All the tracks here (note that it would be crude to say they were indistinguishable from one another, but keeping your eyes on the tracklisting might be a good idea) sound like they could have been made with an arsenal of sequencers and rippling arpeggiators, but it’s all the sound of one man surfing the crests of a series of pulses.

The Flower and the Vessel is etymological in the magical realist sense. It traces language as a memory.

Fuck Buttons have created an aural ibuprofen, an auditory Novocaine.

While it’s certain that catastrophe is written all over Locrian’s high-concept Return to Annihilation, the experience is a step removed from the anxiety of early post-rock: here the listener trudges through the burnt-out husk of a world, its structures transfigured, estranged from their original forms.

Pillars of Ash is the body in transition, all crumble and ovation, an album that celebrates a human voice and exists in a world without it.

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.

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

Transforming such intensity into a product so bewitching is an incredible effort, and the resulting works leave very little doubt that Colonial Patterns is more than some admirable interpretation--it’s a ruthless conquest.

Very straightforward Interpol-lite.

This release feels freer, though--not easier, necessarily, but delivered with a clarity of purpose not quite as muddled, consumption-wise, by sheer weirdness as was their previous LP, Tears Of The Valedictorian, for instance.

Saturn Over Sunset is imperfect and timeless nonetheless.

Beautifully crafted, complex music which intrigues and begs for another listen.

I don’t think garage needs saving. Yet, when Ty Segall shares visions within the freaked-out space of garage, he cracks it open.

As with other Bats albums, Free All the Monsters' charming modesty is a hair's breadth away from monotonous.

The Further Adventures combines the absolute best aspects of well thought-out and researched studio work with the spontaneity and showmanship of live performance.

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

The borrowing of in-house trap elements is neither crass nor exploitative: it is rather a seeming extension of the communicative nature of patten’s project.

Psychic simply doesn’t leave a lasting memory when one considers the work as a whole.

This album is a nice collection of songs for our fans.

This is not the best or most refined Jesu album and for the casual listener perhaps not the best place to start. For the Jesu fans who have not been able to track the debut EP down, however, it is well worth a listen.

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.