While Spirit in the Room matches its predecessor on a track-by-track level, it's only in those last moments that the whole package seems as thematically sound and well designed.

Very nicely done.

"Crooked Smile" with special guests TLC is a genuine, mature step in the right direction and will have no trouble reaching vintage age. A handful of other numbers carry that same weight, making Born Sinner a daring step forward for Cole and an exciting attempt at mastering Jay's Blueprint style.

A compact, lyrically diverse debut, Rebellious Soul makes it plain that K. Michelle should be supported enough to reverse her albums-to-mixtapes ratio.

There's no mistaking Days of Gold for anything earthy, but this sonic thawing winds up emphasizing Owen's inherent sweetness in an appealing fashion.

He's aware he's building upon a past he sometimes pines for, yet he's restless enough to forage ahead into new territory, but only when he's surrounded by cozy, familiar settings.

Sweet, smooth, sincere, and smart, Dreams is an unexpected plush pillow from the group.

The duo don't put a wrong foot forward, and they've made an album which creates that kind of mood perfectly, which isn't easy to do, and making for an even more impressive debut, it's their first attempt.

The story itself is compelling, but musically the album hovers somewhere between bland acoustic roots pop and overly earnest alt-rock.

He's wound up making records that are the new millennial equivalent of classic soft rock, records informed by the trends of the day but which place emphasis on melody and craft, which is why they resonate: they come on smooth and easy but have the foundation to last.

The issues raised on Bitter Tears are still relevant, and Look Again to the Wind reminds us that art can still speak eloquently about the best and worst parts of the human condition, and it's well worth investigating.

New York Before the War isn't quite a full-on rock & roll album, but it comes close enough that Malin has more space to move around than on his more subdued solo works, and he sounds energized and eloquent on these 13 tunes.

Frontman Michael Angelakos presents a gratitude-imbued, relatively ballad-heavy, but still sparkling third Passion Pit LP in Kindred.

Millencolin are no doubt a tad older and wiser, but even bereft of any of that context, True Brew manages to sound refreshingly vital, which is more than can be said about many of their contemporaries.

With equally quirky lyrics and coming in at under 30 minutes, Teen Men is a tight little ten-track parcel of kooky sweetness where head bobbing is unavoidable.

Negative Feedback Resistor is music made to smash the state--or at the very least deafen the enemies of the people.

Not quite classical, though certainly not pop, Postcards From is a fascinating meditation from the soul of a traveler.

While the album is technically one of Rumer's most faithfully old-school, it still sounds fresh, and the analog production aesthetic only works to magnify the purity, lyricism, and expressiveness of her voice.

Krall has a definite vision for Turn Up the Quiet--she wants to keep things smoky and subdued, a record for the wee hours--and the end result is so elegant, it seems effortless.

Produced by Mark Crew (Bastille, Rationale) and Catherine Marks (the Killers, Wolf Alice), the album features much of what has endeared the Liverpool trio to fans; especially vocalist/guitarist Matthew Murphy's literate, tongue-in-cheek self-awareness, which remains firmly intact.

In a way, with all its emphasis on over-achievement and a continuous supply of re-recounted autobiographical content, YSIV can be as mind-numbing as the mumble rap Logic rails against, but the proficiency and fervor are indisputable.

The Secret of Letting Go retains that balance of experimentation and pure feeling, and sounds perfectly at home within Lamb's discography.

Sombrou Dúvida feels like another strong set of jams with a constant flow of bells and whistles transforming it into a tripped-out daydream.

The album hits like the work of a solitary creator, however, its suffocating songs often warped by trippy arrangements, unpredictable turns, and out-of-tune components (including persistent double-tracking) all sound like the product of a singular, eccentric perspective.

This is a warm, low-key affair, a record about family bonds and togetherness that gets by on its gentle, endearing vibes.

