There’s enough texture and variety to Drop to make it a consistently engaging listen, although on a song-by-song basis, it doesn’t quite stack up to the albums preceding it.

Amid the minor missteps and business-as-usual pleasantries, though, there is one winner of a track. Album opener “Wiggmann” finds Japanther supplementing their pop craftsmanship with an equal measure of ingenuity.

Fear of Men speak with clarity (for all their lo-fi charm) through the idiom of twee and jangle pop.

Their sound isn’t one that’s been carved out necessarily; it’s always been there since Exquisite Corpse, but only more recently has it been developed (perhaps because of the aid of top-name producers).

Food is another sad testament to how the squares have won and how we’re all likely to capitulate at one point or another to the dictates of the majority.

The finished product is brilliantly, beautifully schizophrenic.

By making concessions to clarity, Blank Realm have only amplified their inherent weirdness. As such, this thing is a fucking kick in the pants.

Despite its honed brunt and conceptual integrity, the album just doesn’t quite achieve enough to raise it above its similarly disaffected peers.

Each record is made for the true believers, but this new one should at least bring a few more into the fold.

As evidenced by their name, The Body is seeking something more basic, using techniques that link us on a primal level to that most universal of human certainties: death itself. Together, they give us both the forest and the harpies, the tortured and the torturer.

Many of the other songs on this album feel rather static and enclosed.

It’s a slicker, more professional, and more abstract matrix-y record that might put off any fans of the singer’s lo-fi confessional work.

The rich, roomy tonal fidelity on display is a big part of what makes Angel click.

The Drop Beneath takes their sound in a direction both more eclectic and more shoegazy than 2011’s excellent Correct Behavior, even occasionally straying into jangle-Cure territory.

Their meh generation, “shouting lager lager” take on four-on-the-floor energy is starting to wear a bit thin.

The songs here are each separate, lonely or transcendent, self-absorbed and distinct, without the background, café-soundtrack quality of so many modern jazz singers: fleeting, melancholy, and dangerous creatures from Borges’ imaginary bestiary.

Singles leaves the listener in much the same state as their other records: loving what exists, warts and all, yet still gazing expectantly toward what remains to be seen.

It’s a beautiful pop record, in its succinctness, its self-consciousness, and its sheer will to live.

Normally seen driving his hardware into the ground, here Ekoplekz is streamlining expanding.

Say Yes to Love is a potently wrought 22 minutes of febrile noise-punk that contains enough in the way of hook and subtle invention amidst its familiar battery to stand up on its own feet.

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.

It’s a record that vibes on mixture of psychedelic forgery and improvisational wholesomeness.

St. Vincent dances with themes (family, success and the absence thereof, the isolation of the digital) but only ever seems to fringe against them in a way that doesn’t let the record add up to more than the sum of its parts.

In the absence, though, of the gritty murk of TRST and the intimations of a world of malformed sonic objects outside the techno-primitive beat, there’s a quality of the streamlined on Joyland that calls out for irritation.

On Tomorrow’s Hits, we place our hands against the walls, we feel the familiar texture of recording studio foam, we lift ourselves up gently only to drop back down to the ground, actions of a bored child.

While it offers just enough in the way of individuality to stave off a disappearance within the impersonal grid of the received and the conventional, it still can’t quite fuse this into a coherent personality that transcends its inhibiting foundations.

All works of art, like all minds, have the potential to overcome mere sentiment. And that potential is glimpsed here in 10 restless hatchlings that make up Carla Bozulich’s new and perhaps most essential record.

Theirs is an 18-year experiment in empathy, in putting themselves in the place of Others, in trawling through the muck of human experience to find sparks of connection and compassion. English Oceans isn’t the Truckers’ best record, it’s their only record.