Like a daydream, St. Catherine is to be savored while it lasts, then let go until another day.

LP (2015) is a short and sweet affirmation for the faithful.

The most frustrating thing about Currents is that, for probably the first time, it seems like Parker is writing songs that would be pretty decent and probably interesting if he freed them from this musty aesthetic and gave them room to express themselves.

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

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

Whole sections that might feel accomplished if taken as isolated pieces feel misplaced in the economy of these side-long tracks.

It’s a dedicated focus on the materials that compel bodies and minds into motion that make RP Boo a continuously shining light in the ever-growing discourse he helped invent.

If Bones is too densely packed to inspire, at least that’s a good quality for a foundation to have.

Because the album risks so much in its all-in politics, the songs on their own are more difficult to judge. For that reason, the album is enjoyable almost solely in small doses.

Despite possessing a somewhat dour countenance, the main effect of this record is a sort of replenishment.

The album is as stuck in time as a delivered text or dead second cousin. The songs remain the same.

As ever, the project is a winner off the bat for producing material where no one track resembles the other. Olympic Mess raises the bar, however, in a fashion set off by the invitingly tactile, yet nevertheless challenging work of the past three years.

Lantern comes off like Birchard wallowing in an uncharacteristic and blissful tedium.

Cold Hot Plumbs cobbles the weird mechanical detritus from last year’s dank and gloomy Hubba Bubba into something capable of using its spindly appendages to pry open your eyelids and shine shafts of colorful light directly through to your brain’s misfiring synapses. Sometimes it even goes down smooth and sweet (you’ll develop any complications with time).

Both her songs and her subject matter hold back from shocking the listener by virtue of their content, and yet they make a startling impact--creating a headspace that leads to nowhere in the same moment that it paves the way to salvation.

It’s a clarification--leveraging an assemblage of evocation, of presentation, perhaps of curation, but one that’s built from the fragments of the most beautifully uninteresting bits of what’s contemporary.

Despite the absence of a unifying theme or motif, these primarily acoustic songs breathe with a plethora of everyday detail that obscures their often nonexistent innards.

It’s as if the music has already presented itself. But it hasn’t. Titles can’t describe timbres or structures: they can only point to them.

“Wild Strawberries” and “Enchanter’s Nightshade,” which occupy over 30 minutes of the album. They are mid-tempo, trad-to-the-max, predictable clean-tone psych-music.... Yes, there’s strong guitar playing, and the bass and drums plod capably, but it stays in the background and never enters the head. The record suddenly feels awkwardly escapist, and the listener is reminded that the whole disc actually feels rather laid-back.

It doesn’t offer any major stylistic advance over Album of the Year, admittedly, but its 10 songs are constructed with an incomparable craft and creativity that few bands in rock and metal can reproduce.

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.

Instead of picking over internal ashes, Krill rotate and swivel, holding a lighter, as if looking more closely at the moment might make action possible.

Ratchet is one of the most purely pleasurable records I’ve heard so far this year, and one of the strongest debuts in several years.

In a way, on Platform too, there’s just too much control on the artist’s side and not enough room for engagement on the listener end. Still, Herndon is just setting to work as a musician, and she’s already pushing her sound well beyond the experiments of the 20th-century avant-garde.

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.

Jackie doesn’t often transcend its own well-established boundaries, and it doesn’t flow as ***Flawlessly as TMT favorites Beyoncé or 1989 (much of Jackie’s most interesting moments occur in its first half), yet it is a solid alternative for those craving that rare and varied pop gem that warrants repeated listens.

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.

It sheds their debut’s pastoral psych for a spacey romanticism, and in the process, its airy synthesizers and reverb’d guitars evoke a yearning that’s too vague and indeterminate to be a yearning for anything in particular.

It’s poppy and fun, but it doesn’t let you get too comfortable.

Like Plowing Into The Field Of Love, this album is rich and complex.

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

Behold both as an artifact and as a word doesn’t invalidate utterance however; rather, it invites unbound reflection.

Barter 6 is an obvious, tight application of Thug’s lawless style brought into the space of a linear album, letting his flow drip and collect in horizontal spaces, as opposed to being sharply crafted like in his iconic hits, “Stoner,” “Danny Glover,” and “Lifestyle.”

