It’s safe to say that in the less than two years since her old band Vivian Girls announced their official breakup, Cassie Ramone has been busy. Christmas in Reno, her first (yes) Christmas album and second solo album overall, follows last year’s The Time Has Come and stylistically is quite similar.

Given how effortlessly Iñárritu was able to infuse the story of an over-the-hill actor staging a play with propulsive urgency and tension, it’s not a surprise that The Revenant is as gripping as film can get.

This overdue compilation collects obscurities from Cass McCombs’ unruly songbook. It’s a motley patchwork, but one that never fails to fascinate, with a tracklist that skips from White Light/White Heat-style rave-ups to Beatles-esque grandeur to modern protest music.

Gimme Fiction was a landmark album for Spoon, another big leap in the middle of a career that had already made two or three big ones. Coming three years after Kill the Moonlight, a collection of roughshod soul sounds, Fiction sounded slick and rich, laying down massive piano and bass grooves and riding them through to the three-minute sunset.

It’s a few years after Civil War, and eight people are trapped together in a one-room cabin when a snow storm prevents them from reaching their destination.

The instrumental duo returns from hiatus with a new LP of hard-driving prog and ‘80s horror/sci-fi score-inflected tracks; it’s their first of several written live in the studio, giving it an immediacy that their two preceding records lacked.

Def Leppard guitarist, Phil Collen, writes a weird autobiography.

Cartoonist Robert Triptow’s Class Photo is an inventive, humorous, and decidedly raunchy chronicle of the fabricated lives of five-dozen actual 1937 graduates of P.S. 49 in New York City. While in college, Triptow stumbled across a forgotten class photo.

Baroness’ first outing on their own Abraxan Hymns imprint finds them plumbing the depths of the well of harmonic Southern-tinged prog metal they first tapped to enormous success on 2009’s Blue, and yet further on the 2012 double albumYellow & Green.