Compared to Dekadrone, BN9Drone doesn't quite lift off, staying closer to the ground for its duration, and at 64 minutes (including a false ending), it simply goes on for roughly twice as long as it needs to. A shorter dose of it can be effective, however.

Sees the group shift away from the more anthemic direction of their major hits ("Love Killa," "Gambler") to an airier, more vocally driven set of songs: strummed-funk tracks like "Tied to Your Body" and "Blow Your Mind" pull heavily from Justin Timberlake's early-2000s run, while others like "About Last Night" and "Better" slide toward the nostalgic disco yearnings expressed by their 2010s contemporaries.

It all goes to show that Carpenter's knack for composing scores that are entertaining in their own right is alive and well, and just as engrossing nearly half a century after the first Halloween slashed its way onto the silver screen.

While Night Call builds nicely upon Years & Years' indie electronic roots, it primarily feels like a new beginning for Alexander as he boldly embraces his pop future.

Brought up on a steady diet of singles, Templeman has some trouble stringing together a substantive 14-track set and a number of the cuts simply coast along on groove and tone without much else to recommend them. Minus the filler and occasional bouts of clumsy wordplay, Mellow Moon does little to damage the young singer/songwriter's reputation and adds a clutch of well-made tracks to his growing canon.

Their renderings of "Don't Worry Baby" and "Wouldn't It Be Nice" may be ramshackle, but much like the originals, they're delivered with unguarded joy and wide-eyed innocence.

While Will of the People is not as essential as their 2000s classics, it's a quick, satisfying burst of Muse essentials that cleverly forgoes the hits-compilation graveyard in favor of fresh material that honors both their evolution and dedicated fan base.

Ken Carson makes music to be overpowered by and to lose oneself in its sheer magnitude, and More Chaos accomplishes that once again.

This is pure NPR music, all neo-jazz melodies and martini-lounge flourishes without the sly bite of its predecessor.

The songs are too weak, the sound is too good (aka lifeless), and the album feels like a career move instead of anything real or fun.

Wide-eyed wonder still intact, there's a lot of depth to explore in the 30 minutes of Hobo Rocket, from bombastic glam, to chugging stoner rock, to colorful psychedelia--all of it odd as usual.

Heaven Upside Down is Manson at his most human. If Pale Emperor was a welcome return to form that signaled a new day for the band, its successor is just as satisfying, if not better.

While there aren't as many heart-stopping productions as on 2002's unjustly neglected Come With Us, Push the Button proves the Chemical Brothers have retained the innate curiosity necessary to keep them blazing trails for years to come.

By not forcing Redcar's music into a pop template when it doesn't fit, the album reaffirms him as a resolutely independent artist and makes another fine addition to a nearly flawless discography.

Through it all, Leonard maintains an intangible charisma that, along with sustained vulnerability and a knack for keeping the familiar in play while distorting it, has the potential to enthrall.

With Brazilian Girls' sense of wonder and love of musical globe-trotting as strong as ever, New York City is a welcome return to form for this very special group.

Encompassing the past, present, and future of sci-fi scores, Tron: Legacy feels like it grew and mutated from its origins the same way the film's world did. Without a doubt, it's a game-changer for Daft Punk.

If lightweight, it is often pleasant and amusing, if not utterly engaging.

There aren't any weak points, and it drifts along dreamily, from one understated jam to the next.

While Savage and Kelly clearly get big kicks from genre-jumping and trying to trip out listeners, "Baby Boomer," "Michael Kelly," and "The World Never Stops" show that they can rock earnestly as well.

The Royal Bangs don't just grab you by the throat and demand your attention, they threaten to rip apart your speakers, drench you in your own dancefloor sweat, and leave you begging for more.

The gorgeous and haunting ending leaves more than a few questions unanswered, and begs listeners to play the album again from the start to seek them out once more.

It's another batch of nuanced, quietly intense songs that have some degree of heartache to them.

Luckily, there's enough genuine melody at the core of these songs to warrant their arrangements.

