

Half a good album, half disastrously wrong.

While I am not one to fault Kilgour for slowing things down a little, an impatient listener might argue that Frozen Orange shows Kilgour's age in the same ways Yo La Tengo's Summer Sun belied theirs.

If you get a kick out of The Fucking Champs riffing on Bach with "Air on a G String," you're on the road to Panda Park.

This is one of the albums of the year: completely out of left field and completely solid from start to finish.

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.

Doris hits a couple more high points when Earl flirts with horrorcore.

Dawson doesn’t obscure his political predispositions, which are quite understood on tracks such as “Civil Servant” & “Fulfilment Centre,” for example. But 2020 is far from a soapbox, despite being clearly inflected by contemporary anxieties. Dawson’s characters speak for themselves through their lived experience.

The finished product is brilliantly, beautifully schizophrenic.

As gorgeous and misstep-free as it is, the soundtrack risks a bit of that souvenir, collector’s item feel native to score-based soundtracks. That being said, it’s nowhere near as padded-out as those typically are. While melodies and tones recur, track to track, it plays out with an ear toward immersion.

By the end of the album’s blissful, sparse, empty-Saharan-landscape closer 'The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance,' perfection doesn’t seem to matter much anymore--especially when your mind’s too preoccupied on starting Vampire Weekend again from the beginning.

Thankfully, such peeks of inhibition are brief, and Cox spends far more time confidently beckoning us into the glorious world he's created. For the first time, this is a place where we're to be cohabitants, not merely invitees.

m b v is good, Slowdive is great.

The non-stop purging of masculinist bile can be exhausting, but that can and should be considered a measure of success, a sign that, despite whatever growth has been exhibited, success hasn’t changed Pissed Jeans.

Compared to her two previous releases, Barwick's songs on The Magic Place are much longer and more layered, with a greater diversity of textures and instrumentation.

This album has the power to make you feel uncomfortable enough to look away from yourself, which isn’t easy.

Compton itself is a part of this little something too, because even though it fails to make a clear artistic statement, it houses some of the finest hip-hop production Dre has turned in for years, and proves that the city has much more going for it than just a bad reputation.

Puff doesn’t grab your attention directly. Rather, it occupies your subconscious, leaving vestiges of melodies and lyrics behind that lie dormant for stretches of time, resurfacing intermittently and maddeningly.

Parquet Courts are confessing to their own messiness and, in doing so, have delivered their most fully realized project to date: a disillusioned work whose allure reaches far beyond the instruments being strummed on it.

Simply put and strongly stated, King of Jeans goes beyond charting Pissed Jeans’ position as the Deans of Denim--it places them front and center as one of the best and most ferocious guitar bands out there.

What’s particularly exciting about this disc is the possibility that lies in Gunn’s interleaving of timeless songs and allover “time”--few of his influences and even fewer of his peers have searched in this direction.

Xe is a complete ecstatic experience itself as well as a dynamic text that reflects (on) these structural limitations that we employ in making sense of experience.

The album’s subtlety and abstract tendencies prevent it from becoming solely a work of stock collage or pastiche appropriation.

By focusing on his aesthetic and retaining an interest in the possibilities that exist within slow music while setting himself time limitations, Porter has created a record that is as bold and as breathtaking as we might have ever hoped for, regardless of the projection it is set to generate.

Although you'd be hard pressed, but very pleased, to find a shindig entirely amenable to FlyLo's relentlessly eccentric experiments, Pattern+Grid World is certainly more pillow fight than lounge party.

Define artistic success as you will, but it’s beyond question that Mount Kimbie have here translated, and therefore transmitted, an entire state of being.

With nary an aural step forward from their hitherto records, Painted Ruins ends much in the same way it begins, not with a bang, but with a drone.

For the Ghosts Within provides another oddly-shaped window into the labyrinthine mind of Robert Wyatt, nearly as vital in its own way as Shleep or Rock Bottom.

De-Loused in the Comatorium is a very strong debut album for the Mars Volta.

By making concessions to clarity, Blank Realm have only amplified their inherent weirdness. As such, this thing is a fucking kick in the pants.

On Sauna, Elverum’s attempts to mimic heavy metal rock ballads, Tim Hecker, and certain so-called “holy” and unholy minimalists alike, feel inconsequential and compositionally uninteresting. That’s not to say that every citation falls flat.

Overgrown is a remarkable effort from an artist who continues to do things his own way, regardless of the consequences.

Thee Oh Sees are keen students of both the restrictions and liberations of rock music, and therefore continue to thrive with the glad clutter that is reinforcement over renovation of their sound.

