Range of Light's unifying theme of the Sierra range is heartfelt, and when enjoyed as a whole, the album succeeds as a unique effort that is familiar, yet distinct and extremely personal.

Kleerup can certainly be accused of repeating the same tricks over and over, but at least he has some remarkably effective (if not immensely distinctive) tricks — essentially, moderately paced and genially thumping robo-disco beats wedded to majestically buoyant chord progressions, played on synths that somehow manage to sound lush and punchy at the same time, with some bonus keyboard flutters for icing.

Fun, inventive, swaggering, and smart, Finally Famous is an exciting debut.

Her musical vision and production skills are almost astonishing in places. [But] American Doll Posse is a work that has its problems due to its sprawling nature.

It's another impressive album that shows Haden to be a truly talented singer and vocal arranger, and one that fans of movie music done in a non-traditional fashion should find quite interesting.

This easygoing, smooth, and poppy record stands tall next to their finest work and only comes up a little short because it lacks the one or two killer songs that make their best albums really pop. Still, it's a nice addition to their catalog and perfect for fans of loud but not too loud, wild but not too wild, modern rock & roll.

Grand Duchy have enough fun on the album that more often than not, it's contagious.

While there's no real dance anthem in the bunch, World Be Gone does deliver on vocals and memorable Vince Clarke melodies, as well as on arrangements that add some oomph to slower tempos. At the time of its release, it seems on point.

Lissie's strength is how she uses the past as foundation, not aspiration, and that's why Back to Forever is a lithe, unpredictable, and seductive collection of modern pop: it places equal emphasis on song and sound.

Fans of Bachmann's gruff Neil Diamond-meets-Steve Earle vocals and lonesome and literate subject matter will find everything they love about the Carolina native on display, while those who prefer his vocal affectations surrounded by the din of a full band should stick with his group efforts.

Hello, the group's second issue for Alternative Tentacles, highlights the rock side of this noise rock ensemble more than any of their previous albums.

Naturally, it would have made more sense if it appeared in late 1996 or 1997, since it sounds like a simple step forward instead of a great leap into the unknown -- the kind of record that was bashed out in a few weeks by a band desperate to deliver a sequel to a hit record.

The appeal of Life for Rent is what makes Dido appealing -- she's unassuming and gentle, but her songs are so melodic and atmospheric they easily work their way into the subconscious, and the records are well-crafted enough to be engaging on repeated plays.

It's unlikely to storm the charts like their first two records, especially since there aren't standout singles like on the earlier albums, but overall the record works better, perhaps their best album.

Welcome to the Walk Alone ends up as neither a success nor a failure; instead, it feels more like a missed opportunity compounded by a bad decision.

Less accessible than his song-based albums (like 4 Track Songs, released almost simultaneously), Music for Falling from Trees is concise, focused, and well executed.

What doesn't make a direct hit on the hips and heart is, at the least, well constructed.

The result is rich and exciting without becoming overwhelming; it's loaded with charm as well as fine tunes, and that combination makes it a delight that's well worth hearing.

Anyone with a little distance from their own pain will find much to admire in the honesty and craft of the album.

The majority of tracks follow the tried and true template of atmospheric intro/staccato breakdown/huge power chorus/repeat, but the balance between sheen and filth is handled with aplomb.

House of Love are comfortable in their skin without being complacent, sounding happy, even grateful, to be writing and playing again, winding up with a record that stands alongside their '80s and '90s work quite nicely.

Schizophrenic as Glow can feel, its severity shows that Fourgeaud is one of the most interesting, futuristic-minded artists in the game.

Even if it takes a little more effort than expected to fall under the spell he's casting, Abandoned Apartments' finest moments make it one of Jay's best blends of dreamy surrealism and crisp-edged pop in some time.

Plenty of other modern acts have gone for the gold with this type of powerhouse, '80s-inspired electro-pop, but Kibby's material feels more memorable and has the weight to back up the heavy production.

As a whole, Model of You shows a marked improvement from their debut and a distinct line of evolution, which is tough to pull off in such a short gap between releases.

