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

Sometimes it’s necessary to get away from all the noise and grit of the city and retreat into a paradise of soothing sonic waves.

Pennsylvania’s Pissed Jeans’ fourth album offers longtime listeners absolutely nothing new, and thank goodness for that!

It can drip with gentle piano when you expect sonic bombast, or meander into the liquid notes of the lovely instrumental “Encrypted Wilderness”.

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

This memorable cycle of songs will resonate with listeners long after the final note has faded away.

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

I’ve been eagerly dancing around this stunning li’l number from Cambridge’s Hands and Knees, enjoying it as heartily as I would a great huge fucking sandwich.

Though Dallas-based Air Review’s influences weigh heavy on the listener, there’s something enjoyable and special about this young band’s debut album.

A consistently heavy, surprising, challenging and pleasing release by a local legends of the underground that will hopefully widen their audience to a larger circle of aficionados of truly psychedelic rock music.

Deep Elm presents another amazing instrumental post-rock record, this time the Swedish-based Lights & Motion.

Jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington pays tribute to the 1962 LP Money Jungle, originally created by Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Max Roach.

Just because it initially sounds like noise, the latest record by experimentalist Dan Friel is an compellingly enjoyable experience.

The Dick Dale-on-bad coffee vibe still rumbles, but there’s a lot more going on than just angry takes on “Miserlou.”

The Italian/Spanish White Zoo Records continues its obsession with Killed By Death-style punk with this raging slab of darkness.

Originally released in 2011, Yearling, the third album from Portland’s Parson Red Heads, gets a new life after being lost in the shuffle of new releases the first time ‘round.

Straightforward, no-nonsense power pop.

Parquet Courts is the offspring of the Brooklyn-via-Denton duo Fergus & Geronimo; instead of that band’s often confounding weirdness and diversity, this is a satisfyingly straightforward rock effort.

British-based quintet The History of Apple Pie offer up sweet, potent shoegazer-style dream pop on their impressive debut.

Much-missed Washington State post-punk trio Unwound revisits its sprawling 2001 swan song Leaves Turn Inside You with 13 choice live recordings from the band’s final U.S. tour.

Pretty Old’s stripped-down post-emo is sentimental but concise, and sometimes even uplifting.

A potent blast of D.I.Y. pop from a dank Northwest basement.

British newcomers Our Lost Infantry’s debut album is a potent mix of powerful singing and heavy instrumentation, a winning combination.

Athens’s Tunabunny’s third album is a powerful blast of post-punk fury, and is the band’s strongest statement to date.

Co-ed Canucks mine post-hardcore song structures and math-rock time signatures, inverting a tired trend or two.

The second album of 2012 from busy Norwegian producer Lindstrom marks a return to his more club-friendly, groove-oriented sound.

Ambient composer Nicholas Szczepanik quietly released a 43 minute drone piece over the holidays, and it’s worth seeking out.

On Romantic Feelings’ self-titled debut, the Olympia, Washington trio’s contemplative indie pop scores high for musicianship and variety.

EP number two in Drivin’ N Cryin’s four-ep saga, and this one is another powerful bolt of hard rock, Southern boogie, and just plain’ ol’ good time music.

This is one of those rare moments when I kneel down and genuflect in humble admiration for a contemporary hero.

This college-aged New York foursome’s second LP finds guitarist Hunter Lombard’s thick, propulsive riffs and singer Sofie Kapur’s irresistible pipes continually soaring to stratospheric heights.

The long-lost masterpiece of pop singer Del Shannon sees the respectable reissue it has long deserved.

Though for rockers only, there’s a discernible sense of enjoyment and confidence to Police Teeth‘s 10 solid, unpretentious songs.

Former Dropsonic frontman Dan Dixon is taking his audience somewhere new with PLS PLS. He’s primed to pick up a different style of listener that favors genre-tweaking indie rock and tuneful experimentation over Dropsonic’s fearsome old-school rock chops.

Now firmly within the grasp of bandleader Josh Dobbs, The RunnAmuckS have produced their finest album to date, an epic reflection on aging, relationships and punk rock frustration that is as honest as it is succinct.

Tanzmusik is a reissue of Projekt mastermind Sam Rosenthal’s 1985 recordings, and is a fascinating portrait of an artist as a young man.

What truly makes Our House On The Hill a special album is its ever present and overwhelming sense of push and pull between two very different ideas.

Unsurprisingly, given the title image of a lonely soul contemplating life at 2:00 in the morning, the record revolves around ballads and low-volume tunes, all infused with warm soul.

The first question that comes to mind when listening to a new Neorev release is, “How in the hell does Michael Matteo keep getting better?”

Zoobombs have recorded and toured relentlessly since the early 90s making a special effort and taking great pains to make regular excursions over the Pacific to blow American and Canadian concert goers’ minds. This first time I experienced the rock n roll might of these guys was quite by accident, wandering into a long-closed venue on the Main where they were busily setting the stage on fire with completely in-the-red chops of garage rock madness.

Taken as an album, “Sparcity Blues” does not smack you about the face with immediate gratification, but instead invites the patient, the worthy and the intrepid among us into it’s heady, sensual and darkly shaded world of wonders.

While not really a black metal band per se, York, PA’s Night successfully conjure the dark atmospheric quality of the genre, creating post-rock atmospheric tracks that draw as much from Mogwai as they do from Burzum.

Drag City gives the world another lost gem of an album, this time a proto-New Age 1970s recording by a mysteriously anonymous force known only as Mad Music.

Reissue of jazz master Gil Evans’ tribute to Jimi Hendrix fulfills a collaboration that was meant to happen but never came to pass, due to Hendrix’s sudden death.

A new album (and band) that’s a marvel of pop hooks and acidic twinkle.

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

So what happens when you have a wife, a kid, a house in the suburbs, a steady job, you’re living the American dream, but still full of the angst that drew you to punk rock when you were young?

A work of singular beauty that triumphs in it’s ability to evoke deeply archetypal allegories out of relatively simple imagery and opening perception in it’s glyph-laden but still easily epistemological view of the “natural” world as it scrapes trippily across our human need for compartmentalization and supreme control.

With Fuck Faced Failures, leader Steve Davis delivers an album so quietly frightening that nightmares seem preferable.

Being an outsider in a Norman Rockell-esque town would certainly lead to psychosis, channeled here in musical form by three unbalanced individuals whose true calling was probably a circus sideshow.