Every time Mogwai release a new album, there is a line of thought that repeats itself among fans yearning for the band's past glories: "Hmm... another reliably average and/or boring Mogwai album... it's no Young Team." Well, I suggest we consider that streak broken—because, 15 years and seven studio albums into their career, Mogwai have recorded and released their very best work...

This limited run of rather expensive 7" singles by Steven Stapleton and Andrew Liles are a bit of a mixed bag. It is not Nurse With Wound’s finest hour but it will keep die-hard fans going until the guys get around to another full album. However, for the casual fan this is probably best avoided as the high price and variable quality of the music will most likely leave a sour taste in the mouth.

On their fourth full-length record, Arbouretum turn their churning rhythms and buzzing guitars inward to explore the uncanny spaces of the collective unconscious. Inspired in part by Carl Jung, Dave Heumann's lyrics are featured more prominently on The Gathering, which might explain why the band sounds looser and less aggressive this time around. The change accentuates Arbouretum's strengths and shows off Heumann's stupendous songwriting ability.

Late last year, Southern Lord released a collection of Earth's earliest recordings, several of which originally appeared on their first EP, 1991's Extra-Capsular Extraction. That may prove a red herring for those wanting the band to revisit its pioneering brand of drone-doom metal. Earth's latest magnum opus continues in the opposite direction, building on the gorgeous gothic Americana debuted on 2005's Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method. Fortunately, Earth have not only recorded a capable new album—they have made subtle stylistic adjustments that pay off handsomely.

The late Curro Fuentes was quite a fascinating guy.  The youngest brother of the Fuentes musical dynasty that dominated Colombian music for four decades, he stayed behind on the coast and started his own studio when Discos Fuentes relocated to the city of Medellin (he found highland food to be "insipid"anyway).  Combining some of Colombia's biggest jazzmen with the most exciting young musicians culled from Cartegena's many red-light district casinos, brothels, and strip clubs, he produced a slew of scorching, sexed-up big band records in the '60s.  Cartagena! assembles many of them, but the high level of quality here makes me think that the vault is far from empty.  I sincerely hope there will be a sequel.

Pairing one of Matthew Bower's newer projects with Jenks Miller’s minimalist metal band is a wise move for Turgid Animal, and this 10" delivers the expected amount of guitar-focused chaos from both artists.

With each project providing a side of the album (or half of a CD), the whole is a series of dark compositions that are as complex as they are intimidating. The best part, however, is how these nuanced pieces sound like no one else.

More than a decade into their career, the evolution of Natural Snow Buildings continues to surprise me: Waves of the Random Sea might be the most accessible album that Mehdi and Solange have released to date (in a good way, fortunately).  It might also be their masterpiece.  In any case, they've clearly made a lot of progress in broadening their palette of moods, as there is not much here that could be categorized as crushing, menacing, seething with dread, or oppressively sad.  Instead, this album occupies somewhat lighter, more spacious territory and is mostly filled with drone-tinged, temporally ambiguous acoustic folk instrumentals (albeit of the most lysergic and warped variety).  More importantly, it is absolutely amazing.  This is one of the most vibrant and multilayered albums that I have ever heard.

Since the Afghan Whigs called it quits a decade ago, frontman Greg Dulli has been quietly releasing a stream of solid, occasionally fantastic albums with his current band, the Twilight Singers. Dulli's latest release is his first with the Singers since recording the Gutter Twins' debut with former Screaming Trees vocalist and frequent collaborator Mark Lanegan.

Over the past few albums, Jean Hervé-Peron and Zappi Diermaier’s version of Faust have been getting more and more into the rock side of their krautrock. On this latest release, they have fully embraced rock and roll to the point where rock has become pulverised and the roll is in free-fall. Hints of classic rock (as in 1950s rock, not ‘70s dad rock) are smashed into atoms and reconstituted as something new, something loud and Something Dirty.

Ghostly International presents SMM: Context as a vaguely philosophical release centered around the qualities that film soundtracks, classical music, and ambient music share, but I think its lack of pretense is part of what makes it great. On one level, SMM: Context is just a collection of eleven songs from eleven electronic artists, including Leyland James Kirby, Jacaszek, Aidan Baker, and Kyle Bobby Dunn. On another level, it's a very coherent and fluid record filled with beautiful songs and sustained by a shared vision.

For their third LP for Sublime Frequencies, the group has put together a stunning collection of trance-inducing works. Yet, there are two things that set Beatte Harab apart from Group Doueh’s previous albums. The recording quality is a step above the others: granted the overall quality is not high fidelity but gone is the murk so all the instruments and singers can be heard distinctly. Secondly, Doueh himself has moved more into the background. His deft touch of the fretboard is undiminished but he confines himself to the back of the mix, his playing developing the overall shape of the music without dominating the other performers.

The latest opus from these prolific and chameleonic Swedes finds them in full-on primal rock mode, unearthing another batch of jagged, bludgeoning, and repetition-obsessed songs and reminding me that rock music can still be a bit dangerous and scary. There's a big twist this time around, however, as the Defekts have added a very noteworthy fifth member: the rather singular Daniel Higgs, formerly of Dischord art-punk stalwarts Lungfish. The addition proves to be an inspired move, as Higgs' intense, somewhat unsettling persona serves to highlight the darker, weirder side of the band.

A sensitive and spacious work, To R.S. utilizes a variety of traditional instruments (guitars, pianos, natural sounds, etc) in a completely different context, dissolving the known sounds into sparse, pure tones and subtle variations. As a work dedicated to composer Robert Schumann, it’s quite an accomplished slice of minimalism in its own right.

When I reviewed Bionulor’s debut release a bit less than two years ago, I complimented his conceptual use of "sound recycling," but felt the compositions lacked focus and structure. On this sophomore release, Sebastian Banaszczyk has definitely stepped up his game, and the results are quite satisfying

A limited cassette release of an even more limited CD-R, Chicago's Sun Splitter, in the span of around 30 minutes, condense all of what I consider to be the best moments of the past 40 years of metal. With elements of drone, doom, industrial, and even classic rock, it all comes together as a perfectly conceived release.

In the duo 39 Clocks, Juergen Gleue upset everyone from beer-loving Bavarians to Joseph Beuys. Apparently, shitting on organs, playing vacuum cleaners, mocking the art world and using a drum machine saw them regularly abused and hurled from a variety of scenes. Phantom Payn Daze is the sound of Gleue recorded solo in the 1990s after a period over-immersed in drink and drugs. It adheres to the Clocks' version of beauty: as simple as rural blues and raw as early psych-pop, with a beguiling twang and metronomic propulsion looking ahead to Tarwater and back to The Velvet Underground.

Tim Hecker has made a career out of releasing reliably excellent albums, but aside from rare departures like 2002's Van Halen-inspired My Love is Rotten to the Core, he has always stuck very closely to the hissing, crackling melancholy that he is known for. Ravedeath, 1972 certainly contains more of that (which I am perfectly happy with), but finds Hecker edging out of his comfort zone a little more than I would expect.  The raw material for this album originates from "live" recordings made with a pipe organ at a Reykjavik church, and that organ often emerges from Hecker's digital fog in surprisingly pure form.