The revamping of style and substance on Yours Conditionally is also something special, helping it to become the best record they've made so far.

Each of the performances allows the singer's personality to shine through without obscuring Russell's inherent oddball nature.

She uses these songs as a statement of intent, pushing beyond the limitations of the interchangeable rap star persona to show her creative depth, and constructing an album environment where she's able to seamlessly transition between dominating the party and opening up about vulnerabilities.

Missteps prevent Voyage from being a triumph yet they are true to the rest of ABBA's catalog so, in a sense, they're welcome. If ABBA didn't have cheeseball moments, they wouldn't be ABBA, so it's reassuring that the group brings the lows along with the highs on this unexpected and delightful album.

The First Lady is terrifically balanced in its distribution of club tracks, midtempo grooves, and slow jams.

Goodbye to Language is a powerful, intoxicating album and one of Lanois' best works in at least a decade.

Woman + Country is somewhat of a grower--it's so purposefully hazy it seems to pleasingly fade into the slipstream upon the first play, but those repeated spins reveal the deep craft at the heart of Woman + Country, deep craft from both the songwriter, his producer, and musicians.

This feels modern but in a distinctly '90s fashion: the melds and mashups of club music and psychedelia forecast a future straight out of 1996.

The writing is nothing earth-shattering; in fact, it's rudimentary and formulaic almost without exception, although they still come up with a couple of winners ("I'm Coming Home"), and lots of tunes that would easily pass for understandably forgotten oldies.

Irreal's minimalism is an uncompromising and often riveting testament to Disappears' integrity, which seems to be the only constant in their music.

The Third Chimpanzee unmistakably feels like a side project. It's intriguing to hear what sounds and moods he can create outside of the context of his band, but even compared to the more fully realized MG, the EP merely sounds tentative. However, it's worth noting that the striking cover art was painted by Pockets Warhol, a capuchin monkey, which is fascinating.

Jacksonville City Nights still ranks as one of Adams' stronger albums, not just because he's returning to his rootsy roots -- after all, this isn't alt-country, this is pure country -- but because it maintains a consistent mood, is tightly edited and well sequenced, and thanks to the Cardinals, has the easy assurance of Cold Roses

Voice of Ages is a good Chieftains recording; its solid performances easily outweigh its duds, but it feels like something less than a 50th anniversary celebration.

Cronin could have just kept cranking out the same album over and over; that he chose to take a risk and go big showed some real guts. That he was able to make it work as well as he did shows some real skill and should make anyone who liked the first two albums really happy.

Great Vengeance and Furious Fire is too uneven to be great, but its handful of fantastic singles makes for an extremely promising debut.

This isn't Local H's best album, but it's certainly their most daring and emotionally naked, and the results are truly impressive.

Stars and Satellites manages to find that elusive balance between workmanlike precision and 3:00 a.m. vulnerability.

The rapper is an excellent tour guide through this warped landscape of thrills and chills, and even if Rocky remains the A$AP Mob's most obvious and outgoing choice, there's an argument to be made that the more interesting one is Ferg, a Trap Lord if there ever was one.

Throughout Perfect Abandon's nine vocal songs, Brosseau's unhurried delivery transports the listener from her own world into his seamlessly.

While not his most consistent crop of songs, light brushes with Steely Dan-like jazz-rock and bolder synths add flavor to a still distinctive sound that's likely to be welcomed by fans.

One might reasonably expect that a more mature edition of Belly would seem less fiery than what they delivered back in the day, and the craft of this album is all one could hope for, but there's a bit too much drift and not enough clear focus for Dove to qualify as a true return to form.

The charm of Danse Macabre lies in how Duran Duran seem unencumbered by expectations: they're lying back and having a good time, resulting in a record that captures their silly and serious sides in equal measure.

The beats are excellent as well, loping and stuttering and falling over each other in Madlib's best Drunken Master style. Although there are plenty of instrumentals, at least three-quarters of WLIB AM: King of the Wigflip is given over to vocal features.

The album sounds huge and intimate at the same time.

The fifth album doesn't deviate far from the band's tried and true sound, but it's solid nonetheless.

Sleepwalk an essential body of work for those who enjoy their electronic music with a little human interference.

