No Exit is immediate; even raw in places. It's committed to the truths inside the songs, not an iconic performance (as 1990's Blazing Away was). For that reason, it belongs on every Faithfull fan's shelf.

As a whole, Tolchin's rootsy acoustic mix works for him, though he shines brightest on the folkier, more heartfelt tracks.

The 2017 installment of Kompakt's ever-reliable Pop Ambient series serves up a typical assortment of wintry, occasionally somber, always reflective ambient pieces.

The sheer creativity and accessibility of Reaching Into Infinity raises the bar for power metal from here on out, and offers a new plateau for the band. Based on this set--with their catalog as further evidence--there is no reason DragonForce shouldn't be one of the biggest bands in the world.

The results are so ghoulishly compelling that it's akin to shamefully leering out your car window at a grisly accident scene on your way to pick up a pizza. Hardcore done right is a terrible and beautiful thing.

As a songwriter Garrie is the consummate craftsman, playing the everyman bard while Olson and Forester's production sets the stage without ever being cumbersome on this strong release.

At 67, Graham Parker isn't as angry or young as he once was, but he remains an estimable talent, and he's reveling in the pleasure of making music on Cloud Symbols. You may well feel the same way when you listen.

An uplifting, planet-sized embrace, ALL is another triumph for Tiersen.

The way every part of Lung Bread for Daddy comes together to create a ragged but ultimately uplifting self-portrait of Du Blonde makes for thrilling listening.

Epistrophy is a companion to Small Town, but it is also an extension of the intimate, communicative union shared by this duo in near symbiosis. Together they create a gold standard for live performance.

On The Best of Luck Club, Alex Lahey adds a few new tricks to her repertoire without losing touch with what she was already doing so well, and based on this music, it's a safe bet that she'll be delivering more great songs in the future.

Cohen's voice maintains the album's consistently floaty quality through these sparser tracks, making for a relentlessly dreamy set that's lost in thought and desire.

Small Mercies may not be quite as immediate as The Age of Anxiety, but it's fizzing with energy and ideas that prove that Pixx the right person to sing about what's wrong with the world.

It's a roller coaster of conflicting moods and feelings.

More dense, driven, and complexly rendered than anything else in the band's catalog, Spectre expands on the strongest moments of Lightning Dust's ever-shifting muse. The production, songwriting, and performances all reach new levels of curiosity and unpredictable moves, making it some of the band's most captivating work.

The precision may mean 50 Year Trip: Live at Red Rocks lacks spontaneity, but the album does showcase Fogerty at the height of his showmanship. He performed at Red Rocks to entertain the crowd by playing the hits, and what worked in concert works on record, too.

After several records of heady composition and high-concept music, Be Up a Hello is refreshingly direct. Without simply revisiting a bygone golden era, Jenkinson reconsiders some of his old ways, taking some of his more familiar ideas to new, strange places. As always.

Just as vibrant and full of wonder as Popp, Scis is another imaginative, unpredictable world of sound.

"In Your Eyes" isn't quite tonally of piece with the rest of Rated PG but as it's one of Gabriel's most famous songs, it belongs here and helps put into perspective how so much of Gabriel's film work leans toward the artier side of the spectrum.

The easy melodies and subtle singing of the title track is something new and very welcome; much of the rest of the album hits this same note of familiarity and growth, and it makes for a very satisfying listen. If Berry continues to progress and impress at this level, he might soon be known as a musician who does some acting instead of the other way around.

Poised somewhere between elegance and ferocity, All Bets Are Off is an exciting debut from an artist who thrives on the unexpected.

Refuge sounds composed, thoughtful, and intimate, with reflections on pain, grief, acceptance, and relief coming through in the character of the album's varied atmospheres.

It's handsomely crafted classic rock played with flair, wit, and precision, elements that make familiar tropes seem fresh.

Phillips' commentary on the state of the world is quite artful, but a look at the lyrics and a careful listen to the vocals allows the activist side of the songs to step forward, and when they take shape it's effective in the way it whispers rather than shouts in our ear.

