Another quixotic, cerebral, and indispensable album from one of Canada’s great talents.

Houck’s talents are prevalent in everything he plays, and his enthusiasm for Willie’s material comes through with each passing listen.

At first listen, Tidings seemed more varied and adventurous than Steeple does. It had moments that hinted at pentatonic scales, exotic tastes of other worlds only compounded by the record's almost utter lack of focus.

With 16 thoroughly-developed tracks, clocking in at a little under an hour, Infiniheart is a tedious listen. Though its moments of faltering are few, it's a lot to digest.

Largely, Repave demonstrates that the collaboration between these Wisconsinites remains quite fruitful, yielding several songs that rival the finest moments in their respective catalogues.

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

Koushik effortlessly summons the hazy feel of running around stoned at noon on a summer day in hot pursuit of a grape soda or some other ridiculous craving to be satiated.

With Dynamite Steps, Dulli has delivered the fully-realized statement of self-mythology that his fans knew he was capable of, strutting his stuff like agéd legends who've long since been internalized, making it look easier than it should be.

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.

It’s for the Pabst crowd, not the trendy crowd concerned about looking the part. It’s this honesty that permeates everything Escovedo does.

For Herren devotees (a group in which I would place myself), this album will appear as a necessary, blissed-out, and relaxing installment in an ever-evolving musical saga. For others less familiar or only interested in the Prefuse aesthetic, La Llama may leave them feeling adrift.

Gonzalez' voice is beautiful, but it doesn't have the emphatic uniqueness to carry the album on its own, while the songwriting, though producing gems like the EBTG-esque, understated "Mind & Eyes" is just uneven enough to fade occasionally into the background.

Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks is a dense album that seems at its best when it sticks to Badalamenti’s template, filling up nostalgia for the show with acoustic intimacy and emotional affect.

A Moon Shaped Pool is a “grower,” because all music is a grower. Here, there is perhaps a wider opportunity for the music to grow due to there being an audible release of sign and substance as a ghostly after-image of the band’s event-based trauma.

In short, Lux is exactly what one might expect from Eno in ambient mode, here manifesting with a blip of chaos in an opaque sea, like a drop of ink muddling a solution of milk.

They know that a sound so anathema to many rock and soul fans as anti-human or soulless may have been created on machines, but it was the left-field creativity and forward-thinking imagination of a few of his city's citizens that helped to change the sound of popular music.

Ty Segall culls some some of his scene's most appealing aspects and affixes them to unusually-written, melodically appealing songs; in essence, he's an ideal ambassador for his Bay Area milieu.

What is perhaps this record's greatest strength: Baroness has crafted an epic collection of heavy music with two distinct spheres: the hard-hitting paranoia of Yellow, and the more organic, earthiness of Green.

Nothing is excitingly radical nor is anything unpolished or poorly composed.

The New Pornographers are straying away from the niche they’ve carved out for themselves, and they’re doing it with skill and calm. And perhaps that should be celebrated, because Challengers is everything this sort of smooth transition ought to be.

Moments of its 44 minutes are as hard to stomach as anything Xiu Xiu are ever likely to record.

The Men have simply absorbed another musical language and are trying to speak through it and the other languages they’ve spoken through on previous albums, trading Spacemen 3 or The Buzzcocks for Dusty Springfield (“Freaky”). Some don’t work (“Saw Her Face,” parts of “Half Angel Half Light”), some do really well (“The Brass,” “Electric”).

They may have traded in a certain sort of urgency and sprawl, but there's a certitude to the whole affair that makes the album go down easy.

8 Diagrams is a paradox of track selection and pacing.

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

They’ve become one of the most prolific staples of the American underground. And it’s there that Nude With Boots is a sound and welcome contribution.

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.

It contains extraordinary moments of dissonance, rhythms coalescing and congealing then melting away, quietly shimmering choral vocoders. It’s (even) less pop-influenced than earlier works of Dalt’s (Commotus, for example). In its latter half, it sometimes errs into a backgroundish quality, disappearing into its own subtlety