Trials and Errors could be looked at as vindication for Molina given his choice to move on from his Songs: Ohia days; but as an essential live album, [it] leaves much to be desired.

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.

Magnetite is not wholly arrhythmic, but its rhythms are sparse. They enter, and as soon as they develop to recognition (slow gong sounds, for instance, are common), Vainio destroys them with either unrecognizable noise or silence.

It’s a solid rock album whose dedication to artisanal noise in some ways negates its ancestry of majestic rock & roll that begs to be heard publicly.

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.

The album’s second half becomes noticeably more lo-fi as it draws to a close, with the band laying down instrumental nebulas into which Vile allows his voice to languidly recline. It’s a hazy ending to a bear of an album, but one that rewards those who stuck with it through the 80 or so minutes.

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.

For all its flaws, Old Ideas remains Cohen's strongest work for some time.

It's hard to see Medicine County winning her any new fans, but for existing ones it's a welcome release that shows her moving further into Americana (more in the old school sense, but, sure, in the No Depression sense, too.)

Glass Boys is the best album Fucked Up have released so far, by virtue of it being the “laziest” collection of their career.

While The Floodlight Collective offers a great set of songs, I’d still like to see Pundt deliver a more idiosyncratic album through which we can truly hear him expose himself.

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

If you like the Super Furry Animals you will definitely enjoy this album.

Ay Ay Ay does veer closely to the edge of overextending itself by its completion and, by result, making a strong case for listener fatigue--but who said dancing was easy?

Perhaps they still haven’t quite gotten there with La Di Da Di, but they’ve come somewhere close.

By any other band's standards, Winchester Cathedral would qualify as a strong to very strong effort. However, the feel of sameness prevents the record from surpassing the sum of its parts.

The reinventions that fare best are the ones that come from the minds and hands of producers who dare to alter the attitude of the original compositions.

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.

Transit Transit works like a best-of compilation, assembling the group's better efforts over the last six years while forgoing the mismatched feeling of such collections, a feat only a group as talented as Autolux could handle.

The Helio Sequence have finally produced not just a collection of songs, but an album.

Blackjazz is an undoubtedly bold statement from an incredibly gifted compositional genius. Munkebey has been working toward this album for a while, and it is a real achievement in synthesis of the band's overriding influences.

As a follow-up to the massive, hypnotizing Overseas, Sorcerer is a concise distillation of Tonstartssbandht’s refreshing vision, a crystal ball portraying their intimate friendship, their cosmic noodling echoing deep into the nethersphere.

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.

For a record preoccupied with usefulness, it’s unsurprising that that’s the case. There’s no room for artifice; he’s got to tell it like it is, because the telling is the moving, and the moving is the riding, and the riding is the living.

With a sotto voce that at times leans too hard on the adenoids, Will knows better than to preen his voice for Top 40 radio. His home is with the glitch crowd. But pop star or no, Wiesenfeld, as Baths, taps into those universal feelings that makes pop music so accessible and so, well, popular.

Next Thing moves.

Are The Roaring Night brings the Montreal group’s potential down to earth, expanding what were sweeping, almost classical compositions into gut-wrenching, prog-y panoramas. A lot of the same cerebral, chamber-music-meets-guitar-wash elements are still there; they’re just a bit beefier this time.

As far as collaborations go, Thao & Mirah does a good job of showcasing its contributors' strong points while still allowing them to mesh together as an organic unit.