As the release schedule winds down for the year -- gotta get everything in the stores in advance of Thanksgiving -- there's been a flurry of excellent new albums appearing. Here are a few highlights, unconstrained by genre or order.

Brock Van Wey: White Clouds Drift On and On (Echospace)
Brock Van Wey is better known (and more prolific) as a dub techno artist under his pseudonym, Bvdub. His first album under his real name is ambient of the most beautiful sort, awash in vast swells of synthesizer chords but with more than enough variety of texture to reward attentive listening, including some vocal samples that are distinctive (vaguely redolent at times of other cultures) yet still fully within the mood of the six tracks. Rhythms are slow but inexorably forward-moving, making the disc a sort of gentle plush juggernaut. On disc 2, Intrusion Interpretation, Stephen Hitchell AKA Intrusion (who happens to be the Echospace label’s head honcho) offers remixes of Van Wey’s material, adding dubby beats and ditching the vocals.

Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou: Echos Hypnotiques, Volume 2 (Analog Africa)
This is subtitled From the Vaults of Albarika Store 1969-1979, which provides a clue as to why this two-disc set sounds much better than the fine but motley volume 1: the material here was recorded for the Albarika Store label at EMI’s studio in Lagos, Nigeria. While this legendary Benin band had some Western influences, this is less derivative than a lot of the '70s stuff that’s been the target of compilers, more African thanks to the complex Vodoun polyrhythms that the band’s name boasts of. Funky highlights include "Malin Kpon O" and – oh heck, every darn track is a highlight, as this 14-song set was boiled down from 200 or so and represents the very best work of one of the greatest African bands of the '70s, and if you know anything about '70s African music you know that’s really saying something.

Fire in My Bones: Raw + Rare + Other-Worldly African-American Gospel [1944-2007] (Tompkins Square)
The only well-known artist on this three-CD set is Snooks Eaglin (who recasts “Down by the Riverside”); casual gospel or “roots” fans may also have heard of Precious Bryant, Abner Jay, Bishop Perry Tillis, and Isaiah Owens. So over the course of the 80 tracks heard on this revelatory set, you’ll be introduced to a ton of hard-rockin’ folks you’ve probably never heard of who will kick your sinner ass with gritty guitar and unrestrained singing. How unrestrained? If there were a showdown between Aretha Franklin and Lulu Collins, on the basis of the latter’s “Help Me” I’d expect her to wipe the floor with her more famous counterpart. The selections are resolutely lo-fi and anti-slick, no impediments to musical enjoyment.

Jimi Tenor/Tony Allen: Inspiration Information 4 (Strut)
Allen was Fela’s drummer, and certainly at times this CD is closer to the Afrobeat style of Fela than much of what Allen’s done in recent years (which I consider good news). But track to track, there are many other comparisons that come to mind, notably the Sun Ra Arkestra and Dorothy Ashby. Finnish techno-lounge star Jimi Tenor contributes much, from his versatile big band Kabu Kabu to a little vocalizing and some fine flute. Allonymous raps wittily on a few tracks, Daniel Givens adds some deejaying, and Strut’s Inspiration Information series of collaborations has another winner.

Espers: III (Drag City)
Trying to parse the differences between II and III is ultimately pointless. Oh, maybe the guitar is a tad more assertive this time out, but basically, these Anglophile Philadelphians achieved perfection last time out and have wisely chosen not to mess it up. The inevitable comparison is Pentangle, but I also hear a quieter, cello-infused version of early King Crimson’s electric/acoustic alternations, the pastoral contrasted with the modern and the dark chiaroscuro tension of balancing the two, beautiful yet disquieting.

Sufjan Stevens: The BQE (Asthmatic Kitty)
While there’s no such thing as a “typical” Sufjan Stevens album, this is unusually ambitious and eccentric even by his adventurous standards: a small-orchestra/rock band celebration, complete with dancing cheerleaders, of the highway we love to hate, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. (I wonder whether, when the Brooklyn Academy of Music commissioned Stevens to write a piece for the 25th anniversary of its Next Wave festival, this is what they expected.) The show is presented on an audio CD (or LP, your choice; the LP comes with a comic book!) and a video DVD that provides an inkling of what a multi-media spectacle the BAM presentation was.

Pylon: Chomp More (DFA)
In 2007, DFA made many best-reissue-of-the-year lists with its reissue of Pylon’s first album, Gyrate; now DFA follows up with Chomp, their equally great sophomore release from 1983. Pylon’s most famous song, “Crazy,” is here, along with plenty of other gloriously angular, yelping songs that defined Southern post-punk. There are four bonus tracks: "Crazy" 7", "Yo-Yo" alternate with Vanessa Briscoe’s vocals slowed down to man-pitch, previously unreleased alternate mix of "Gyrate," and non-LP single "Four Minutes," which is based on the instrumental track of “Beep” at half-speed.

Jay Farrar & Benjamin Gibbard: One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Music from Kerouac’s Big Sur (F-Stop/Atlantic)
Farrar (Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt) and Gibbard (Postal Service) were good choices to score a film about Beat icon Jack Kerouac’s retreat to a wilderness cabin in his flight from fame – there’s a lonesome quality in both their voices that reeks of isolation. Their music sounds closer to Son Volt than Postal Service, with pedal steel guitar prominent. There are lots of choices for buyers. CD, CD & DVD, 180-gram LP w/DVD, and the deluxe box with CD, DVD with additional footage, booklet, and the inspiration for it all, the complete Penguin paperback of Kerouac’s book Big Sur.

Efterklang & Danish National Chamber Orchestra: Performing Parades (Leaf)
The question of where to file Danish group Efterklang was already confusing enough – Post-Rock? Electronic? – but is even more muddled now that they’ve released an album that can easily stand among the more attractive Post-Classical albums of the decade. Perhaps a new category, Post-Everything, is in order. This is a magnificent transformation of the quintet’s 2007 sophomore album Parades. Performing it with orchestral textures and richness makes the stylistic ties to Minimalism – some of this could pass for Steve Reich – even more obvious, and makes the songs more sensually powerful (kudos to arranger Karsten Fundal; additional collaborators here include Peter Broderick and Our Broken Garden’s Anna Brønsted); having the vocals declaimed by a small chorus lends the music a ritualistic tone that heightens its intensity. Parades is a very fine album, but this concert performance is now my first listening choice for this material; this now seems like the way these songs were meant to be played. The post-rock/classical thing is almost becoming a trend, what with Sufjan Stevens’s The BQE, Rachel’s, Johann Johannson, Gabriel Prokofiev, etc., but this is the best so far. A bonus DVD includes the concert, behind-the-scenes documentary, and seven Efterklang song videos.

Ghana Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Ghanaian Blues 1968-81 (Soundway)
This two-CD set comes from the people who’ve previously compiled the Nigeria Special and Ghana Soundz series. This album is less psychedelic than the former and much closer to the first Nigeria Special set, the title and subtitle of which were identical with the obvious exception of the country. Pretty much anyone who enjoys Nigerian music will enjoy this too; they’re not the same, but they share the same virtues: the highlife tracks (the earlier material, mostly) infectiously joyous and rhythmically stimulating, the later stuff denser and grittier, like the most complex garage rock you’ve ever heard, and while that sounds like a contradiction, the groups here make it work. - Steve Holtje

Mr. Holtje is a Brooklyn-based poet and composer who splits his time between editing Culturecatch.com, working at the Williamsburg record store Sound Fix, and editing cognitive neuroscience books for Oxford University Press. No prizes for guessing which pays best.