Black Dice: Mr. Impossible [Ribbon Music]

Maybe Black Dice went soft. Sonically, Mr. Impossible is certainly the cleanest of all the band’s feature-length raunch-fests. But “The Jacker”-- which sees Eric Copeland repurposing a sample from the masterful Waco Taco Combo’s “Land of Foot”-- reminds us that Black Dice has always progressed via distillation. Bjorn Copeland may finally sound like a guitarist in a rock band, but he’s still playing over the lurching, disjointed beats that the Dice unveiled on Repo via Broken Ear Record. Songs like “Carnitas” may groove as smooth as velvet, but earlier burp samples were mucking up the vibes on “Spy Vs. Spy.” See, Black Dice is the band that brought moshes to a Chinese Buffet and a Bushwick Deli earlier this year. If you fear that Mr. Impossible is their dad rock album, just remember that this was the soundtrack to some kid getting decked and seeing a case of cold cuts as he went down. --Michael Sugarman

Blanche Blanche Blanche: Wink With Both Eyes [Night People]

Wink With Both Eyes is one of five albums that this Brattleboro, VT duo have released on four different labels in the first half of this year alone. What makes us really impressed by the team of keyboard player/singer Zach Phillips and guitarist/singer Sarah Smith, however, is less the sheer number of one-to-three-minute song-sketches they seem to have cooking than the number of ideas they manage to sneak inside each one. If prog rock was sort of a rock ‘n’ roll incarnation of the Mozart “too many notes” cliché, then Blanche Blanche Blanche shows us what prog might sound like if it aspired to a similarly herculean greatness using the kind of musical palette you can hustle up for a few bucks at a garage sale. Burpy synths, cheap recording equipment, call-and-response vocals, and an almost childlike lyrical candor add up to what is not only an endlessly vertiginous listen, but one that feels grounded in the very real scenario of two human beings struggling against the constraints of matter, space, and time to express themselves. --Emilie Friedlander

Blues Control: Valley Tangents [Drag City]

Since the dawn of the ‘70s, a musician’s decampment to the countryside has often resulted in the stripping back of excesses. When Blues Control landed in the Pennsylvania countryside as refugees from Brooklyn, partners in life and jams Russ Waterhouse and Lea Cho didn’t replace their electric guitars and keyboards with kazoos and banjos. But something did happen on the way to the farm. Valley Tangents, the duo’s fourth proper long-player and Drag City debut, floats among the little fluffy clouds that a move off the grid of cool can bring. The album finds Blues Control stretched out and relaxed, their seamless blend of new age atmospheres, prog-rock kinetics, and noise tinkering at its most enveloping. --Jeff Conklin

DIIV: Oshin [Captured Tracks]

If you're one of those dorks who insists on comparing DIIV to other indie rock bands with cooperative lead guitarists…there's the door. Living in Brooklyn, where these guys are from, I hear this kind of commentary all the time, and, apart from being a really tired know-it-all's attempt at being hip, it really just smacks of "my inner child is dead." Oshin may fool people with its accessibility, but Zachary Cole Smith and Andrew Bailey's twin guitar crooning, Devin Perez's melodically precise bass plucking, and Colby Hewitt's beautifully bastardized motorik form a subtly unique brew of indie rock's romantic golden age and psych rock's wandering spirituality. Anyone can sing along to it, but only the truly attuned can see colors from it. Oshin's one of the few records of the year that accurately captures that rapturous, painful, and ecstatic feeling of young love-- with any creature, or any idea-- in a way that's simple, sophisticated, and powerful for all ages. --Matt Sullivan

DJ Rashad: Teklife Vol. 1: Welcome to the Chi [Lit City Trax]

2012 has been a big year for juke; it seems like just about everyone is getting behind the genre. Actually, that's not true, not everyone, but like last year's minor explosion of Danish punk, Chicago's footwork scene is growing beyond its geographically defined coordinates thanks to the self-publishing phenomenon that is the Internet (<3!!). But the rise isn't just due to DJs springing for paid Soundcloud accounts so they can spread their ecstatic creations far and wide on the web.

There's a yearning for something raw, real, and untouched, and DJ Rashad has emerged as the breath of fresh air amidst a series of WTF events surrounding electronic music this year-- the eye-and-ear-raping dubstep cereal commercial, the New York Times-highlighted and offensively lucrative EDM festival circuit, Skrillex's three-Grammy sweep, and Pitchfork's provocative Best New Track write-up on Avicii by founder Ryan Schreiber, who had last picked up the pen two years beforehand to bestow Ariel Pink's "Round and Round" the same status.

And while Rashad doesn't have a single that matches the mass appeal of what these villainized producers make, there's tracks from Welcome To The Chi-- like the undeniably technical "Kush Ain't Loud", the soulful "Feelin", and the violently funny "Shoot Me"-- that make you just want to take off the gloves and go for the fucking jugular. --Ric Leichtung

Girlseeker: 1-800-Greed [Underwater Peoples, New Images, Big Love, Insula Music, Release The Bats, Denim Hologram, Silver Ghosts, KRAAK, Music City, and 4:2 : 2v2.]

