Editor Pick: Music

Kaki King, Wyldest, and Fenster were among the opening Monday night performers at SXSW Music Festival 2018 in Austin, Texas.

'Robots, Rockets & Rampage' is taut, powerful metal, full of tone of sepulchral gravity and superior harmonic concatenations. It exudes raw, palpable, prodigious energy and monumental rhythmic punch. War Gods of the Deep knows how to turn up the heat.

The release leaves listeners with a fondness for pleasing pastorals.

'High on Love (Cant’ Get Too)' is a buff and nastily tight song. The funky melody writhes with chill, fresh dynamics, as the rhythmic pulsations flex with muscularity. With this tune, Karen Atkins delivers music rife with enormous frisson.

Firmly established as a talent to be reckoned with, Viele won two New England Music Awards in 2016, for Album of the Year and Male Performer of the Year. 'Howl' called his shows 'transcendent,' with music that 'will rattle your bones and penetrate to the core.'

Crazy fun with a Texas drawl highlighted the second night of Little Big Town’s The Breakers Tour, on February 9, at Austin’s Irwin Center on the University of Texas campus.

In 'Pissing Stars,' Efrim Manuel Menuck creates a protest album that is as focused as it is obscured by his own compulsion for noise.

In a marketplace flooded with reissues that are little more than thin-sounding cash grabs, this remaster is absolutely essential.

There’s a tasty stylish energy to 'Fire & Brew,' a combination of modern production, mature esthetics and the residual dynamism of polished R&B. The melody is suavely charming and Kai Exos’ voice glows with silky sultry quixotic colors. 'Fire & Brew' definitely deserves your attention.

Hama Sankare's 'Ballebe: Calling All Africans' is a great example of Malian desert blues.