This is international music, not intended merely for Kinky's native Mexico. Actually, it's more intended for trendy music cultures such as those of Europe and the U.S. -- a sort of Spanish update for the early 2000s of the late-'90s electronica/rock sound associated with groups like Prodigy and Primal Scream.

Even if it seems unassuming and underwhelming upon its first listen, Baby I'm Bored with each spin reveals the uniform strength of the songs and the sweet, understated charms of Dando as a performer.

Not bad for a placeholder EP.

The songs here often found their way into the group's tours for Blackberry Belle; this probably accounts for how much they resemble Twilight material, even as the original shape is maintained.

Unlike the Streets, Lafata spits everything with a straight face, making his slow-mo Baroque on "Break Or Be Broken" and hardcore pop finale "Let's Get It On" (which features a Peaches-like guest appearance by Sue Cie) into a kitschy farce worthy of his vanguard reputation.

Even though Wet from Birth occasionally gets tripped up on its own ambitions, it still has its share of enjoyable tracks.

It's a bracing and welcome return to form for an important artist.

While Koster's childlike enthusiasm, meandering, impressionistic lyrics, and Anglophile steampunk posturing may be the very definition of twee (or tweed, in this sense), like Willy Wonka, it's hard not to admire his Luddite tenacity, especially in an age that prefers instant gratification to pure imagination.

The lyrics to the more energetic tracks are no less dire, but as the album speeds by at just over half an hour, the impressions made by the slowest songs become the strongest, without melodic hooks or youthful release to hide their hopeless sentiments behind.

This debut album is pretty good, and this band shows a lot of heart.

At this stage, Body Count haven't changed much, and really aren't likely to, which means that if you were on board with their earlier work, then Manslaughter has even more rap-influenced metal to fuel your rage. However, if you weren't sold on these guys in the first place, this album isn't likely to change your mind.

It's not a vibe record so much as it's an album about the interplay of old pros who still get a kick playing those same old changes years after they've become second nature.

Appointed with lush strings, horns, and a host of backup singers, the songs are well-arranged and impeccably sung, but it's hard not to want Jury to expand his range somewhat.

Anything But Words is a stellar and truly collaborative endeavor between two creative energies, the result of an organic songwriting process that is anything but thrown together.

Cosmetic is a strong step forward for Nots that builds on their strengths and gives their weirdness some new and interesting places to go.

With the exception of the seriously catchy "Get Your Way," the rest of this set is dominated by the group's rock moves, but at the same time, Polizze writes actual songs, not just frameworks for his guitar work, and it's the melodic strength of High Bias that makes it so powerful.

The soft focus of Under the Pepper Tree is alluring, even soothing -- a record that could calm the nerves of frazzled parents as they put their child to sleep at the end of a long day.

A Brief History of Love is a strong, sometimes really, really good debut, and a nice addition to the shoegaze canon.

By sacrificing grit, some of the charm that made the debut a success is lost along the way, but the sleeker production is only a minor setback and some of the songs onboard are Deer Tick's best thus far.

Law of Large Numbers won’t sneak up and hit you over the head, but it will sneak up on you.

While there's a mercurial effect to Until the Tide Creeps In at least partly due to its songwriters writing separately, common tendencies, artful execution, and a melancholy dreaminess tie it all together, like a novel that's consistently compelling as it moves through multiple perspectives.

There's no lack of artists making similar sounding music--MGMT, Pop Levi, White Williams, and even Animal Collective come to mind--but Miike Snow is ambitious and fun enough that they're worth checking out.

Coomes knows he's not for everyone, and that lack of self-consciousness is one of the album's biggest strengths, but listeners with short attention spans and a low tolerance for eccentricity might want to stick with a more commercial brand of sonic weirdness.

It should come as no surprise that the second half suffers for its subdued pace; after all, Slaves are fashioned around the idea of being abrasive, not insightful.

A few songs sound nothing like Crocodiles, like the rollicking Latin-inspired ballad "Alita" and the cheerful '60s pop/rocker "Not Even in Your Dreams," but it still works thanks to the focused songwriting and the care they put into the sound. That at least half the songs are among their most powerful and poppiest to date ("Telepathic Lover" chief among them) doesn't hurt, either.

