The Lacking Permanence

The female vocals have a child-like quality, and the bass-forward music hulks behind it, sometimes like a princess’ bodyguard, sometimes like a delicate clockwork contraption.

Rock and roll is absent from the charts, and you’d hardly know there is a serious revival going on, this slab of shimmering paisley from the Fogerty kids being a prime example. Get your riffs, hooks, choruses, and more right here.

It’s hard to pin down this Brooklyn trio, with their angular guitar dissonance and harmonies that range from drone to treacle. This live album showcases the band’s strange energy with a barrage of short songs and very little audience reaction.

This is a reissue of a 20-year-old album, yet the pan-global disco stew that comes from this band could live anywhere in their decades-long career continuum, past, present, or future. This is dance music for getting subtly amped up.

The Scientists have been conducting their Australian experiments in proto-punk for over four decades now, and it's surprising that they've yet to publish in a peer-reviewed journal.

Some bands are obscure, others are sporadic, but The Mabuses are downright enigmatic. Their music is hard to describe, and while the word "psychedelic" has become a commonplace and devalued label to put on something these days, in this case it would apply as a feeling of existing in a disjointed but entirely fascinating musical reality rather than a genre.

The cover album is trite and cliché by now, but when the kings of Los Angeles release a tribute to the music scene that made them who they are, it’s definitely worth a listen, as both a rock show and a history lesson on what made LA sound that way.

Out of many odd cover-filled releases bands have ejected over the last year-plus, this is one of the most disparate and interesting, partly from the selections and the interstitial music, but mostly because it’s not what you expect from black midi.

It is difficult to make lush pastoral pop like this without going completely overboard into schmalz territory, but this band manages quite well, carefully draping their orchestral tendencies over a solid base of interesting songs.

The reissue of the band’s 2014 cassette debut shows a clear trajectory for this garage-delic outfit that constantly wanders through the dirtiest of musical territories and comes out the other end looking perfectly disheveled.