Their loosest, wildest, and most honest collection of Saturday night/Sunday morning pining/drinking songs to date.

The new looseness that runs through the grooves, the variety the additional voices bring, the very strong songs, and Eno' perfect production all add up as the album plays, and as a result, Thr!!!ler ranks as the band's best work to date. That also makes it one of the best modern dance punk records to date, right up there with LCD Soundsystem's best.

Ot overall the compilation, with all its good intentions, pales in comparison to the originals and will only strengthen the urge to hear Russell's wonderful songs again after listening to this well-meaning but flawed collection.

If you still hold Lanois' earlier recordings to a high ideal, this may indeed frustrate you because it offers considerably more evidence that Lanois has lost his way as a musician.

So did Do Make Say Think actually intend to attach this level of conceptualism to 'Do,' 'Make,' 'Say,' and 'Think?' Probably not, but it sure is fun to listen to that way.

Ultimately, Beautiful Rivers and Mountains is more than a mere curiosity piece; for all its easy-to-recognize styles, Shin's way of enmeshing them into something original underscores rather than erases their strangeness and splendor--even to widely exposed Western ears--making this is an excellent introduction to his work.

The Valley isn't necessarily a gloomy album, though; most of the anger is funneled into Chauntelle DuPree's guitar riffs, whose rawness is balanced by the girls' sweet, dreamy harmonies.

So the Obits might just have the stuff to save rock & roll, or at least keep it off life support for a while, but as good as I Blame You may be, they're going to have to get their songwriting chops in order before they can really finish the job.

Family shows that Le Loup have really come into their own since the release of their 2007 debut.

While some of Constellations lulls a bit, seven-minute suite "Steerage and the Lamp," a snow flurry of Lowe's rolling piano arpeggios accentuated by subtle strings, captures the classical wonderment of Balmorhea at its finest.

As it stands, New Shapes of Life is a solid record that connects quite often on an emotional level, but is far too easy to tune out and shift to the background, something that can almost never be said about any of Carr's previous work.

This first official release is a soul searcher and may require more patience than your everyday debut. Still, the chilly, complicated Man on the Moon perfects the futuristic bleak-beat hip-hop Kanye purposed a year earlier, and rewards the listener with every tripped-out return.

John Hiatt's muse hasn't stopped keeping him on task, and the work he's doing remains satisfying, and anyone who can crank out an album as good as The Open Road every 18 months or so would be well advised to keep up the good work.

While this collection obviously isn't the best place for newcomers to cut their teeth, From the Vaults, Vol. 1 is a collection that will give longtime fans a taste of what could have been in some kind of alternate time line, making the album essential listening for Kylesa diehards.

Despite a personnel list that borders on audacious, Big Sean is at his best on Detroit 2 when he sounds like he's standing alone in his room giving himself a pep talk.

The decision to rein in the forward-thinking, more ambitious, and colorful musical and textural steps she made on her last recording makes this rather monochromatic affair feel somewhat longer than its scant 33 minutes.

Childish Prodigy is split between drunken caterwauling and quiet hangover-recovery sessions, and both sides of the spectrum are fantastic.

Ishibashi follows suit with the meaty "Carry on Phenomenon," a lyrically impenetrable, impossibly catchy blast of ELO worship that, like all of the songs on the tightly packed rainbow canon that is Lighght, skillfully applies a dizzying array of bells and whistles to what is essentially a simple, relatable, and reliable pop melody.

Cuts Across the Land is a strong, self-assured debut, even if the Duke Spirit needs to work a little harder to escape the long shadow of their forebears.

Red Velvet Car has something of a meditative mood -- the punchy Townshend power chords are used as color, not fuel -- triggered somewhat by a preponderance of textured, acoustic-laden arrangements and miniature epics, all elements that hearken back to Heart's golden age yet wind up feeling right in line with their vibe in 2010.

A collection of songs that are both ardent and humble.