Unpredictable and ruthlessly abstract, Pattern of Excel is possibly the most avant-garde release in Ninja Tune's long history, and may seem like a stark departure from Lee Bannon's earlier works, but it's really just a continuation of his tendency to follow his fearlessly creative spirit into uncharted territory.

Showalter and producer Nicolas Vernhes find a nice balance between the rawness of the production and the meatiness of its execution, and allow the classic rock underpinnings that were so prevalent on Heal to continue to rise to the forefront.

Necessity might be the mother of invention, and their lack of training certainly gives their music a wonderfully eccentric slant, but that's just as likely due to their restless imaginations as it is circumstance.

Time 'n' Place might not be quite as cohesive as Bonito Generation, but it offers a fuller portrait of Kero Kero Bonito's music without losing any of the spark that makes them special.

A curious misfire that trades strength and confidence for second guessing and stylistic uncertainty.

Even with the quick-shifting styles, the emotional charge of the songs and Mulherin's distinctive songwriting sensibilities expand nothing,nowhere's range and keep the album from devolving into a scattered mess.

[The album offers] an easy, accessible entry point into this Dark Knight's world.

Changing Horses marks a defining moment in the songwriter's career, offering up a batch of pastiche-free country music that, like Ryan Adams' "Jacksonville City Nights," may be a promising sign of what's to come.

Fans who were drawn to 2:54's introspective blend the first time will see this as a natural continuation of their deepening, subtly changing world.

It's a much more focused and intriguing follow-up that may provide a much-needed shot in the arm for the guitar-bass-drums three-piece formula.

While Andrews may lack the late singer/songwriter's [Jeff Buckley's] angelic pipes, he shares his knack for making the darkness in all of us feel both hopeless and sexy.

Gym Class Heroes' Quilt is very, very much of its time: it skates by on the surface, which is appealing for a while, but in large doses it can seem like too much empty style.

The band have never made music that's sounded so modern and disconcertingly eager to please. It's a sea change that's hard to swallow, and despite the presence of some decent tracks, Wallop is the band's weakest album to date.

Love Comes Close is a strong debut not just because Cold Cave embraces their darkness so fully, but because they find so many shades within it.

As an album, Standing on the Rooftop may not be as striking as its predecessor, but perhaps it wasn't meant to be. It is a seemingly effort that pushes the familiar toward an uncertain future where pop genres cease to need to exist at all.

Frusciante has done a nice job of carving an identity completely separate from his main gig, and Empyrean fits nicely with his other solo albums.

Despite the obvious stylistic proficiency at play, Double Jointer is a bit too au courant (maybe it's all that reverb) to have much of a long-term impact.

His first official solo outing (he recorded a rollicking 2009 album under the moniker Lady of the Sunshine) finds the Australian singer/songwriter successfully bridging the gap between bearded Laurel Canyon rambler and bearded indie pop urbanite.

Stripped of some its flair, the band sounds both invigorated and a tad unsteady (an Albini trademark), but never have they sounded more muscular.

This is unapologetically well-tailored contemporary music, drawing upon the traditions of Kentucky and Laurel Canyon to create something gentle, pretty, and substantive, something that is as enchanting as it was the first time around.

Xtreme Now is eclectic to the point of feeling scattered, and its songs don't entirely live up to the outrageous concept.

Overall, though, while Mirage Rock sees Band of Horses further immerse themselves in Americana, more than anything it finds them enraptured by the simple joy of music-making.

Though this is some of Braxton's most abstract music, it might be the purest expression of his cerebral playfulness yet.

Droll humor is not Bazan's bailiwick, and in spite of some of Blanco's near-misses, it's nice to hear him put down the guitar and insert himself into less familiar environs.

Adult Nights is an engaging debut from a band that wears its sunny California influences as well as if they were born and bred there.

So Divided's remarkable balance between the band's grandeur and power makes it far from a disappointment.

