Nothin' But Blood finds the hard-living and hard-playing one-man band Biram sounding as intense as ever.

There's a good chance we're going to get a full-on rock album from Jennings now that he's gotten this out of his system, but as an expression of his country soul, Shooter ranks with his best work to date.

Dissolution is the album The Pineapple Thief have been promising since 2012's All the Wars: it's poetic, erudite, emotionally powerful, and chock-full of musical imagination.

As Lo puts her stamp on all of Sunshine Kitty's different sounds and emotions, there's a breeziness that hasn't been present in her music since Queen of the Clouds.

Perhaps the only match for the cerebral weirdness and eventual beauty of Mars Volta's lyrics is their music itself.

For as much as Way refers to other acts, this is a thoroughly original work, a vibrant reflection of all his artistic obsessions.

Delta Spirit's commercial aspirations may be more apparent this time around, but they've done an awfully nice job in pairing that inclination with material that benefits from the slick production, resulting in their most cohesive (and television- and film-ready) collection of songs to date.

Rodriguez has been hinting at the ambition displayed on Lola for some time. What's surprising is how a record of such scope and imagination can be rendered so intimately and elegantly.

Tahoe is far from being simple, and is much more emotionally complex than the average ambient album.

Song for song, it's as strong as any of their records -- if anything, these 11 songs are the tightest they have ever been -- and Stuart Murdoch remains faithful to the aesthetic he essayed at the outset of his career, finding sustenance in the fine details, his obsessions carrying the weight of passion.

It's a tighter, less primitive album than its predecessor, but as such, it has a lot more to offer as well.

Blues Funeral, while an adventurous, strident, and complex album, will likely polarize longstanding Lanegan fans; but if they can't follow him into this new terrain, it's their problem.

Ultimately, with Alix, Generationals deliver quirky, catchy pop songs that stick in your head like DayGlo bubblegum on a hot summer parking lot.

It's a strong debut from an excitable band barely able to contain themselves as they blow through their songs like a friendly tropical storm.

Memoir of a Sparklemuffin greatly expands and dramatizes the sound and scope of her relationship laments, putting it in the territory of Lana Del Rey and Angel Olsen's most extravagant works.

Apocalypse is a song cycle that places the usually extremely inward-looking Callahan in the unlikely role of observer and interpreter of various American myths; myths both externally held and culturally self-referential, that inform the interior world of the protagonist.

Glass Animals' most cohesive and satisfying album to date, Dreamland is a well-deserved triumph that's as rewarding for fans to hear as it was for the band to make.

Bragg and producer Joe Henry, owner of the aforementioned basement where Tooth & Nail was recorded, make for a solid team, allowing their shared love of rural Americana to run wild and each song enough elbow room to get comfy by sticking to a pantry of few seasonings.

Acid Tongue is where Lewis finally pulls it all together and delivers one killer of a record.

While it's hard not to be overtaken with a sense of nostalgia while listening to this album if you knew these songs from back in the day, Phillips pulls them out of their original context and in the process reveals their strength is more timeless than one might have imagined.

An ambitious exercise of restraint, it's a lumbering beast that's minimal but still feels expansive. Epic, even.

While Fake Surfers might not have the immediate impact of Finberg's earlier albums, but it takes his music in some bold directions without losing its smart-alecky, catchy-despite-itself essence.

On this very nice debut, Spielbergs are a tough band to pigeonhole, boasting quality writing and a hooky approach that transcends whatever sonic space they occupy at a given moment.

These are doomy, bass-heavy arrangements, rife with layers of orchestrated sounds that build and swell with a sustained dramatic tension. Think Matthew Dear meets The Downward Spiral-era NIN and you'll get a good sense of the grayscale atmosphere Biliński has achieved here.

While the newer additions to Thurston's muse are all well and good, The Best Day is most exciting when he returns to his most familiar trademarks, again investigating a sound that has spawned generations of imitators but still sounds like no one else.

Devil sees them continuing to move forward again, and although Hale's presence will certainly be missed, fans of the band will find that the return of Frost and Owens more than makes up for the loss.

The record is good enough, and the band skilled enough, that even one year without a new album from them would feel like an eternity.

While the retro-future production on some of the songs gives Migration Stories a distinctive flair, it's still by and large a typical Ward joint, replete with all of the idiosyncrasies and retro affectations that have become a stylistic hallmark of his catalog. Familiar as it may sound, though, he doesn't skimp on quality and there is plenty to love about this latest entry in his impressive catalog.