YLT has always showed a great deal of variety, but they’ve outdone themselves on this album, which has so many styles that over its first half (the first nine of its twelve songs) it almost sounds like a multi-artist compilation. The first track, “Here to Fall,” makes it immediately clear that YLT refuses to be pigeonholed; they’ve never before sounded quite like this track’s Brit-poppish heavy electronic-plus-strings vibe. “If It’s True” opens like it’s about to burst into “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch” or “Soul Deep,” and soul sounds/references pop up elsewhere as well. Jangley dream-pop, snazzy ’70s pop, a darkly keyboard-heavy lullabye, pounding rock, a loungey groove, and an acoustic ditty that always seems on the verge of becoming “Sloop John B” make appearances. Then, for the three long concluding tracks that are roughly equal in their combined length to the nine preceding songs, we are in familiar territory: the long, guitar-oriented drones and whispered vocals that are practically a YLT trademark, closing with a raucous freakout. (Steve)

Fans of Hercules and Love Affair will find similar ingredients at work on the first track here, “The Fun Powder Plot”: Hayden Thorpe’s falsetto is as whoopingly high and wildly emotive as Antony’s (albeit with the occasional Morrissey inflection), and there’s a definite disco feel. That said, this British group’s skewed pop sensibility is more on the herky-jerky post-punk disco end of the spectrum rather than the smoothly pulsating Eurodisco of H&LA, with catchier songs and occasional jangling, soaring guitar lines reminiscent of early Echo & the Bunnymen. This will all come as a surprise to those few folks familiar with Wild Beasts’ first full-length, which was weirder and more scattered; the avant-cabaret feel is replaced by a more focused and accessible sound. (Steve)

It’s been a year since the Vivian Girls first crashed Brooklyn’s noise-pop party. They showed up slinging gritty guitars and basement reverb, packing such sneer and wink charisma into a 22-minute debut we couldn’t help but fall in love. Now they’re back in a slightly darker dress: Everything Goes Wrong (In the Red Records) sees the trio sticking close to what they know—filtering girl group ideas through a proto-punk prism—and adding a gloomy sheen for good measure (“Tension” plays like the moodiest brick in the Wall of Sound). Lo-fi backlash be damned, the Girls are still standing up to the hype. (Carly)

The greatest musicians are those that are not easily classified. As a solo artist, collaborator and producer, Jim O’Rourke has displayed an uncanny ability to create music that is at once familiar and exotic. On The Visitor, a nearly 40-minute instrumental composition, O’Rourke uses a variety of strings, woodwinds, percussion and some electric instruments to create a devastatingly melancholic atmosphere. Perhaps drawing from O’Rourke’s experience as an American living abroad, The Visitor invokes the spirit of total freedom familiar to anyone who has wandered from the front-porch into the great unknown of the outside world. As with much of his previous work, The Visitor contains elements of folk, pop, jazz and a slew of other musical styles boiled down to their bare essence and presented in O’Rourke’s singular musical voice. (Jeff)

Blog-rock of the most adorable stripe, this is full of highly anthemic songs by a trio of Brooklynites whose credits are revealing: Peter Silberman (vocals, guitar, accordion, harmonica, harp, keyboards), Darby Cicci (trumpet, bowed banjo), and Michael Lerner (drums, percussion). They are joined at times by Sharon Van Etten and bassist Justin Stivers. Obviously any band that has accordion, harmonica, and bowed banjo is not interested in operating by the standard formulas of indie rock, but they’ve got two of them down pat: quiet verse/loud chorus and epic crescendo. It’s lo-fi when they want fuzzy ambiguity but perfectly clear when they reach their climaxes, and always sweetly melodic. (Steve)

Kinda mathy, kinda noisy, kinda dancey, Health offers the best of several worlds — not by alternating these styles, but by combining them (though, yes, a few tracks are nothing but noise). And they aimed for maximum power and grit by recording direct to analog tape; you can practically hear the meters hitting the red (or you should: the band includes instructions that “this record should be played at a minimum of 90dB”). This is much more focused and structured than their earlier releases, and IMO much better. (Steve)