As a whole, Heavy Rocks [2022] is demanding, wild, and raw, yet needs to be heard in a single listening session. After three decades together, Boris continue to willfully and eagerly engage a tense musical restlessness that keeps them sounding unsettled, ambitious, often feral, and in a class of their own.

King Gizzard are never less than compelling and even when their concepts are modest, they deliver a final product that's psychedelic pop/rock/funk/soul/prog/what have you at it's very best.

A bevy of producers, highlighted by Jennifer Decilveo (Bat for Lashes, Anne-Marie) and Daniel Tannenbaum (Kendrick Lamar), do admirable, evocative work, but the songs and feeling get lost under the layers of sound, particularly at the album's hour-long running time.

Tunes such as "Rainlines," "Dolphin Spray," and the amusingly titled "Cafe del Mars" are among his prettiest and most straightforward, respectively, dealing out throbbing and knackered house, intimate dancehall, and vaporous techno. The few purely ambient pieces, highlighted by "Doves Over Atlantis," are almost as evocative.

Hole Erth is definitely something of a departure for Toro y Moi and Bundick as he's never sounded quite as modern and rap friendly as this. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has been following him since the beginning, Bundick handles the shift with sure-handed aplomb, and everything he tries works out perfectly. As usual.

At times, The Odd Couple is a more beautiful record than its predecessor. But all too often Cee-Lo relies on the same sort of lyrical cipher as on St. Elsewhere, although none of them are as effective.

Era Extrana's lavish electro-pop proves that Neon Indian can be more than just chillwave.

It is a mellow, melodic album that switches between stripped-down, folk-inspired material, downtempo pop, and up-to-date productions designed for both home and club listening.

It’s a wide, spacious, summer storm of a record that bounces around genres like an open-world RPG game, and while there may be only 12 locations you can fast-travel to, there is enough treasure in each to keep the adventurer occupied for a month of afternoons.

On Holy Fire, the third album from the English band, the post-punk revival is given a newfound sense of depth, creating songs that are rhythmic enough to draw listeners, but hypnotic enough to leave listeners lost in their wide-open spaces.

Whoop Dee Doo is the Muffs playing near the top of their game.

Turner nails the concept, wallowing in warped dreams and painting widescreen soundscapes, but the foundation is wobbly; at a glance, it's impressive, but the slipshod details reveal themselves upon close inspection.

This compilation won't do anything to make Maus' bizarre intentions more clear or his cloudy legacy more cohesive, but for those already converted, its 16 songs will be essential.

Bunny seems more like an album to mentally pick apart than dance to, yet it's not hard to lose one's self in the rush of Dear's inventive rhythms.

Unlike Vol. 1, which ran out of steam during its last third, Vol. 2 keeps its momentum from beginning to end, clattering and shambling through its 33 minutes without a false step.

The goal of Xiu Xiu's confessional, confrontational music is to shake their listeners out of complacency and make them think and feel; once again, they accomplish this mission beautifully.

Adding more noise and toughness to their sound on Lost Time was a genius move, taking an already very good band and pointing it toward greatness, or at the very least helping Tacocat make one of the most fun punk-pop albums around.

It's not the prettiest or easiest of records, nor is it Oberst's finest outing to date, but it does house some real gems, including the emotionally charged opener "Tachycardia," the thoughtful, Dylan-esque "You All Loved Him Once," and the barbed and broken "A Little Uncanny."

At their best, they are capable of creating songs that take off like jet planes at dusk ("Hi+Lo"), strut wobbly like Paul Williams on a bender ("I Wanna Prove to You"), and hit the perfect spot between heartbreakingly sweet and just plain odd.

As Cavern of Anti-Matter embarks on a deep space voyage with the album's suite-like final third that culminates with the lovely "Phantom Melodies," they prove their music has an irresistible momentum, no matter how ambitious it gets.

Expanding and improving upon their already striking debut, No Way Down is a stunning accomplishment on so many levels: the amount of care and attention to detail that so clearly went into its creation; its stylistic uniqueness; and its sheer, subjective beauty.

The pieces here -- it's hard to call them songs or tracks -- are almost ambient, but there's too much noise and too many shifting sounds to keep you from spacing out for too long.