A satisfying land where they receive all the drive, the snarl, and tribal drums they require, while late album highlights "Quit iPhone" and "Fibre Book Troll" (which is really "Facebook Troll") are screaming examples of the band's rockabilly-punk in overdrive.

nes. Skillfully strung together by ringleader Inglish, these flights of fancy turn into a substantial party album with plenty of fun and flash.

At their best, Hudson and her collaborators provide the kind of mature R&B that is not felt merely in the mind, throat, chest, or hips but the entire body.

Though their debut album is considerably more polished and focused-sounding than their EPs, the uniquely winsome quality of It Hugs Back's music remains, with buzzing keyboards and fuzzy guitars.

This may not satisfy a casual fan who wants to hear versions played on the radio, but the entirety of Telephantasm winds up being something better than a hits collection: it captures the essence of the band, why they were important and why they still sound powerful some twenty years later.

All in all, Between Two Shores is an effort that will please his fans while showing he's still learning new tricks in the art of record making, and he's putting them to good use.

Body of Song ultimately feels more like an attempt by Mould to please both his audience and himself than a coherent and confident effort.

This disc has been rendered with creativity and panache, and it features hooky songwriting so compelling that it's easy to listen to the mere 35 minutes of material (divided into 11 three-minute long, radio-friendly songs) on a continuous loop.

There's no lull here, just fast-paced fun.

Never bland, the Daredevil Christopher Wright rise from good to great when they let their freak flag fly and allow their true weird personalities to come out.

The concept of fusing together live analog instrumentation like electric guitar and bass with electronic drums and vintage synthesizer arpeggios keeps the music of Mwahaha enthralling, despite the lack of traditional, tuneful structure.

Lyrically, this is among the sharpest and wittiest collections of songs this band has ever released. Add in the similarly fine music, and Solid States demonstrates the Posies have plenty of fresh ideas and great records left in them after three decades.

A somewhat lengthy collection, the album does tend to drag a little in its second half and while there are no outright duds, a bit of editing might have turned a strong 14-track outing into an excellent ten or 12-track one.

Not a game-changing comeback by any means, Cause and Effect is instead a satisfying return to form that manages to gracefully age Keane by invigorating a familiar formula with wisdom and honesty learned over a dramatic, life-changing decade.

Tracks with amusing reinterpretations of classics by Hall & Oates, Guy, and David Banner show that the rapper had a good deal of fun while making it, too.

Perhaps cloaking her personal experiences in the guise of a fictional narrative allowed Parton to allude to her past in this fashion, but no matter the inspiration, these moments are the grace notes that help make Run, Rose, Run a satisfying listen on its own terms.

All in all, Clash the Truth is exactly the record Beach Fossils should have made at this point, reinforcing all the things that made them good while adding some excellent new wrinkles and boosting the production values.

While We Are Born occasionally lapses into the anodyne, overly tasteful pop-folk balladeering of Sia's past, overall it's a charmingly cheery, light-hearted romp looking nowhere but sweetly, sanguinely forward.

If it often gets over on mood rather than message, Gibson turns out to be an impressively good mood guy, and the production (by Gibson and Randall Dunn) gets the details right, making Carnation sound like a middle-of-the-night album for a man whose sense of style is matched only by his knack for poor choices.

They’ve never been the most consistent band, making mistakes and careening down the wrong road in pursuit of transcendence – something they have managed to achieve a few magical times -- but they’ve never sounded this irrelevant or out of touch before.

One of his very best records.

What keeps Longwave's distinct improvisational character upright in the rocking chair, lost in thought instead of asleep like the cat, is a gentle melodicism and an impressionistic bent that's as pretty as it is simple. Part of that design is subtle organ, piano, slide guitar, and effects that fill in some of the space around lead guitars in broad strokes.

Styrofoam represents the part of the Morr Music roster where the first three letters of the label's name might as well stand for "middle of the road."

Rather than being a simple throwback band, they add their own twist by way of a dark, vaguely ominous tone.