This legendary New Zealand band’s loud and abrasive days are mostly long behind them, at least in the studio (this is the Kilgour brothers’ first studio album in eight years), but there’s still a bit of the old spark on “Tensile.” Largely, however, this album is dominated by organ and gentle mid-tempo tunes that suggest warped sunshine pop or DIY low-tech psychedelia. This album is so unassuming that it might not make an impression right away, but repeated listening soon reveals its considerable charms. (Steve)

If anyone ever wondered what the Buzzcocks would sound like if they were Australian and played garage rock, the answer’s here. This quartet came together at a record pressing plant’s Christmas party, and sounds just as enamoured of old vinyl and just as celebratory as that might imply. Brendan Suppression sings like Pete Shelley, but the band plays with more abandon and edginess than the Buzzcocks have shown recently. This is their first album, a 2006 release finally getting U.S. distribution; its 11 songs were recorded in a mere four hours (aside from “the odd extra guitar and tambourine”). Thankfully, this has nothing of the current garage rock trend of being so lo-fi as to be nearly noise, but instread is clear and hard-hitting. While the lyrics are sometimes far from happy (“Having a Hard Time,” “Insufficient Funds”), the group’s energy makes for a joyous listen. (Steve)

These pioneers (some might say gods) of math rock returned to action after a ten-year layoff with a performance at the 2008 All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, and now with this spectacularly good studio album. The intervention of a dozen years since 1997’s Shapes, and having switched to their third drummer, left no noticeable difference in their sound, which pretty much picks up right where they left off. True, the first track sounds more like heavy metal than their past norm, but after that their familiar darkly chiming riffs take over and they are the complex, brooding powerhouse of old. There have been a lot of comebacks in recent years; few have been as artistically successful as this one. (Steve)

Taken by Trees is Victoria Bergsman, ex-singer of Swedish band the Concretes (though more famous, perhaps, for sharing vocal duties on Peter Bjorn & John’s “Young Folks”). TbT is a more low-key operation than the Concretes, but shes expanded its reach on this release by collaborating with Pakistani musicians, impelled by her love for singers Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Abida Parveen. That might imply an exotic sound, but it’s more of a light flavoring amid Bergsman’s cool atmospherics. And it’s balanced by her love of Animal Collective, expressed here through collaboration with Noah Lennox and a cover of AC’s “My Girls” (revamped as “My Boys”). (Wolverino)

Wind’s Poem, Phil Elverum’s latest outing under the Mount Eerie moniker, casts long, black metal shadows. Massive guitars strike hard and then burn; epic distortion brackets — and often overwhelms — Elverum’s searching vocal. The shifting soundscapes (now spare, now ragingly dense) and ruminating lyrics say that the artist’s heart is where it’s always been: pondering the forces of nature, the purpose of existence, and his own looming mortality. With all of the weight hes carrying, it’s lucky Elverum has a gift for balance — Wind’s Poem follows each of its most intense moments (“Wind’s Dark Poem”) with something approaching peace. (Carly)

This is the third release in Numero’s Wayfaring Strangers series of folk compilations, this one focusing on obscure ’70s male American singer-songwriters (though the release dates among the 17 compiled tracks range from 1970 all the way to 1984, only three are from the ’80s; there is one Brit for variety). Jack Hardy and Robb Kunkel are the best known — or, at least, the guys I’d heard of before — but as usual with Numero, there are many small gems to be found. And they really had to dig to find some of these on private pressings that practically ensured obscurity. The album title is not just a celebration of solo artists accompanying themselves on acoustic guitars, but also a theme of the collected songs: solitude, whether enriching (Jim Ransom’s “It’s So Profound”) or depressed (David Kauffman’s “Kiss Another Day Goodbye,” from an album titled Songs from Suicide Bridge), and any number of points in between those extremes. (Steve)