Luckily, for most of its duration, Where You Go I Go Too manages to assimilate the more enjoyable elements of both of these alternate possibilities into a seamless and engaging whole, with only a few moments of awkward uncertainty.

Like ghosts that don’t know they’re dead, the songs on Deerhunter’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? wander about in a well-produced limbo almost in mourning for the death they can’t die. But they don’t know it, so--and this is the saddest part about it--they become what they deplore, all loss glossed over.

They go out not with a bang or a whimper, but with a wide-eyed and confident work tinged with sadness, knowing they were part of something truly unique and amazing that met an untimely end.

Cut the World may not be essential Antony and the Johnsons, but it's a recapitulant compilation of some of their strongest songs, in some of their strongest iterations, while presenting stimulating ideas for reconsidering their music and our own planet.

Melodies are practically nonexistent, leaving the music almost completely ignorable.

It's business as usual, but there is not a damn thing wrong with that when it comes to this group.

There is a generative sense of the perpetual "to be continued" and "to be announced" in both the projects of Benjamin and Torontonian songwriter Sandro Perri.

What’s impressive about this broadening and deepening of their thematic coverage is that it’s been achieved with only a few subtle adjustments to their sound, making it seem like the product of a very organic and irresistible evolution from the days when they were playing with Mats Gustafsson and Ken Vandermark.

The songs of his that have stood out most are the ones that at least try to meet the listener halfway, the ones that betray the deep-seeded enthusiasm underlying Vile’s laid-back, stoner(-esque — he’s a family guy, now) cool. While such material can still be found on Wakin on a Pretty Daze, locating it is becoming more and more of a chore.

Bringing bouts of surf twang, no-wave tangles, and chopped-up power chords, the record blurs boundaries of genre, its eighth notes alternately swung and then made straight again. The band (Todd May, Ben Lamb, Jay Gasper, George Hondroulis, Andy Harrison) shines across the changes in support of Loveless’s powerful voice.

For its circuitousness, there's always been a lean, mean backbone to the guy's writing; even his most bored-sounding toss-offs came wrapped in barbed wire. Here, he just kinda sounds bored.

This is one of those genre puzzles that are rewarding to anyone with an adventurous appetite, even if your bright eyes’ve never gazed anywhere but ahead.

black midi aim to dazzle and perform, and with Schlagenheim, their mammoth ideations never cease to thrill, the product of a boundless creative spirit and unwavering techni

In bringing to light these stillborn-again pleasures, The Caretaker reveals himself to be nothing less than formidably eponymous.

Rather Ripped comes off as a collection of good-and-great songs, but it just isn't up there with their best.

True Love Will Cast Out All Evil is a rare example of a man finding peace on record, of a long journey being rewarded with a slight glimpse of salvation.

From most bands, half of a great record would be an incredible accomplishment, but we’ve heard so much better from them.

The songs seemed to absorb the vista, their embers sustained underneath the settling dusk.

It is big, but without feeling grandiose. While Everything Ecstatic was bursting at the seams, bright and flashing with cacophony, Hebden doesn't try to dazzle us with any sudden moves this time around. And the album is a joy.

Brothers is the least stuffy record The Black Keys has put out, and it's by far their strongest.

Post-Nothing is convincing in its candor to the point of exhaustion.

Chelsea Wolfe’s songs don’t often sound like they’re supposed to, and therefore they always sound exactly like Chelsea Wolfe.

There may be less surprises over its 45 minutes than over the course of earlier efforts, but Rutili’s hand for slanted folk songs that possess their own select personality is as strong as ever, and for this reason, we have at least one thing whose reality is equal to its unreal paradigm.

Kaito could be the best band in the world, but Band Red isn't the best album in the world. What it is, though, is a record that shows just how good this band can be when they get it right, even if that isn't all the time.

The fact that Venice takes a few missteps before getting into full strut inevitably takes its toll on the overall body of work.

With Christs, Redeemers, they ignite a range of complex reactions designed to inspire and to petrify, the consequences of which reveal a wholly unsettling listen.

Le Kov is not as cold as Y Dydd Olaf (which was based on a decades-old Welsh sci fi novel)--it’s less machinic and more organic, less 80s and more 70s. As such, it wavers a little, particularly in its second half, where the feel is a little too warmly indistinct, too hazy.

Although there is no absence of noise on this record, what is quieter about it gives space to hear what was always there: a fully embodied voice that, through pain as through love, ceaselessly gives only herself, an angel whose message becomes indistinguishable in grace from the messenger.

If sometimes the grandeur threatens to overwhelm, the album’s subtle gradations just as often leave me struggling to explain why exactly they make me shiver, pause, cry, or, at their most elusive, disappear.