With Past Life, Lost in the Trees have risen to the occasion and crafted a record that's no less haunted, but decidedly more open to interpretation.

Clipped down to 40 minutes, Nobody Lives Here Anymore would have the potential to be a great album; at 77 minutes, it's quality music that somehow wears out its welcome.

Echo Party ends up being that rarest of commodities: a party record equally suited to the under 20 and over 40 crowds.

Phox is an undeniably tight unit, and their long history as friends imbues each track with a distinctive warmth that eludes similar-sounding acts, but their not-so-secret weapon is Martin, who can bend cliches to her will, and does so often throughout the 12-song set.

It's an environment that rewards more often than it disappoints.

What makes a difference here is the general lightness of his new songs and Was and Lee's sympathetic production; the two play off each other perfectly, turning this into the first latter-day Diamond record to feel quintessentially Neil Diamond.

Ultimately, with Turn to Gold, Diarrhea Planet, a group with arguably one of the best-worst band names in rock history, have crafted their first truly great album.

Timbaland has revitalized Nelly Furtado both creatively and commercially.

While Pink's peers take incremental, cautious artistic steps forward, she's slyly fearless, choosing the right collaborators that help her create pop music that has both style and substance to spare.

There's a newfound sense of poignancy that overrides much of Mississauga's patchwork nihilism.

He sticks with simple acoustics and subtle string arrangements; however, A New Day at Midnight doesn't possess the heavy heart of White Ladder.

A truly twisted masterpiece that offers new rewards with each new listen.

This album will have to remain the a mark of a band's crazy potential and perhaps a warning siren of what is to come.

More fully realized and bolstered with a stronger song selection than its predecessor, Wallpaper for the Soul is a well-crafted collection of infectious tunes that won't necessarily stick with you for years to come, but should be quite enjoyable while you're listening.

Macy Gray lets her freak flag fly, almost to the detriment of everything else.

There's nothing that betrays their high standards of craft, but, on a whole, the songs are neither as hooky nor as resonant as the ones unveiled on its predecessor.

So, in a strange way, Loud is an extremely successful album for Maas: it rids him of the trance tag, has enough vocal dance-pop to win over even more admirers, and is so diverse that everyone will find at least one enjoyable track.

The music is something else, sophisticated, jazzy on a few numbers, occasionally funky and varied for a rap album. But the rapping is still not quite right.

Despite the weighty subject matter and kinetic mayhem, the Danielson Famile are just an indie pop band, and listeners already familiar with Smith's distinctive shrieking and intricate arrangements will find much to love on Brother Is to Son, while the untested will either submit or run screaming to their mommies.

With the gleaming, self-aware production as well as both Danny Vicious' embarrassing rapping and Elisabeth Troy's overly soulful vocals, it's clear that Cole wants respect at every turn. Despite the consequences.

Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz have explored a stunning amount of musical styles within the confines of this album, with every song sounding like it was produced by a different group.

Too often, however, he gets mired in sexual pursuits, as well as excessive drug talk. The album's vinyl edition is 18 tracks long, including bonus songs and instrumentals, but even the 13-track standard CD version is exhausting, at 52 minutes.

Four or five less tracks and a little less time spent extrapolating on the end of the world would have made for a far more engaging listen, even taking into consideration how rare new material from Busta Rhymes can be in this phase of his work.

Is 4 Lovers one of Death from Above 1979's most balanced and stylistically engaging albums.

While this experimentation is sometimes seamless, sometimes fun, and sometimes distracting, Hawke's distinctive, vulnerable rasp, wispy melodies, and perceptive lyrics keep the album on track.

The sound is fleshed out much more than Joan of Arc has been for some time, and it's an easy album to be affected by — at least for fans of confessional post-rock, Chicago style.

Cults give more of themselves on these songs than ever before, and opening themselves to more possibilities pays off with some of their most exciting music.

Where You Live is yet another elegant and easy album from Chapman, just the kind her fan base has come to expect.