Think of it as a conceptual street release made for Styles and/or Scram fans and Float succeeds splendidly.

It's difficult to say how good this musical is just from the songs and pieces of dialogue presented here, but the songs have a weary, inevitable flow to them, as if fate forced them into a dark room with little light or air or chance of redemption.

It may not be Rogue Wave's best record, since Out of the Shadows still holds that honor, but it is the record that is the best at showing all the sides of Rogue the songwriter and Rogue Wave the band, and for that it is well worth checking out.

Few songwriters can capture the bleak comedy of loneliness, bitterness, and the sheer helplessness that accompanies aging than Merritt, and he does so here with great aplomb.

Evil Friends offers ample evidence that the match between Portugal. The Man and Burton expanded the horizons of both parties and will likely heighten the band's profile considerably.

While Coco and Hannibal are doing it a little less softly now, they're still killing 'em.

Here it results in some of their best and most confident work to date.

Even if the album is more comforting than exciting, it's still an enjoyable portrait of Friedberger's artistry: warm, genuine and a little mischievous.

With Selfhood, Sharks have come into their own as a band, one that’s grown past the simple sturm und drang of punk's three-chord limitations and emerged as something even more inspiring.

If you're a fan of autumnal pop that wears its heart on its sleeve as it shouts its feelings out to anyone who will listen and you're not a fan of these guys, The Greatest Generation is here to realign your priorities for you.

The by-the-numbers production goes hand in hand with the bandmembers' tailored playing and thickly stylized vocals, hitting all the marks of emphatic country-enamored rock on tracks like the Toupin-fronted "Houston Train," a tale of being strung out, riding the hard-luck rails.

While these few songs ["Losing a Friend" and "That Girl, That Scene"] threaten to derail the album, the rest of the set is more unified, offering an understated but brilliant celebration of both Frankie & the Heartstrings' unique songwriting and their catalog of classic pop influences.

Even if it doesn't always demand listeners' attention, Immunity is never less than thoughtfully crafted.

If the album isn't quite a classic, it does represent its time in an unhurried, unselfconscious way: this is what big-budget rock sounded like in the mid-'70s, and expanding it to such an extravagant size doesn't hurt it because it always was bigger and bolder than its competitors.

Package it all together in an album that's sensibly sized and runs smooth as silk, and the evolving and growing Mount Kimbie remain a keeper.

Overall, these songs are a fine reintroduction to a band that has worked hard to emphasize its strengths and come up with new ones.

As this excellent introductory comp proves, no matter which sonic path he chooses here, or will choose in the future, Furlow's songcraft and skill at coming up with hummable, strummable songs will serve him well and make fans of pop music with a little grit and gunk quite happy.

The density of the album might take a while to sink into, but its catchiness will keep the listener returning to try to crack the code.

The 11 songs breeze by quickly, cultivating a mood so generous and warm that listening to the album feels like a friend smiling and waving from across the room at the first party of the summer.

Other Life, while being a solid album, falls short of being any type of definitive statement about his place in the landscape of his scene or the world at large.

Alice in Chains are now firmly entrenched in their middle age and settling into what they do best: retaining their signature without pandering and, tellingly, without succumbing to the darkness that otherwise defines them.

Eisley rarely come off as cloying, and while Currents may require a little more patience from the listener than on previous outings, it's well worth the investment.

Homme has marshaled all of his strengths on ...Like Clockwork and has found a way forward, a way to deepen his music without compromising his identity.

Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and White Denim's D are examples of similar-sounding albums that successfully pushed the respective bands outside their comfort zones, and Saltwater takes Brazos to a new plateau in the same way.

Considering the Black Dog's immense volume of output over the previous few years, it's remarkable that the group's attention to detail and uniquely stern sound remains. And yet, for all the output that preceded it, Tranklements isn't merely another Black Dog album.

These songs also reflect how When Saints Go Machine have expanded and enriched their sound on Infinity Pool even more than Konkylie might have suggested.

Ultraviolet represents a further refinement of the new direction they've been heading in, making it not only the bands most accessible work to date, but also their most purposefully written and solidly constructed, putting it in the running for the best album of their career.

He's never been one for lyrical subtlety, but this set contains several stretches of monotonous, joyless carnality.