Together, Stetson and Neufeld have succeeded in not only melding their respective sounds, but also refining them.

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.

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.

Minus a few semi-refreshing exceptions that see Brian Wilson team up with old bandmate Jardine--is more or less artistically bankrupt, failing as it largely does to communicate or emotionalize anything of Wilson’s concrete being or of the 21st century in which he now finds himself.

Beyond nodding more explicitly to the sounds of the early 70s than Ghost’s or Batoh’s work usually did, the real difference--the thing that marks The Silence out from these earlier projects--is a kind of poise and effortlessness, which is drawn out by the richness and immediacy of the production.

The spacious long-form approach on these eight tracks really showcase Schott’s insistent, tactile, and conversation-with-yourself lonesome performance style. It’s great loner music, for those who own this about themselves but are ever casting a tentative eye toward the throng.

Although it is exploratory in terms of space and texture, Skullsplitter is anything but incidental; it unfolds like an epic poem, in all its boundary-dissolving creativity and intentional patterning.

When I listen to Waxahatchee, I feel a little less strange. Less washed up.

Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress’ is not a failure; it’s merely familiar.

Eclipse is not a record for everyone, and Twin Shadow’s older fans probably are justified in their dismissals. But in terms of emotional texture, Eclipse represents a return to form.

Although not perfect (and perhaps transitional), Time to Go Home is a defining moment not only for Chastity Belt, but also for a style currently seeing a serious revival.

It’s actually quite an audacious album; it’s just that it’s so well articulated as to come across as serviceable. It is vain, self-serious, and predictable, but endearingly so.

Jam City’s message is a positive one. The actual music Dream a Garden is offering, separate from all the pomp of its press releases and strained interviews, are beautiful requiems for our lost sense of love toward shallow brand loyalty; they return to our inclinations for warmth, solidarity, and friendship.

Any song on this album could function as a funny little short story well enough, but Barnett’s band, her guitar playing, her impeccable sense for melody and consistency give her stories life beyond their quirks, beyond her strength as a chronicler of the exhausting contemporary situation, expanding them into emotional worlds unto themselves.

To Pimp a Butterfly requires an extra commitment. Even the most casual attention to the lyrics can unveil the complexity of Lamar’s critique of institutional racism, consumer capitalism, hip-hop culture, justice, and his own choices as an artist, as a black man, and as a human being.

Call it experimental muzak, call it cultured post-bop fueled by the internet. Either way, it’s interesting to hear Ghostface sink so smoothly into their rhythms.

Blade of the Ronin’s greatest success lies not in avoiding the commonplace, but rather in their commitment to pre-SDCC juvenilia, as well as to a more holistic sense of sincerity.

Throughout, ego is rightfully extended through the sheer material force of his content generation. The listener must ultimately face their visceral love or hate toward his character, or, at least, observe how the majority of any given subway ride is in their feelings with his music.

Strangers is a fundamentally passable album.

Despite the mystifying veil that has been draped over the album, it’s an insightful journey that has our West Country enigma plotting past projections of the future with mesmerizing ease.

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

The jettisoning of shoegaze trickery takes place within a comeback that, even if very welcome, isn’t entirely spectacular.

Heterocetera is packed with writhing climaxes and blistering comedowns that leave you gasping without ever being able to forget who is behind them. Of course, confronting these contrasts remains a provocation on the artist’s part, but only ever in the best possible sense.

Transfixiation’s weakest points are its fixations, when it lingers too long on a verse clearly aching for the payoff of a chorus or when it tries for serious by way of obscene.

There are very few metaphors for the limitlessness of human creativity and ingenuity as powerful as that provided by space, and now by Public Service Broadcasting.

The morbid motivation behind it all looms like that skull, never far from the festivities, even if Gliss Riffer doesn’t always reproduce its glow.

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

Ibeyi is an uneven but sturdily promising debut.

As a straight-ahead listen though, it’s oddly paced.