A little more variation from song to song, a little more of their own sound, or another song or two as compelling as the best stuff here and the POBPAH's debut would have been classic. Settling for impressive is fair enough and good enough for fans of loud, fuzzy, and heartfelt indie noise pop.

It's commendable that the Black Lips are trying to find new things to do after 20 years of balancing order and chaos, but Sing In A World That's Falling Apart isn't the exciting new aberration they need.

Each track has its own kind of burning intensity. The album's front, back, and inner photos are in black-and-white, but the music evokes rich shades of yellow, orange, and red.

It's just as easy of an album to drift off in thought to as it is to obsess over its patchwork of details and strange coloration, reaching a deeper, more thoughtful expression of the kind of bizarre beauty the band excels at.

While the Death in June/Current 93 comparisons are warranted and worn with pride, this album sees the band growing upward from those roots into an aggressive, heavily orchestrated look into the darker parts of the human condition.

Perils from the Sea skillfully bridges the gap between Kozelek's most recent offerings, which favored classical guitar and vocal over full-band arrangements, with the fuller sound of his Red House Painters and early Sun Kil Moon years, resulting in a listening experience that trades in the distant, narrative-driven opaqueness of Admiral Fell Promises and Among the Leaves for a newfound inclusivity that suits both parties.

While Early Riser was pieced and patched together, it flows as a gleaming focused set that combines left-field electronics, alternative R&B, and futuristic jazz.

Pickpocket's Locket is less furious than most of Frog Eyes' body of work, but if the music doesn't kick as hard the emotions are still there in abundance, and Carey Mercer's songs of love and hate remain compelling and rewarding stuff.

Though the songs average just under two minutes each, at 21 tracks, it's generous for a Cosmos outing and does nothing to detract from Kline's reputation as one of indie pop's most reliable songsmiths.

On Familia, Cabello celebrates her family's journey and how it helped bring her musical dreams to life.

He certainly talks like he wants to make music that stands the test of time and really matters to people; if that's ever going to happen, he'll need to make records go beyond pleasant and enjoyable. Despite the handful of songs that touch of his potential for greatness, Fine Line isn't quite there yet.

Fans of esoteric underground rap should take notice. Worth investigating.

Beauty rarely hides where you expect it. Take, for instance, the debut release by the U.K.'s Trembling Bells.

As lovely and sparse as Anda Jaleo and Perlas were, it is Blood Rushing that offers us the most of Foster, as a singer, a singular songwriter, and an artful conceptualist.

Throughout the album's nine songs, there's a nebulous sense of despair, but it's less an anguished confusion and more of the melancholy of acceptance that comes with a life full of heavy changes.

All the new bits here and there, and the slightly altered course, help to make Paperback Ghosts the most accessible Comet Gain record yet, without compromising any of the burning passion that has made them so important to their loyal fans.

T the album feels like a coherent work rather than something assembled in different locations by a disparate cast of individuals. It also demonstrates that Péron and Diermaier remain fearless and vital, over 45 years after co-founding the band's original incarnation.

From the heartfelt Irish folk tribute "Blackwater Banks" to the unstoppably hooky "People Like Us," this is an engaging and fun listen that is easy to repeat again and again.

Tracks like the glammy "Mekong Glitter" and the instrumental "Heathrow" both hanging on long enough to outstay their welcome. Overall, though, Insecure Men's melting pot of pop is straight-up fun with some deceivingly clever craft to it.

ISAM plays out like the soundtrack to some bizarre nature documentary: it continually pauses, goes off in another direction, halts again, then sits unmoving for a time, as though Tobin had been musically ghosting the movements of a tiny insect traveling along a leaf.

It's a trade-off that many bands make as they progress, cashing in on the uniqueness of their original sound for something more palatable to the imagined masses. It almost never works out well for the band involved and despite a few bright moments where they almost get it right, it doesn't work for Cherry Glazerr here.

This album feels alive and breathes honesty.

Bare Bones is a remarkable work from one of the best artists in vocal jazz.

Honky Tonk is country facing forward informed by the past.