Long Distance's successful moments make its well-groomed monotony especially frustrating: Ivy polished these songs to a fare-thee-well and invited guests like James Iha and Eric Matthews to play on them, yet they couldn't give them more individuality or emotion.

There's almost nothing in the way of guitar heroics and it's far from groundbreaking, but fans of darkly personal skewed pop should enjoy Will to Death.

Amazing Grace is far from a bad album, but it's not an especially compelling one, either.

A colorful, satisfying album that feels like a classic.

Ten confident and smart folk-pop tunes filled with fetching hooks and engaging melodies perfectly suited to his warm, winsome voice.

Keys to the Kingdom may have been recorded in response to death and birth but it is, more than anything else, a celebration of all that Jim Dickinson held dear in life and music, which are, after all, the same thing.

Builds on the loose and raw sound of Wold's earlier records, but [the album] is also an extension of them, pulling in strains of folk and country and adding them to his signature trance blues sound. The result is a powerfully good record.

A heady and quirky mix of Regina Spektor, Leslie Feist, and Joni Mitchell, the second album from Nataly Dawn, the female half of heady and quirky indie pop duo Pomplamoose, is held together by the French- and Belgium-raised, Stanford-educated, American singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist's gift for gab, unique phrasing, and sophisticated musicality.

Bareilles is such a naturally melodic songwriter that she doesn't run much of a risk of seeming insular on The Blessed Unrest and, fortunately, the feel of the album follows the contours of her melodies, so its melancholy is warm and inviting.

It doubles down on his distinctively mellow, '60s- and '70s-vintage sound. This time around, after demoing the songs with a four-track tape machine, he borrowed an eight-track reel-to-reel recorder to capture the official takes with his band.

With unprecedented access and insight into Dion's world following such a life-changing few years, Courage is a triumph of spirit and resolve.

The slower, foggier, harmony-rich "Ofrenda-Flanger-Ego-à Gogo" is a more coherent entry, if utterly psychedelic, although most of the rest of Freeway Lucifer follows the example of the first song, expressing overwhelmed thoughts through a shape-shifting and ultimately surprisingly (if not entirely) listenable and cathartic sequence of tracks.

In short, another first-rate album from a group that keep adding new facets without ignoring their past.

Aas a whole, Why Are You OK isn't quite as memorable a set as they've proven capable of delivering.

It is also one of the strongest senses of true ambient music as originally proposed, where volume is secondary to overall impact.

Hairdresser Blues offers a more intimate window in to a more down-to-earth personal world, allowing room for that enormous persona to be folded back into the greater sum of Bogart's infectious songwriting personality.

These are nicely captured, feel-good staples that will likely have their best moments on-stage, contracting and expanding each night at the whim of the band. Where things get more interesting are on songs like Page McConnell's "Home" and "I Always Wanted It This Way," two tracks where Ezrin's classic rock touch and Phish's progressive tendencies neatly dovetail.

It's an unfocused album that defies comfortable listening, perhaps deliberately so, but the collision of half-baked folk tunes and uneasy soundscapes isn't as stimulating to hear as it might have been to create.

Harry Styles works exceedingly well as a modern pop album and an extension of the One D sound and brand, but as the kind of personal statement Styles wants to make, it comes very close, but ultimately falls just short. More weirdness, less slickness, and a distinct musical vision next time and maybe he'll get there.

Each song a wildly different part of the whole, yet unmistakably belonging to the same powerful beast. It's a cohesive and bold statement from A Perfect Circle, a triumphant comeback after too much time away.

It's filled with memorable, exceptionally played and produced electronic pop songs that are off-center yet targeted squarely at the heart.

As it is, with the improvements, revamps, and overall more interesting arrangements, Somewhere Else manages to be the equal of Disco Romance, and the only reason it isn't better is that it lacks the surprise factor that made Sally Shapiro's debut so breathtaking.

Lost at Last, Vol. 1 is filled with loose ends and mess. ... Even if Langhorne Slim can't come up with the tunes to suit his sound, that sound is bewitching enough to make Lost at Last, Vol. 1 worth a listen.