On his latest, How the Thing Sings, Orcutt summons from this compromised thing a droning, sputtering blues that is utterly personal, theoretically rigorous, skeptical of tradition, and completely enthralling.

The sounds sometimes crash and collide rather than meld together, whereas elsewhere, paradoxically, they slide off the ear, a little over-anonymous yet falling short of the unique grey palette of an act like Japan.

The band’s persistence is what makes this music “challenging,” as opposed to the compositional structures that shape them, but on Piano Nights, those idiosyncrasies are pressed through a grotto of layered instrumentation that reveals an essential addition to the Bohren canon.

Thankfully, More Life is Drizzy’s homecoming, a vocalization of the heart in his heartless world, and a veritable return to form for it. Welcome back to the Firm.

Again and again, Antony gestures toward a light: a crying light, a swanlight, a luminous impossibility that beckons, ultimately serving only to illuminate the sadness of this world.

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

II is gonna get you. It's gonna fold you up, flatten you in its steel press, and make a revolting panini outta ya. Then it's chow time. So long, sucker.

It’s a perfectly respectable, fun dance record, but I just wish its grooves came more naturally.

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.

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.

It’s no mistake that the title of this superbly fun album ends with an exclamation point; El Guincho has created an album that’s relentless in its ferocious rhythms and beats until the very last track.

This isn’t their first release, but it’s no doubt their best so far, a fully realized space of shimmering notes and subtle signs toward a masterful production and shared creative mindset of defying expectation.

He’s gently guiding, minding small details as they contribute to the success of the larger mission and never forcing their emergence, Eno’s keen grasp of these two forms of songwriting allowing him to easily walk that line.

As a sophomore set, Lenses Alien is daring and cohesive, layered and challenging.

Juggling potential contradictions with the greatest of ease, In Advance of the Broken Arm ushers in a new voice in rock, one that seems poised to be blazing trails for years to come.

The energy imparted simply can’t overcome a drowning of influences, or rather, the kinetic is overcome by the potential.

From the get-go, from the very first tremblings of Chris Abrahams’s piano and the hullabaloo of Tony Buck’s drums, the album engineers an atmosphere of beguiling insecurity and enigmatic possibility.

Travels With Myself and Another is the best thing this crew has ever made. It’s got all you could ask for: hooks, riffs, volume, wordplay, razor-sharp absurdity, and Jack Egglestone’s incomparable power drumming.

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.

Although it’s undoubtedly consistent and enjoyable, these are the kind of adjectives that restrain this established songwriter from truly challenging or surprising his audience.

Son should stand as one of the most beautiful and inspiring albums of 2006.

Brill Bruisers is an enthusiastic correction in course, as well as a reminder that age doesn’t always equal solemnity or, for that matter, slouching toward self-importance of any kind.

Dangermouse's actions have breathed creative life back into a 35-year-old record while inventing a completely new work of hip-hop art.

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.

The lack of a unifying theme on this particular album leaves their past influences far downstream and without a paddle.

The Magic is Deerhoof’s 13th full-length album, and it’s one of their most well-rounded, sweeter offerings, perhaps a companion to Friend Opportunity or Offend Maggie in size and spirit.

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.

I Am Very Far can only be considered a stumble or misstep on a steeply curved scale, yet it proves, even as the shock of the musical pomposity fades and familiarity sets in, to be a less emotionally generative return to the same wells from which Sheff has long drawn.

In Prism’s genius is to service the newbies and true believers in equal measure.

For Pickering, electronic music is as powerful as any supernatural promise, and on House of Woo, he demonstrates his dedication to the beat with a most persuasive degree of conviction.

DAZE is a collection of perverted smash hits in overdrive, a keyed up, obsessively concerned, hyperbolic exaggeration along the lines of Werkflow compatriot Recsund’s recent mix for Disjecta.

In the end, Junior Boys' improved skills at constructing pop songs within their fantastic sonic template is more than enough to make So This Is Goodbye one of my favorite releases of 2006 so far.

Biophilia the "Bjork album" stands with the best of them.

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.

The music here speaks for itself, whatever else Ward might be trying to say through it.