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

Given time, these transmissions work on a person like a vast overgrowth, subsuming one’s fastidious human preoccupations. When it hits you right, it’s like that first big beam of sunlight after weeks of cloudy sky.

The signs are there, but they just haven’t come together in a way that makes significant impact--at least not yet.

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.

On Everything Else Matters, the band funnels the Kansas post-rock group Appleseed Cast’s delay-pedal wizardry and open-ended song forms into bright pop that’s more in line with Astrobrite alum Andrew Prinz’s Mahogany.

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.

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.

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.

As a whole, On Your Own Love Again is a somewhat murkier affair.

Fantastic Planet is an achievement in advancing that voice to a clear-eyed place, where wonder and apprehension can peacefully coexist.

The result is Björk’s most frighteningly intimate album to date.

Collaboratively, then, You, Whom I Have Always Hated makes for a solid metal album, but the attribute that gives it an edge works also as a reminder as to just how imaginative this collaboration could be the next time around.

Despite some questionable, off-putting decisions, there’s a wistful, melancholic temperature to this eponymous debut, one belied by the band’s sophomoric war metaphors and rubbery noodling, and it makes their self-titled debut one of the most essential records of the season for me.

There are some obvious pitfalls to this newfound worldliness, and the second half of Girls in Peacetime is a bit of a mess.

As it stands, the album sounds like Panda Bear at the height of his unchecked, uncompromised (and, therefore, at times uninventive) powers.

Black Messiah was crafted painstakingly, that’s evident, but it never sounds labored over. It sounds loose, on fire, and huge, like a truly Christian sermon.

Ambient music since its inception was about overlapping voices and how it effects perception: two, three voices are one sustained tone across and infinite period of time, where interactions intersect and combust. Visa exploits this to brilliant ends.

The giant, immense void that swallows sound in Part 1 shows itself in Part 5 to be just another windmill, slain by Ambarchi’s guitar and studio magic.

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.

With his inoffensive voice and inoffensive beats (surprisingly so, considering their producers), Bodan does, if only for a brief time, achieve something exciting and intimat

Faith In Strangers amplifies human interaction with the elements and the fractured nature of our relationship with them; this might not be the most joyful depiction, but it has been impeccably well documented here.

A hypnosis kicks in and we discover that a massive and dense album has run its hour-plus course in what felt like... two minutes? Four days?

The middle third of pom pom gives itself over relentlessly to schlock and dross for the purpose of exposing deeper truths on the way.

It creates an illusion of depth, and its intervention is interesting, rather than distracting. It thickens space and imagines worlds that once were.

There’s something to be said for two masters of their craft talking jazz for the joy of it, but to me, the question remains whether or not this kind of jazz is played out.

It was great listening in on Hungtai’s world, a filmic mixture of life and life-that-can-be.

Unfortunately, instead of rebuilding a sound structure (double meaning intended) with those scattered shards that Deerhoof has violently shaved off over its career, with La Isla Bonita, they’ve traced a nominal new work from a picture that never existed in such an ostensibly neatly composed way. Without that compositional tension hanging in its margins though, La Isla Bonita’s expressions, however inciting, remain just out of grasping reach, like an island mirage.

There’s a newfound purpose to his dilettantism, one that invests the album with more weight than anyone had any right to expect.

It’s a gracefully self-contained ecology--a sonic environment rich with empty and warm spaces, within which the listener is urged to breathe more easily and share in a queer feeling of belonging.

With Ruins, Harris opens up a portal to one of those clearings, and I don’t feel quite as bombarded affectively and aesthetically (by problems, timelines, insecurities, noise, and other people) when I hear its call and disappear there.

The results may indeed be reflections of Yorke’s skill and sensitivity, but as compositions, they are self-contained and fully anticipated creations whose power to surprise or displace the listener has waned.

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.

If the album feels too familiar sometimes, it shouldn’t really throw you off much.

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.

It does justice to the musical traditions it invokes, integrating them into dynamic, scrupulously constructed rampages that escalate at just the right moments and explode at just the right moments.

The album is full of familiar tropes dressed up in gold and leather, and the songs are wrapped in a plastic that stops our touch--turns it cold, numb from feeling the electricity of the body, of the night.