With Gold Motel the bandmembers are wiser, but never weary, simultaneously expanding their sound around their new world-view and fitting it within the candy-pop shell they've crafted so well.

As they head further down this cerebral path, it would behoove Newcombe and his gang to work a bit harder on their core offerings before they paint on all the fun stuff.

In the end, Love Songs for Robots is well represented by its title: weird, heartfelt, haunting, stimulating, and unexpectedly sultry; it holds much for humans to appreciate, too.

Billy Joe Shaver is one of a kind, and this set proves it; it makes an excellent introduction for anyone not familiar with his singular talent.

This more open, organic process comes through on the songs, providing E and company with a refreshing amount of creative freedom after the relative confinement of doing a conceptual three-album trilogy.

Easy Tiger delivers what it promises: the most Ryan Adamsy Ryan Adams record since his first.

The album offers a fresh perspective on minimal techno, keeping things energetic and more than a little bit apprehensive.

One of Metheny's aesthetic signatures is an often euphoric character in his composing and playing. While that's absent here, emotion, vulnerability, and poignancy aren't.

Surely, it's a revival for Leon Russell, who has spent decades in the wilderness, but it's not a stretch to say The Union revitalizes Elton John just as much as it does his idol: he hasn't sounded this soulful in years.

The lush synths and bubbling beats carry the same wild dreaminess she achieved on songs where she was covering D.I.Y. rock songs in sheets of reverb, and it's more Rose's exacting and specific songwriting design than the instrumentation that makes Love as Projection feel so wonderfully strange, secret-keeping, and exciting.

Admittedly, these are also slower-burning compositions that lack the hooks and pop immediacy of much of Villagers' previous work. Ultimately, however, the pulling back feels intentional and fitting for an album of songs that always seem born out of O'Brien's most personal experiences.

Luluc's attention to detail and careful songcraft are apparent yet the music slides comfortably by, revealing its true depth with repeated listens.

There's less brooding menace and more giddy insanity -- without ever giving way to total chaos.

Putting the Days to Bed finds Roderick writing his most intimate lyrics to date while also building upon the radiant pop sensibility of 2005's Ultimatum EP.

Driven by a restless exploratory spirit, Gengras uncovers something new during nearly every moment of the album, which indeed consists of some of his most playful work.

The Afrobeats-tinged "Happy People" and "We All Win" spread joy to a communal level. A couple other songs, while inviting, are over-sugared, and certain production choices, mainly with regard to vocal effects, don't play to Nao's strengths. Hearing her so assured and exultant is no small consolation.

It's the consistency and quality of his work that continue to impress, and the timeless Local Valley slots easily into his catalog as if it's always been there.

By not taking the easy way out, Ready for Love is a successful experiment that nudges at John Hammond's limitations while satisfying his recently acquired, larger fan base.

It's a sassy section of sultry soul and urban vibratos, yet a snarling demeanor asking for a little respect also peeks through the dozen-song set list.

This is easily Sheik's strongest, and most mature record to date.

Universal Truths and Cycles shows the band has lost touch with the most important thing outside producers brought to their TVT albums -- someone to help pick, choose, and sequence Robert Pollard's over-abundance of songs.

Bjork has crafted an album that is both intimate and theatrical, innovative, but tied to tradition. Though Selmasongs paints a portrait of a woman losing her sight, it maintains Bjork's unique vision perfectly.

No matter the number of bright moments, you can't help but feel that Jadakiss has his best days ahead of him.

Outside of the Bacharach album, it's his best in a long time. But in order to know that, you will have to have dilligently listened to everything from Spike on -- and if you got off the bus around then, it's harder than ever to get back on.

It's beautiful, weird, and difficult to love.

Union and Return is as much a continuation as it is a fresh start; as much as Wyatt's old approach might be missed, he doesn't need it to make compelling music.

Rot is the kind of album only a band with a full grasp of rock & roll history could have made--no doubt they've worn out a copy or two of Radios Appear in their time--and it should appeal to anyone who likes their punk scrappy as can be with a bunch of wiry pop mixed in, too.