Ultimately, All the Women I Am it falls flat; it feels awkward in its stylistic mimicry, and has no center.

As a songwriter, Ubovich still seems to be getting his sea legs; many of these tracks seem to be more about jamming than delivering melodies that will stay with you after the record comes to a close.

While covers records are common, the taste, energy, and imagination Inter Arma apply to Garbers Days Revisited is anything but. As a whole, it stands head and shoulders with any recording in their catalog.

Sometimes it's hard to tell if Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune is meant to be some sort of parody of current R&B production techniques, or a conscious effort to upturn Swamp Dogg's music and send it someplace no one would expect to find it. Either way, it's obvious that Swamp Dogg still knows how to write a song, and even at the age of 76, he's still vital, passionate, and eager to throw a curveball at the expectations of anyone and everyone. Talk about Total Destruction to Your Mind.

Challengers is their biggest grower yet, a dense collection of carefully constructed pop and brain power pop.

As with most extreme death/doom albums verging on the funereal, this one requires a little patience, but the payoff is well worth it.

It has that same slightly unnerved but ultimately comforting effect, and like Neon Golden, you might want to take it everywhere with you, even when you can only replay it in your mind.

Where All Is Fled builds on Hauschildt's Berlin-school/kosmische influences while exploring new dimensions, resulting in his most immersive, accomplished solo work yet.

Omni deliver the songs with all the punch of a band twice their size. They beat the tar out of the sophomore slump and come away with another instant classic album.

Much of the album meanders and loses focus. When the band hit their mark, as they do when "Pictures of Today/Victory" ramps up, or with the strident, beat-heavy march of "Motionless Duties," it makes the process of digging through the rest of the scuzz worthwhile.

There are a few lesser moments, but they don't distract; Slipstream reveals Raitt at another creative peak.

This is the kind of album that can fully define her sound, but is still multifaceted and well crafted enough to be exciting.

No one surpasses her as a master of poetic regret, and few albums examine the peculiar beauty of depression with the skill she brings to Lost in Space.

In another regard, Rave On Buddy Holly is quite different. Encouraged by producer Randall Poster, the 19 artists involved do not settle for mere replications of Buddy's hits, they play fast and loose, sometimes radically reinterpreting the original.

Ware continues to express a multitude of emotions with superb elegance. The material, unfortunately, is on a lower plane.

While not a terrific album, the good often outweighs the occasional filler.

This mixture of clattering, ramshackle arrangements and smartly put-together tunes... is an intriguing new direction for a band that previously seemed more interested in artsy, diffident post-rock.

Thing of the Past succeeds on three different fronts. Certainly, excellent song selection is one, inspired musicianship and arrangements another, but the actual sound of the recording is equally important in putting Thing of the Past across.

Victory Shorts is an assured, confident, and quite often brilliant album by a band that is clearly influenced by the past but never falls prey to easy nostalgia.

There's a strong sense that Valley aims to reinterpret a kind of never-never land of angelic male singing and electronic-driven arrangements that seems to recombine a variety of impulses from the '80s into a combination that never could have existed until a later moment.... A strikingly good debut effort.

The Legendary Demos is a fantastic example of a collection of unreleased material that really works rather than some lackluster hodgepodge of archived filler.

Everything else is instrumental, and suited equally well to either careful listening or playing in the background when some of your hipper friends come over for dinner.

Mark Knopfler has brought some star power to The Sailor's Revenge, but he's also treated Bap Kennedy's skills as a performer and tunesmith with the care they deserve, and this is a dark but frequently beautiful set of Celtic-flavored contemporary folk.

Something that is notable throughout that's been a hallmark of the band's work is the attention to the drumming--for all that there's the flowing wash one might guess, there's also an actual sense of impact rather than simply skittering along.

A Different Arrangement might not be the kind of album that one could cozy up to on a sunny summer day, but on a cold, wintery night it just might be the kind of sound you want to hear as you burrow under the blankets.

This 2012 overview of Laibach has eight extra years to cover, and with one bonafide career highlight occurring during that time, the absolutely epic "B Mashina", which was a key feature of the Nazis-on-the-moon, dark comedy film Iron Sky.

Despite using occasional strings, steel drums euphonium, woodwinds, and even a mellotron, this is not a slick affair.

The control and variety they display throughout Long Distance Song Effects shows that Goldheart Assembly have come into their own here.