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.