Listening to 1-800-Greed, the debut full-length from Copenhagen mystery trio Girlseeker, feels kind of like sitting in a really glossy-looking mixology bar at 3 am, fighting the creeping realization that you’re being stared down by that dapper-looking figure in dark sunglasses at the other end of the room. The fact that you cannot see his eyes gives him a frightening power over the situation, as though his ability to see straight through you were somehow magnified by your inability to detect any emotion at all behind the mask. With its ominous, baritone vocals, endlessly ticking drum machines, schmaltzy piano chords, and screaming guitar solo caricatures, 1-800-Greed would seem to reduce the entirety of Western pop music to a tumbledown edifice of its own glamorous and theatrical surface details. There is a sort of giddy dementedness to Girlseeker’s melodic arrangements, and when you factor in the references to champagne and emotional dungeons, it’s as though the band were holding up a mirror to everything that we do not want to see about ourselves, and laughing all the way home from the strip joint. --Emilie Friedlander

Julia Holter: Ekstasis [RVNG Intl.]

Tragedy, the first full-length from pop experimentalist Julia Holter, was so full of ideas that it made us feel overwhelmingly small next to it. With Ekstasis, it would seem that 2012 is once again the year of Julia Holter. Lyrically and structurally, she builds on same intelligence of her debut, carefully assembling words of love over deep, picturesque atmospheres ("A fountain ices over / A story over"). But Holter's lulling vocals feel closer to us now as they pierce through the coils of traditional instrumentation and shady synths. The meaning behind the album's title-- to be or stand outside oneself-- feels particularly apt here, marking Ekstasis as her strongest work to date and one of one of the most inspiring records of the year thus far. --Tonje Thilesen

Keith Fullerton Whitman: Generators [Editions Mego]

The bearded American synth dynamo known as Keith Fullerton Whitman is having a banner year. It's difficult to single out one of his various 2012 releases, but Generators, two divergent live performances of the same composition, stands out for its cleanliness and consistency. KFW moves beyond simple noise mass with both "Generators," and as he builds up the modal heft by exploiting pitch difference through rhythm, there is a feeling of absolute purpose here. As much as the theoretical aspect of his work turns one on, it's also a deep listen--spiraling, bouncing, engaging. --Dale W. Eisinger

Laurel Halo: Quarantine [Hyperdub]

Have you ever sat down to compose a Tweet, or update a status, only to find that the urge to digitally share is not a road to others, but a pathway back to yourself? Laurel Halo's phenomenal Quarantine manages to capture the strange uneasiness of this experience. Much digital ink has been dedicated to technology and alienation, but Halo surpasses the clichés by giving us a deeply honest portrayal of the struggle between human beings and the often misguided undertakings of their digital doppelgangers. The sounds vary between tense, instrumental spaces and the humanist, octave-shifting wonder that is Laurel's voice. On "Tumor", arguably the record's bleakest moment, Halo deals with obsessive infatuation, describing the object of her obsession as her "target." On closer and lead single "Light + Space", she sings of the failures of language ("words are just words"), and an acceptance of the isolation she has spent the space of the album describing. It is a melancholy outpouring, but there is something hopeful and cathartic in its curiosity and vulnerability. As hard it is to visit the dark places that Halo is summoning us to, Quarantine is one of the truest, most soulful reflections of our times this writer has ever heard. --Samantha Cornwell

Pallbearer: Sorrow and Extinction [Profound Lore]

This Little Rock metal quartet surged out the flood gate with a sweeping Profound Lore debut. Pallbearer's mine for inspiration here happens to be a low point-- and a desolate one at that, considering singer Brett Campbell's arcane poetics. But rather then default to a black-white/bleak pallet, Sorrow and Extinction sounds as blue tonally as it does in mood. The album's five songs resolve at peaks that are built from the ground up, falling somewhere between Candlemass and Cave In. It's an inspirational record for Grand Canyon riff-riggers everywhere, as well as any depressive just trying to get over a hump. A massive, patient, and calming debut. --Dale W. Eisinger

Peaking Lights: Lucifer [Mexican Summer/Weird World]

Arriving on the heels of a slew of diverse and often completely unexpected mixtapes, Lucifer is not only a concentrated budding of what made last year’s 936 such an absorbing listen, but a personal testament to the benefits of an expanded perspective. That wasn’t a drug reference, but why fight it? This is extremely sober and deliberate drug music. Aaron and Indra's scaled-backed and pared-down interpretation of California psychedelia and Jamaican dub doesn't rely on an abundance of sounds or stacks of effects to create opportunities for deep listening; instead, they allow a few carefully tailored melodic elements and well-defined rhythms to do the heavy lifting/grooving. This clear-eyed and level-headed delivery lends itself to a dialog on parenthood that’s celebratory, not sentimental, and explorations of an atavistic cosmic spirituality that brings more substance than incense. --Luke Carrell

Traxman: The Mind of Da Traxman [Planet Mu]

Da Mind of Traxman is sure to go down as a historical record. Before it dropped, buzz had already been building around the burgeoning Chicago footwork scene for years, prompting, among other archival attempts, a mini-documentary from NPR and the quintessential Bangs & Works compilations from Planet Mu. But even though the style was fully formed and interest was fad-high, no one had stretched the sound outside of its dance battle roots quite like Cornelius Ferguson (aka Traxman) did this year. Just as people were getting comfortable with their understanding of footwork as a seemingly insular, futuristic dance movement, Ferguson challenged that entire image with a timeless, three-dimensional take on a scene he helped birth, tying disparate strands of acid bass, jazz fusion, Purple Rain, and so much more into his warm and worldy palette. Da Mind of Traxman is his most most expressive, soulful statement to date. --Matt Sullivan