Overall, this is a strong debut with heart, style, and some nice hooks.

Unmistakably influenced by the late SOPHIE, who appeared on Hi This Is Flume, the production has a stretched-out, rubbery-yet-metallic quality, and the songs balance sugary vocal hooks with truly intense beat formations.

While it doesn’t really come close to capturing the lightning-in-a-bottle power of Doggystyle, there’s enough of that original spirit mixed with a modernized production sound to make Missionary one of Snoop’s more enjoyable full album listening experiences in several years.

It may not have the sugar rush immediacy of the Strokes, and at times it's downright indulgent, but Phrazes for the Young shows that Casablancas has more than enough ideas for several albums on his own and with his band--and perhaps most importantly, he sounds more enthused about making music on it than he has since "Is This It."

Jim is most reminiscent of the Southern deep soul of the late '60s, although recorded so well (and so dry) that it betrays its lineage. Add to that an assortment of unobtrusive guests (including Nikka Costa, Gonzales, Peaches, and Alex Acuña) and the result is a record that reveals soul and sincerity.

After spending a little bit more time swaggering than wooing, he's back to crooning and it's amiable and appealing, if not overwhelming.

At their best, they entrance to such an extent, like watching a slalom skier at half-speed, that the plainly worded sex talk is as inconsequential as any random boast about wealth. Toliver sounds anesthetized more often here.

September Girls sound like a copy of a copy of a copy, not quite reaching the heights of their immediate predecessors, let alone the classic bands they're all aiming for.

Its casualness sometimes surfaces in its tossed-off jokes or sing-song melodies, but that only underscores that Jenny & Johnny are having a good time -- and it's a good time that's easy to share even if one of the hosts doesn't quite hold up his own end of the bargain.

Eric Clapton has never sounded so relaxed on record, either as a singer - he is supple and casually authoritative, a far cry from the tentative lead vocalist of his earliest solo records - or a band leader, sounding at peace with his past yet harboring no desire to recycle it, even if he's reaching back far beyond the blues that initially sparked his interest in music.

Bracken makes thoughtful, reflective music, like Brian Eno, or even fellow anticon labelmates Alias or cLOUDDEAD.

Overstuffed remix collections like this are hit and miss by nature, but Bigger. Messier. acknowledges this with its very title, and its impressive cast takes the original songs in some fascinating directions, making the whole thing worthwhile for fans of any of the artists involved.

Horace Andy and Hope Sandoval front some impressive productions, and Damon Albarn's "Saturday Come Slow" is one of his best post-Blur features (including Gorillaz), but overall Heligoland lacks the majesty and might of classic Massive Attack.

The Avett Brothers aren't rewriting the book, they're just translating it for a new generation.

The 13-track set adds some relatively subtle flourishes of electronics to the mix while dialing back a little on Sean Mackin's signature violin playing, but fans looking to conjure up some nostalgia for the band's Ocean Avenue heyday will find what they're looking for.

Half the fun of the album is listening to the oddball ways he twists words and sounds into his own slack language. The other half is taking up oddly cozy residence in BRONCHO's unique world of underwater doo wop, naptime pop, and energetic inertia.

Its sturdy set should also prove a worthwhile find for those interested in offshoots of math rock, or a kind of controlled virtuosity suited for rainy-day instrument workouts.

Mid-album "Silence," a Homeric ballad in which Smith soars through the cosmos on a delicate rainbow of synth and chimes before crashing to the earth in a meteor shower of over-driven electric guitar squelch and digital distortion. It's a bold, deeply emotive moment, evoking the heartfelt style of Peter Gabriel. That these tracks, as with all of EBM, feel both familiar and unexpectedly fresh speaks to the alchemical spark between Editors and Power.

Stories Don't End barely registers upon the first spin (it's easy pop for the millennial generation), but if given the time to percolate, it produces a damn fine cup of coffee.

It's almost impossible to dislike Swimming's pastel beauty, but it's nearly as difficult to work up much enthusiasm about it.

A confounding, often thrilling album of pieced-together samples and shorted-out electronics that nevertheless has a primitive groove coursing through its veins.

