A late look at one of the year’s best albums. The internal momentum of Pollock’s discography, seemingly impervious to the passage of time and lack of immediate rewards, remains its most striking feature.

A great live band leaves its ancestors in the dust, then channels The Saints.

The Australian musician continues to step out from the shadow of The Go-Betweens on a new solo set, Songs to Play.

Arguably the most death anyone’s ever attempted in music.

Scott Lucas talks about the new Local H record, then plays a show at Minneapolis’ Triple Rock.

Two days, ten acts: thestand4rd, Lucius, Courtney Barnett, Conor Oberst, Belle & Sebastian, The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, JD McPherson, Seun Kuti & Egypt 80, Babes in Toyland, and Modest Mouse.

H is for Hundred Thousand Fireflies — Prolific writer sings his greatest song at last.

A fully arrived performer is greeted by smiling strangers, watched by a few less than billions of eyes.

Let’s count the ways Ben Gibbard is like Neil Tennant. His eternally boyish and sedate voice has logged enough years to be beyond the reach of detractors, at last.

If I’d designed the variables and controls myself, I couldn’t have come up with any better experiment to discover a general principle of aging among touring artists.

In which Segall christens the remodeled Turf’s most distinctive and enduring feature and re-inaugurates the club as vital.

“Music is just because you have to have it,” says the songwriter.

Has an artist ever played such a wide selection of her back catalog, containing so many words and lines of melody, on one tour?

Ecstatically opposed to a high concept approach, but with visual sense, and moments.

A night of planet engulfing reverb—the mortal bewilderment of Benji couldn’t be smothered with any less.

Midwestern rock duo makes music increasingly ravaged by winter, plays a show at the end of the worst one yet.

Two days, ten acts: Lizzo, Jeremy Messersmith, Best Coast, Matt and Kim, De La Soul, Valerie June, Kurt Vile and the Violators, Dessa, Guided by Voices, and Spoon.

An incomparable showman handles the violin with the light and playful manner his celebration rock requires.

Rhapsody for an overlooked composer.

On the Emblems anniversary tour, the band is determined to articulate every sound as powerfully as possible, as if the songs, ten years older but ten times more vivid, can be made new again.

Everything profound she follows with a laugh, sometimes in the middle of a song if she can break its spell.

Basically I’d rank the songs according to how much of the heavier guitar sound of Belong they jettison, not because I wanted that to happen, but because Berman seems to have needed it.

Annie Clark enacts a kind of science fiction story told in the relationship between herself and her guitar.

They squashed my ego, broke down all barriers of self-definition and aesthetics that one might use as quarantine, left me standing there stunned with only these words: What can I say, it’s a great band.

“Stand up, your father’s passing,” someone might have said.

The greatest garage rock band in the world, brought to you by the Reverend Little Richard Penniman.

In which Samson’s big pants emphasize and also encumber the parts of the body her dance pop compels to movement.

I suspect her band has tried the songs at every conceivable speed and then, finding the right one, often at the pace of deceptive leisure, they can finally play and let out their endless sigh.

The London-based songwriter talks about his excellent new album Abandoned Apartments, his recent movie work, and his L.A. past.

In his shifting pronouns, in person, I got the fullest sense of Oldham’s expansive affection.

Last Splash, recreated with astonishing opulence and precision for at least the first five songs, then with forgivably less precision after that.

Dim lights, a carefully prepared stage: Some part of the band’s magic comes from these kinds of monumental concessions to Hope Sandoval’s shyness.

A long-awaited situation.

Kelley Deal 6000 to Waxahatchee’s Breeders, but with a fairer chance of matching the popularity of the sister band.

Case & Co. play music with unpredictable energy, regardless the clarity of the vocal that guides it.

Their status as showmen quickly overrides any indifference to the substance of the show.

Mystery is a limitation in the Callahan universe, illumination a deeper quality, even when the answers it provides aren’t very straightforward.

One of the most straightforward sequels a great album ever had.

We’re excited to premiere Monogamy Party’s tough new album on Good To Die Records, in advance of its September 17 release date.

Hope for the return of the MGM musical, immediately dashed by her rarity.

In an inhospitable country, she’s scaled family life and music to a size that might allow them to endure.

Minutemen vs. Gaytheist: a contest centuries in the making!

If your world isn’t this band’s, then it can shut up for 20 minutes.

I’ll agree with the assessment of Nightingale Floors as a return to form, but not in any way that requires me to whitewash the excellence and weirdness of the band’s recent history.

