As Damaged Bug, John Dwyer exposes new horror, though perhaps that’s not quite it. Perhaps horror is hyperbolic. Perhaps as Damaged Bug, Dwyer exposes anxiety as ambience. Inescapable static.

Schoolboy Q is neither a great lyricist nor a technically dazzling rapper.... Happily then, the production on Oxymoron is uniformly solid.

The fact that it’s alienating, strange, impossible to get through and occasionally radically boring isn’t a slight, because that’s not the point. It’s too much and too real and too close and too far away.

So, largely unimaginative arrangements, flat delivery, a surfeit of vague ecological metaphors that wash like spray on the rocks (you can have that one for free, Mr. Hansen), and a lack of any sense of connection, of need, of reality.

Benji, Mark Kozelek’s sixth album as Sun Kil Moon, is as abrasive as Pharmakon, as hauntingly emotive as Dean Blunt, and as disorienting as Oneohtrix Point Never.

There will be about 20 songs, and there will be about 30 minutes’ worth of myriad emotions that you’ll have to re-spin back four times or more to hear all that was sung-and-said.

There isn’t a misstep to be found here. There are a couple moments that veer close to an overly-maudlin tone (namely when the piano shows up on the sixth and final tracks), but this tone is just part of the strange alchemy of traditional singer-songwriterisms and fumbling tremulousness that make these 45 minutes so curious.

It’s “Lost Boys and Girls Club,” “Cult of Love,” and “Trouble Is My Name” (“Trouble is my name/ Is it your name too?”), endless clichés in songwriting, narrative, subject, and sound.

Perhaps the most that can be said for Have Fun With God is that it is reverent of its exceptional source material.

The LP isn’t internally coherent, isn’t particularly successful on its own terms, which is probably more of a sin than any imputed association with this or that philosophy could ever be.

It ensnares the listening consciousness, simultaneously revealing the trap and pacifying the listener.

As each track unfurls, its glacial pace arrests the listener’s search for novelty, forcing attention to the profundities of the mix and the texture that the interlaced sounds create; and yet it also deepens the desire for what each step forward promises, the crisis that the procession patiently unveils.

As good as Hastings’ production is, however, it is Young Fathers’ vocals that make Dead great.

Its problems arise not out of any dearth of talent or skill, but out of its unfiltered sincerity and relentless positivity--qualities that are hardly problematic in themselves.

In the end, it’s the vague, shapeless, and undefined nature of the fancies her protagonists chase that partly undermines the album’s substance, since without any clear delimitation of their supposedly particular aspirations it’s a little hard to sympathize with her characters and see in them anything more than cowardly, flighty children who ought to grow up.

Despite the aforementioned darkwave influences, it’s not that his earworms get leechlike hooks into you--but that, while you’re caught listening and daydreaming, strands of ivy poke tentative tendrils into the eardrum, and deeper.

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

Wonderland isn’t a very good album, but it more than succeeds at being a mess. Is this meant to be a Marxist critique of capitalism, or is it a maximalist celebration of the same? I’d argue that it’s both, but much like Berglund, I have too strong a sense of the fact that I do not understand what it all means.

From All Purity at once epitomizes Indian’s sound and represents a leap forward into new levels of intensity.

Amidst the palpitated urgings of bass and the rapid skimmings of guitar, Fox’s drumkit emerges as the key figure here, the volatility of his technique underscoring the fact that, as soon as you efface the certainties and the contrived precision of the external world, the once incontrovertible dimensions of the self go with it.

Come To Life is a continuation of the captivating style he brought to the fore with Digital Lows; it’s motivational, sure, but it’s also thought-provoking and catchy as hell.

Unfortunately, the bright spots are weighed down by fodder that would fill the troughs of many, but coming from Cohen feel perfunctory at best.

Silver Mt. Zion (now a quintet) extract so much harried beauty and grace out of the world’s sorry predicament that it seems unbelievable that they wouldn’t be dispossessing themselves of something if all their/our problems were magically solved one day.

They are pros, the best at what they do, but this is running on empty.

The River & The Thread transcends its geographical markers. It is an open-hearted piece of Americana, filled with music that is literate, narrative, and just a little bit strange.

On Pangaea Ultima, that world isn’t one with which the audience is typically familiar, but Moore does a spectacular job of making us feel at home there.

The selections run the predictable gamut of great to interesting to wholly disposable, but the breadth of material here nonetheless reaffirms Springsteen’s talents as a songwriter and interpreter of others’ work.

Give The People What They Want is an especially bright new feather in the cap. It’s towering, tempestuous, addictive, and available in a beautiful shade of marbled blue. Maybe we don’t deserve it, but it’s here to own us just the same.