What makes a Wolf Eyes album worthwhile is less the raging skree than their keen application of dark, delectably uncouth fragment. Your head can still wade in this bracken, even if it may not be as tumultuously roiling as it once was.

Another solid release.

He might not be making sounds for fighting the many injustices of our current place and time, but Unseen in Between is nonetheless a solid compatriot against the confounding effect of going forward among them.

Where xx was an album that got its hooks in you, Coexist becomes a somnolent atmosphere-in-itself, in which hooks are conspicuous by their absence. It all works best when the tempo rises (relatively speaking), as on "Tides" and "Swept Away;" still, the pulse races placidly.

While the album isn’t exactly synergistic in its coupling of the two singers--neither Kurt nor Courtney achieve their lyrical or musical apex here--Lotta Sea Lice nevertheless intimates an unrelenting kinship between its two auteurs.

For anyone who found themselves begging for more than five songs, you will be happy with this new album; the distance traveled from Young Liars is not so drastic as to alienate anyone.

Crackles with sparkling guitar work and [is] simply a great, fun, rock n' roll album.

Cripple Crow finds Banhart doing what many didn't want him to do or thought he couldn't do: make a pretty lackluster album.

Schmilco is missing the same spark that drove Schmilsson. Where Nilsson was relentless in pursuit of something other than settling down, Tweedy has gone the other way.

Last Summer sounds good; next summer could be even better.

Distortion does not reinvent the wheel of alternative rock, but it may have just started it spinning again.

Finding new ways to speak old truths. I think that’s why we may be here. I think that’s what Phil and Julie find as they wing and waver their voices around the songs of Lost Wisdom pt. 2.

Aesop has tremendous control for a syllable-stuffer; he's Kweli with restraint, knowing when to rein in the racehorse flow and slow down for emphasis, never loosening his grip long enough to stumble over the vigorous drum-driven beats, which - to the benefit of Aesop's gruff narration - are simple and unobtrusive and angry and allow whatever he's talking about at the moment ... to sound not only compelling, but also hard.

The stronger songs to these brittle ears are the ones that feel like experiments within an album.

The result is an exuberant, almost joyful record brimming with sly cynicism and a newfound fondness for whoa-oh refrains and handclaps.

Admittedly, Beautiful Rewind isn’t Kieran Hebden’s magnum opus, but it’s an album that succeeds at both moving the listener emotionally and, like much of the producer’s impressive body of work, inspiring him or her to literally and physically move.

Over and over, listen after listen and Half Free just plain sends. Mastermind Meg Remy’s first album for the vaunted 4AD label is bursting with vivid, cracked imagination and cool mastery of slippery pop allure.

Overall, it's Boards of Canada trying new things and experimenting outside of the box that they built for themselves; commendable and quite addictive.

Yesterday and Today, the sophomore effort from The Field (nee Axel Willner), can be easily understood as part of the tradition of moody follow-ups a la In Utero: a pairing of a signature sound with willful experimentalism.

Exploding Head is a solid album that spits in the face of any sophomore slump expectations.

This is a dynamic, densely-packaged slab of rock ’n’ roll, which not only stands alongside the titans of the genre, but gives Kylesa a name of their own.

On Punk Authority, Pete Swanson distills punk as a generic signifer and punk as an ideation even further.

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

On their latest effort, no track is longer than 5:45, and they kick the whole thing off with arena riffage and a song about bears.

Middle Cyclone still stands out as another strong entry from a woman who is more than proving her mettle as a revered indie veteran.

Its funereal funk can be hard to shake off; its catchiest hooks stain and discolor.

Grizzly Bear are an Animal Collective that decided to go more intelligible and accessible instead of running naked through the woods on five hits of sunshine acid while screaming in tongues.

Although the record is saved from complete disaster with its musical accompaniments... Elk-Lake Serenade is outrageously lonely and cumbersome.

It is the right kind of unsettling to get your feet and heart pounding with the full power of your soul in total awareness of the moment. Embrace the darkness and appreciate the light.