No longer weary with youth, Marty Crandall and friends make a joyous rock ‘n’ roll record.

Impressions from inside the time cloud.

Certain victories aside, Grant remains a pretty uncertain guy, the type who just can’t stop being unfair to himself, comparing himself to movie stars, etc.

There’s a pretty consistent layer of analog filth, but the music as always comes across as immaculately clean, purified by art.

They spill blood on the land when the audience commands; our love survives because they’ve done their job well.

Oh no, I’ve said too much. I haven’t said enough.

An amazing half-hour of psychic creation.

Don’t be scared by the title: No previous knowledge required. I’ll be your test subject.

The perils and pleasures of an artist’s profound consistency.

Time’s running out for the world much faster than it is for Lisa Germano, faultless artist.

The inaccurate but hopefully useful narratives we construct when listening to albums.

A fair and intelligent appropriation of mainstream pop’s reliable gestures and phrases, by a man who has legitimate use for them.

That he performed his ode to cunnilingus while wearing a black cotton sack dress made it all the more a shining example of unselfconscious sexual expression.

Rather than recasting the whole project, it’s as if she decided the best way to complete the political record she first set out to make was to turn it as personal, intimate, apolitical as possible.

A hometown show that wasn’t really a hometown show.

Fanciful acoustic guitar passages, a wealth of sonic detail on songs that could have been rendered bare, the sense that we’ve caught the artist at a turning point, in his moment of greatest aloneness. Is this Rebo’s Workbook?

Kurt Feldman, possible genius, follows another clean line from inspiration to idea to implementation.

Dream-pop double header, a.k.a. Hurry Up, We’re Awaking

The style of her lyrics is the result of a practical consideration: Hyvönen’s train of thought is too highly associative to be forced into a rhyme scheme.

“God is in the art, that’s what I think. Until the money comes.”

A new kind of drug album, one lacking the euphoric highs of Screamadelica, the terrifying/hilarious visions of Locust Abortion Technician, or anything like an identifiable “experience.”

Holter’s ideas are primarily latent, embedded in the slipperiness of her language, discoverable only from the pleasure the listener finds in their execution.

A 33% reduction (in time, not quality) of Beach House’s enduring classic Teen Dream? Let’s look back and see.

Too often we get stuck talking about the same few bands, but the self-evident secret about The Stevens is that they’re as good as anyone.

The recollection she continues to whistle up is primarily of herself, which is not to call her selfish or uninspired, but to say that the voice remains, ageless and immune to authority.

Some of the sonic details the band so effectively rescued from their studio recordings are nameless, and some spring from the great register of fair use rock ‘n’ roll gestures.

On the title track, he avoids articulating the syllable-final r’s and leaves the ess a hissing pivot between e’s, so the word “hairdresser” ends up almost all vowel. Appropriately so: Despite the scratchy, hard stop rock ‘n’ roll world he inhabits, Hunx has always lived in his vowels.

Ambiguous words among artfully framed mountains: The art of interpreting cover art.

The latest (if not greatest) of the Portland Lauras to capture my attention with a type of folk music that offers Oregon as one of America’s last uncharted places.

Shouldn’t our survival instinct guard against music that weakens the body even as it strengthens the soul?

It’s the kind of album our species is programmed to make in abundance but that rarely ends up very good, as energetic and melodic, short yet transcendent in its repeatability as It’s A Shame About Ray … And it’s now being toured across America!

Hey, can you feel it, the way it sways you, the hum in your chest?

The most notable Le Bon in music since Simon. His last name was pure fashion; Cate might not consider herself The Good, but she certainly comes across as musically devout.

Thought experiment: What if Weekend was the first band you’d ever heard?

How can ghosts have gravitational pull?

Concealer is one of those exercises in minimalist aesthetics that betrays a deeper well of talent, an understanding of the process of subtraction and the importance of what’s left out.

Being mostly a comparison of the two versions of “Stephen.”

The In Heaven we have, not the one we dreamed, ends up more likely than Screamadelica to head for inner space, more eager to come down than to come together.

We always hope that a band will have the inherent gravity needed to overcome the fracturing of its individual parts, but not all bands are as committed as The Rosebuds.

“What’s more popular here these days, ice sculpture or butter sculpture?”

This collection of twelve songs, culled from a theatrical folk concert first staged in 2009, is all interiority and bed-ridden body-pondering, rarely suggesting a dramatic component and cohering beautifully without it.

Suddenly, it’s as if Bill Callahan belongs to us on some cosmic level.

