Much like our ever expanding universe, Yellow Ostrich's Cosmos is an infinitely listenable album that holds up to repeated scrutiny.

A beautiful and often brave-sounding album, Joyland shows how much can be gained by letting go.

It is searing, raw and lusty, tender, open and vulnerable.

Eagulls' density and intensity sometimes border on exhausting, but the album is an undeniably bracing beginning.

Working Out is an apt title, as Arthur Beatrice sound a little bit like they're in the late stages of development, where momentum is sometimes mistaken for maturation, but there's little doubt that they have the tools and the talent to carve out their own niche if given the room to grow a bit further out of the very populated one they currently reside in.

Ten tight songs and out, and the album feels like a mystery itself, but artists who nail that stoic sense of wonder, like Isaak and Orbison, don't come around often. Waterhouse is certainly of their ilk.

We Are Scientists make writing infectious, utterly listenable pop songs, over and over again, seem easy.

Looking at Major Lazer's previous releases, the whole Rasta zombie-hunter concept is applied the least to this one, but it's not missed, either. Apocalypse Soon is too fast and mean to be bogged down by any comic book extras, and besides, the music is weird enough and wild enough on its own.

The streamlining does much for the album, giving the songs enough space to let their varied and often contrasting influences meld nicely with the band's unique visions.

While War Psalms is certainly a long way from Morning Glory's humble beginnings as a bedroom recording project, the album shows a maturity that marks it as the beginning of an exciting new era for the band.

Her uncommon, even singular approach to singing, recording, and writing, remains fully in evidence here.

The album is a bit more raw than previous, so expect more fan favorites than hit singles. Otherwise, this is business as usual, and business is absolutely gangbusters.

The album consists entirely of songs begging for a singer that could give them their own personality, to which Michele and company respond by making every song louder than the last.

With third full-length Atlas, Real Estate grow even further into the sound they've been spinning for themselves, mellowing more while they become more nuanced in both playing and production.

The album is a well-written love letter to yesterday's rock & roll. Though this means the album's sound isn't nearly as revelatory as the sonic assaults of their earlier work, the Men continue to prove that, above all, they're a band that know what they're doing, even if they don't know what they're doing next.

It's fun, frivolous, and low on excess.

Ten albums and 18 years on from their first show, the Drive-By Truckers are still capable of mixing things up and showing off new sides of their skill set, and that's certainly the case with English Oceans, which shows them making wise use of all their talents--not just Mike Cooley.

As with any meeting of pop and noise, Axxa/Abraxas can feel somewhat at odds with itself at times.

Without mellowing too deeply or becoming so serious that the songs aren't fun to listen to anymore, +/- turn in a fantastically studio-crafted album that communicates greater depth and more sophistication than any of their other work.

Damaged Bug is a celebration of the strange and often unstable world of analog electronics, and while there's considerably less "crash and bang" to the project than Dwyer's work with Coachwhips and Thee Oh Sees, it has a scuzziness that fans of the prolific noisemaker's other work will appreciate.

As a whole, Like It Never Happened benefits from its lower-budget production. It is, if anything, more imaginative than her previous albums.

As has always been the case, Transatlantic excel at making a four-piece sound like a marauding horde.

Doubled Exposure, recorded by Jason Meagher at Black Dirt Studios in upstate New York, has a rich, full, warm, and still live-sounding and edgy wash of grit all over it, and it is Speer's most accessible album yet, if accessible means one can't help being kind of fascinated by it.

Atkins has come a long way since her debut and without the distractions of a major label or a major break-up, she seems to be in the driver's seat and completely in control of her destiny, delivering her most artistic and confident album to date.

It's a sturdy, often absorbing record from a singer who is determined to be in it for the long haul.

Bluebird reveals Landes' healing process in emotionally raw, delicately crafted songs.

New Bums finds two decidedly specific songwriters' styles and voices mesh into something new and different. The combination results in a strange, haunted look into imagined desert scenes, cheap motels, and tales of depraved living, floating by on tunes so unassuming they disappear before the darkness ever truly sets in.

Exquisite stuff and not so far off the trip-hop universe that it sounds alien, but those wishing for revivalist music or a nostalgia trip back to the days of chillout rooms could be thrown by the album's forward-thinking and genre-expanding moments.