All told, Western Teleport is an absolute victory lap for the punchiest axis of his 2005 sound

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

Although it isn’t as full-fledged or layered as a full-length Aphex work, it’s full of minor miracles, advanced lessons in acid appreciation and stirring little lines of drum poetry.

Age of Transparency is heady and dizzying, even more unpleasant than Anxiety at times, but it’s keyed in to the zeitgeist in a way that feels genuine, constructive even.

As ever with free-improv records, the level of control is remarkable.

While Nothing Was The Same won’t do anything to win over Drake’s detractors, doing pretty much nothing new for the rapper except bringing in more drill-style hi-hats and scaling back the obsession with 808s.

Lambchop show glimmers of invention, and if these were pursued more and the quality control was stricter, one very good album could be the result. [combined review of both discs]

The elusive details in the songs here are what bring me back, haunted.

Get Color is exactly what a sophomore release should be: a deepening of and expansion upon the promise laid out by the band’s first record.

So come now fans of insidious and wily (yet cerebral) rock, Liars have delivered just what you need... even if you don't realize it yet.

There is just something so appealing about such guileless, honest music, music that sounds like it was easily made, and that makes it look so easy to do.

Despite having moments that tip it toward being his most “challenging” album lyrically (if being challenging has anything to do with being serious), This Old Dog might be his least interesting instrumentally and musically.

With Sarah Davachi’s baroque venture on Pale Bloom into the sensuous folds of light blooming into light, one can hear unfolding this always light and lightness.

The more populist material that makes up All the Way is stripped of any comfort such familiarity may provide by Galás’s jarring reinventions.

The Alternative To Love to be a quality rock album that covers several genres in influence and doesn't deserve to be punished for not being as good as its predecessor.

Fuck Death will blow your mind.

They’ve left the cutting edge musically, which can have valuable results, but here it feels ambivalent and a little tidy.

The Wild Hunt is a very good record, but it's not perfect. The album's second half, though unarguably beautiful, runs together like an extended 60s folk mix.

A collection of overzealous pop songs consisting largely of recycled ideas.

One can’t declare Autumn of the Seraphs, Pinback’s fourth full-length, any better than their first, second, or third album.

Not everything on Shape Shift With Me fits like “333,” which fits plenty, and hits hearts. Some of the hyper-syllabic loose-lyric delivery of “Norse Truth” drags baggy, some of the mixed political/personal imagery of “Suicide Bomber” bogs down what the song wants. Like want and love and bodies, songs won’t always feel good.

Sad music has never sounded so uplifting.

A painful disappointment.

If Melnyk’s technique hasn’t changed, he is breaking new conceptual ground.

Imagine my surprise to discover that Teflon Don is not only not atrocious, but it may also actually be one of the better rap albums of 2010.

The faithful will be rewarded with this immaculately recorded set of live versions, while the release could provide a solid introduction to those who've yet to discover the virtues of having heavy, emotional music that still manages to let you fill in the blanks.

It’s not so easily classifiable as “country,” but easily classifiable as really great pop music.

There is something martial, something insistent, to Compassion. True to his aims, Barnes has created something that denies passivity.

Dedicated isn’t a perfect album--it’s overlong and occasionally concedes too much to chart tastes to be interesting. But by the time Jepsen takes a bow following bonus track “Party For One,” you’re reminded once again of her generosity, of all the space she’s cleared for strength and weakness, for personal epiphanies and communal release.

Frustrated fanboy headscratching aside, the point is simple: All Day is a misstep of the worst kind, wherein Gillis' craft devolves from transformative to parasitic.

At 35 hefty minutes, Dedication is Zomby's most complete statement to date. But, much like the man, it offers a number of details in one hand while obscuring other crucial signs with the other.

An almost abstract series of daubs, here, there. Melodies submerged in machinery.

As a whole, Limbo, Panto’s uniqueness translates to something remarkably special and substantial rather than mere luster.

There are sounds, but are they melodies? Yes and no. We hear these sounds and get awed by how Lord Raja manages to suspend the belief that they, the sounds, are somehow working to form a whole. Snares and pads and synths. The same formula, a slightly different approach.