Atomos is, to my ears, a more uneven offering than the debut, lacking the gem-like balance of its predecessor. The upside is that Atomos is perhaps a more challenging listen, featuring a broader sonic palette that contains more distinct highs and lows, both of mood and of merit.

If Departing sounded as if absurdly-energetic drummer Paul Banwatt was holding back, then Mended With Gold corrects this modesty a bit.

Hold It In recalls the excellent Stag in its effortless eclecticism, and if there’s one criticism of the album, it’s that, even with its variety, its sounds and styles can’t help but echo its sibling from 1996 and also most of the other albums at the more diverse end of the Melvins spectrum.

It’s certainly a strange pairing at first glance, but it’s a testament to both Prudhomme’s versatility and Lopatin’s curation that Remembrance is a perfect fit for the typically hi-def, post-internet sounds of Software.

He’s been wood-shedding like a jazz player for years, riffing on ideas and loops and textures the way a pianist learns their scales, and he can now confidently test those skills out on just about any combination of sounds out there, if only to see what happens. In some ways, this succeeds, and in others, it fails entirely.

This dropped-ball feeling that NehruvianDOOM exudes derives from how it handles and telegraphs (or rather how it doesn’t handle how it telegraphs) its supposedly unifying theme.

If Plowing Into the Field of Love is meant to convey anything, it’s the otherworldly passion of a world without control and without truth.

Collaborations abound, and most of them work.

There isn’t a single moment on EWBAITE when I wasn’t second guessing my feelings, and that makes it interesting to me, if not necessarily as interesting as some of their other post-reunion records.

With Perfect Hair, Busdriver has once again crafted a fantastically immersive listening experience (arguably Busdriver’s finest work yet), only blunted by how profoundly it telegraphs its own ambitions and intentions, more than meeting my expectations as a piece of confrontational sound art, yet leaving its targeted structures a bit too comfortably in tact.

This is a good album, sure, but a better collection of songs.

The album is too overbearing to be much fun and too paint-by-the-numbers to feel dangerous.

From start to finish, it’s a solid bit of pop, one that clearly took a lot of hard work to make.

They are uniformly wise and lovely, and by turns elliptical, sad, even political, whatever.

Savage Imagination, the duo’s second full-length album, arrives little over a year after Toropical Circle and represents a remarkable upgrade to their shared sound, blasting their day-glo explorations through a mosaic approach to sound source layering and live multitasking

James is still at the reigns, and Syro is proof that he is still very much the king of his own tangled domain.

While the Actress tracks were, by most accounts, club tracks exposed to organic erosion and presented in sequence as an endurance test, KOCH is more bizarre and less aggressive.

Too Bright boasts harder-hitting lyrics, more sophisticated arrangements, and his best-fitting production yet. Its musical successes are obvious in their immediacy and variety.

The grand message that The Underachievers seek to spread musically can get a little boring, though, especially when they pretty much rap about it on every song.... AK and Issa Gold are getting better at rapping, and rapping together.

Dude Incredible is every bit as lean as its older siblings when it comes to reverb, overdubbings, FX, and samples.

Popular Problems, his 13th studio album, has everything of which a latter-day Cohen album is popularly known to be composed: the amelodic, magical croak of Cohen’s own finely aged voice; the hyper-melodic shine of his singers, who have become as integral to Cohen’s project as he himself; a loose, blurring approach to genre and tone.

Primitive and Deadly will take you to the highest heights of doom, high enough to see the end in its coming. It’s all over now, there’s no need to come down.

This lack of identity admittedly fuels the indecipherable, entrancing mystery of the album, yet unfortunately this strength also equates to the album’s primary weakness.

Sometimes Avi Buffalo’s entrance into the gauntlet of the undisguised voice leads to a pretty song or two, maybe a moment of blissful pop; but more often than not, the songs whimper without much intelligible emotion.

On City Wrecker, in the swirling synths and bottled righteousness, you can hear Krug stirring the embers.

Forgettable melodies and arrangements abound on the mid-tempo tracks that comprise the bulk of Moonshine.

Its energized cheeriness eventually proves itself at once disarming and salutary.

As welcome as this debut was at the time, and as arguably relevant as its topoi of absence and alienation are to us all, there’s something very disquieting about a band that, four albums later, is obstinately continuing to mine its somber wellsprings.