His description of the genesis of Zen Arcade led to a sort of heartbreaking admission that the album means more to others than it does to him, that he had outgrown the feelings it documents by the time they’d been written down and recorded.

Confuse your contemporaries.

All art is abstract art. The Cars are fairly artful and surprisingly abstract.

Williams’ magnificent 2009 single “Sufferer” becomes Euphoria’s centerpiece, unchanged but even more potent amidst eleven more songs of the same shaky, yearning flush.

Jay is a strummer of great intensity, but I think it requires some extended attentive listening to hear the unaccountable heaviness of his playing, muted scratching between full blooms of pure, unchased electric guitar.

He emerged like a half-remembered American nightmare: striped tights over black Speedo, leather jacket, cap and bowtie, “Hunx” scrawled in pink lipstick across his chest, penciled-on mustache à la John Waters and pitch-black hair…

A perfectly balanced double bill, almost too much for the strongly beating heart.

Fun fact: Kim Deal mentioned she has a sister who lived in St. Paul for nine years, on Grand Avenue. Could she have meant equally rad sis Kelley?

A sound with no extra fat, and its embodiment in the frighteningly muscled arms of Robert Grey (formerly Gotobed), the Clint Eastwood of drummers.

Whoa.

Something transcendent was implied, I believe, in the night’s most interesting visual element, more transfixing even than all the bright lights: the slow soaking with sweat of Dan Whitford’s button-down shirt, turning dark outward from the armpits until no dry spot remained.

Five men, three acts, the cold north, and the Friendship Principle.

I suppose it was inevitable that I would someday soon witness the iPad keyboard app used live in concert, and now I have, the Trash Can Sinatras being the unlikely conjurers of the winds of change.

Gosh, he even took an early break, in lieu of a break before the encore, for his explicitly stated “need to pee,” and then came back to the stage and continued to play with a purity that had no memory of bodily functions.

In the realm of back-catalog-heavy concerts by veteran artists, this definitely fell under the category of “nostalgia trip,” but some unresolved questions linger.

Lonely Scientist arrives as silvery and hushed as its evocative cover art, peering through the windshield and wondering which came first, the big empty landscape or man’s bemused and lonely reaction to it via acoustic guitar.

Superchunk make music about the pleasures of hard work, and they wouldn’t have returned for any other reason.

Martin Devaney, The Mad Ripple, Sons of Gloria, Ryan Paul, glorious things of ragged rock ‘n’ roll beauty and the spirit of ’85.

She’ll take you there, and you’ll know what that means when she does.

Rock ‘n’ roll laid claim to the vertical, and allowed its audience to look heavenward.

A merely good album that still manages to put me in greater awe of its creators, as it makes more apparent than ever the slippery and mercurial nature of their writing and recording process.

Does Write About Love promise not just the status quo, does it slyly allude to a degree of revelation we’ve never seen in the work of Belle & Sebastian before?

A remarkable debut from a woman who is just beginning to discover how much she has to say.

He stopped frequently to smell his armpits and channel their rock ‘n’ roll energy, shouting “Fuck yeah!” before starting the next song.

More praiseful prose and phlattering photographs: the Teenage Fanclub lovefest continues.

She can really play it, she can really lay it down. Not a household name, but she’s been in your head all day. It would be so cool to be like Laura, Laura Veirs.

A ten-song album with five (mostly) unqualified successes, Hurley is, by this math, at least half fresh, maybe better.

A big, big rock ‘n’ roll show, just the right size in fact, not so big that the band’s personality diffuses in the arena air before it reaches the back row.

A second consideration of the Pavement reunion tour, but mostly an excuse for some excellent photos.

Mark Kozelek’s fourth album under the Sun Kil Moon moniker is by far the most sparsely arranged, but to call it simply a guitar-and-voice album is misleading, given the fullness of his singing and playing.

You can always expect a sing-along at a show by any musician who recorded a great song in the year 1984, but this one’s opening lines (“I was 21 years when I wrote this song / I’m 22 now but I won’t be for long”), and simple, permanent arrangement made it quite a bit more transcendent than the average.

Lou was Lou, Wye Oak killed, and Young Man are on their way.

This new noise pop duo may have been raised in a boarding school secretly operated by Slumberland Records, where the only classes are rudimentary music lessons and the only homework is the complete recordings of Black Tambourine.

I spent a somber week falling under this album’s melancholy spell, and then found reason to rejoice. Melody, human emotion, a finely wrought story: all is right with the world.

Deerhunter and their friend Panda Bear release lovely new singles in advance of forthcoming albums. They dub these “7-inches,” though both are available digitally.