Coypu: Floating
Coypu, featuring experimental journeyman Ben Chasny, delivers a debut LP that sounds almost narcotic, surrounding you at every turn in its sweet, heady layers.
Matthew Fiander
Various Artists: Soul Sok Séga
This set shines like on Séga, the traditional music of the island of Mauritius, and leaves you feeling like you've got no choice but to dig in and learn more about this tradition.
African Head Charge: My Life in a Hole in the Ground / Environmental Studies / Drastic Season
Hearing African Head Charge's four LPs now they play like one long, unfolding record, a complex document meshing experiments with structure, old sounds with new, and weaving various traditions into one heady mix.
Guerilla Toss: Eraser Stargazer
Guerilla Toss finds a focus in the center of shuffling beats and synths and shouts. The album is uneven, but it can tightens up the band's freak outs in a more focused way than ever before.
Jennifer O’Connor: Surface Noise
Surface Noise has a new and fresh propulsion to it, but it's the way you'll sink down into the details of these songs that make them so rewarding.
Hop Along: Get Disowned
Get Disowned may share musical DNA with Painted Shut, but to see the former in the shadow of the latter is to miss an album with its own goals, personality, and raw-nerved epics.
Feels: Feels
Feels enters the crowded field of west-coast garage-rock bands and quickly claims its own dingy, fascinating corner.
Glenn Kotche and Sō Percussion: Drumkit Quartets
Drumkit Quartets is all about composing for percussion, but Kotche and Sō Percussion see this not as a constraint but as a place to begin far-flung experiments.
Lizzy Mercier Descloux: Mambo Nassau / Zulu Rock / One For the Soul / Suspense
These post-Press Color records from Descloux show her as a world traveler, recording each record in a different location and genre-hopping in her music at every turn.
Rangda: The Heretic’s Bargain
Rangda is still playing on its established order-chaos dichotomy. But it brings those seemingly distant poles closer together than they've ever been on this record.
The Donkeys: Midnight Palms
This mini-album sounds like a band taking stock, returning to their strengths, and pushing at some new angles.
TW Walsh: Fruitless Research
Walsh's new record is another impressive shift in his sound, and another great record to his name.