While the Libertines still haven't fully seized the opportunity to define what they could be as veterans instead of upstarts, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade still sounds more like the product of a working band than Anthems for Doomed Youth did, and offers enough good and great moments to keep fans believing.

Burn the Maps is an elemental journey that tugs at the heart and sticks around in the mind.

Fans who have been following Black Joe Lewis' career since his 2007 debut album will find a lot of what they like on Backlash. But there's also enough that's fresh, tough, and challenging to remind listeners that Lewis is still moving forward, putting a modern-day perspective on the tropes of classic soul and R&B.

I'm Only Dreaming's brightest highlight is "A Song for the Birds," a bright guitar pop song featuring DuPree-Bemis' husband, Say Anything's Max Bemis, that feels like a sequel to their previous collaboration, Perma. Moments like this suggest that this incarnation of Eisley sound best when they're creating new traditions instead of holding onto old ones too tightly.

Normal Happiness is more in the tradition of his best work with GBV -- sixteen short songs (only one over three minutes, seven under two), with plenty of hooks, lots of guitar and no more fuss than necessary.

Release Me wipes away any memories of the band's previous work as well as any boring talk of their famous fathers, and re-introduces the band as first-rate purveyors of thrillingly fun rockin' retro pop.

While the downtrodden Fading Love was a noteworthy debut full-length from an artist who had built up a solid discography of club singles, FitzGerald seems re-energized this time around, and the excellent All That Must Be is a clear improvement over his previous release.

Uneven as it may be, Jukebox is still a worthwhile portrait of Chan Marshall's artistry.

Though it may not be flawless, it's pretty satisfying nonetheless.

It may take a few listens before the record reveals itself as a relative cauldron of restrained emotion, but it's worth the effort.

Hopeless Romantic has an appealingly cool veneer in addition to a sturdy structure of songs. It comes on so smoothly, it's easy to overlook how the songs quickly sink into the subconscious.

Weird as it is, this is his most exciting work yet.

While the pedigree of this project is certainly strong, Inventions stands strong on its own, so although fans of Eluvium and Explosions in the Sky won't have any trouble digging into the album, being a fan of the duo's previous work isn't a part of the price of admission.

While that might mean Colors doesn't offer the depth and intrigue of most Beck albums, it does mean it's a fun confection. It's a record that's designed to be nothing but a good time, and that indeed is all that it is.

To a large extent, the music on Shine a Light confirms this to be true, proving that the band retains a remarkable alchemy that has deepened over the years.

For all their various impulses, it's clear on Valley Tangents that they do have a certain general approach to explore, just one that doesn't welcome immediate simplification.

In general, the album focuses more on texture and fluidity than memorable tunes, so listeners aren't likely to find an earworm here, but they may find themselves humming along just the same.

The album is one full of highlights, with a sad beauty surrounding it that makes these songs immediately deeper, more connective, and more exciting than anything Death Vessel has brought us before.

Fans of the first album may be disappointed by the changes, especially since the band takes most of the psych out of its pop. Those who stick around will find that Volcano is a pretty good modern pop record.

This self-produced major-label debut boldly plunders a reverb-and-white noise course previously trampled underfoot by long-gone British bands of the late '80s and early '90s (the Jesus & Mary Chain, the Verve, Ride, the Stone Roses, etc.).

A stunning comeback that will alternately horrify, thrill, and satisfy fans of Television Personalities, as well as fans of honest, real, and truly independent indie rock.

Throughout all this--both the old ways and new directions--the ever-present weak link would have to be Cronise's emotionally deadpan vocals, but, as was the case with earlier Sword albums, they ultimately don't matter as much as the group's pulverizing twin guitar attack.

What makes it great is excellent producer and guest rapper choices, a tight track list with nearly perfect flow, and the fresh G-Unit meets crunk and Lil Jon sound that dominates the album.

Those who appreciate an honest, basic record will enjoy Paloalto's simple approach.

At times a beautifully rendered album with surprisingly solid songwriting; it's an unashamedly nostalgic musical postcard from the American West Coast.

There's so much effort, Holy Wood winds up a stronger and more consistent album than any of his other work. If there's any problem, it's that Manson's shock rock seems a little quaint in 2000.