This is a sweet-sounding album with subtle depths, not really bluegrass, but a precisely gentle folk album that grows more graceful and revealing with each listen.

If anything, it feels like alt-country's answer to stoner metal (and a decidedly healthier one at that), providing the listener with a soundtrack that's as tailor-made for hazy summer afternoons as it is for the inky black curtain of night.

With New History Warfare, Vol. 3, Stetson explores scorched landscapes and heavenly scenes alike with his stylized playing.

This is just one of those albums that works great either as a stoney throwback or a party-starter.

Dramatic and sweeping, the Las Vegas band works in the same vein as pop giants Coldplay, offering up track after track of hooky and emotional midtempo jams.

This focus on ambience really makes Sky Burial feel like it exists in a very specific, and very secluded, space, and while you probably wouldn't want to live there, it's amazing to visit.

Raw Solutions is a smooth and occasionally stirring continuation that switches tacks with such frequency that pigeon-hole evasion seems like a conscious goal.

It's classic pop music for people who have never bothered with classic pop, which is reason enough to check this out.

To Dust is body music for the spirit, a celebration of all that is human. It is the record that should finally put her over to a mass audience.

X'ed Out is more fleshed-out, listenable, and revelatory than one could ever expect.

Two of her first album's many attractive attributes were the subtle and surprising twists in song structure and seamless genre fusions. They're in steady supply her.

Bruni's songwriting is deceptive in its limpid simplicity, full of reverie, wit, and the directness of her breathy voice, which is well traveled but contains delight at its heart.

With one foot in the constantly building atmospherics and experimentation of groups like Explosions in the Sky and the other in the openhearted optimism of the emo scene that they grew out of, Appleseed Cast offer up some of their best work to date on Illumination Ritual.

OK, it may not be not that timeless, but it's still high quality work from a youngster who is off to a fine start in the indie rock game.

If the production had been a little more restrained and the band had written a few songs that didn't sound like they were meant to be played by U2 after a couple days spent listening to Top 40 radio, the album might not have been quite the heavy and ponderous thing it is.

These are languid, gorgeously crafted tracks that find the band delving even deeper than on Shapeshifting into an atmospheric, slow-burn aesthetic that holds up on repeated listens.

It's undeniable that the album takes his gift for channeling dread in subtler, more complex directions and deserves to be listened to under headphones in total darkness.

Reincarnated the album is all heart and heart-in-the-right-place, threatening to mash up the system without ever even harshing the mellow.

Bankrupt! isn't nearly as devoid of new ideas as its title suggests, but it doesn't feel like quite the leap forward Wolfgang was compared to what came before it. Not that it necessarily needs to be.

A fuller, more focused version of the sound they introduced on Fields, this set of songs is worthy of being Junip's namesake album.

Turner's big expressive voice and gift for everyman poetry loom large over the proceedings, but there's a newfound musical effusiveness at play here as well, due in part to some tastefully simple yet sharp production from Rich Costey.

Measured, melancholy, and mysterious, Jones' debut as a singer/songwriter is as subtle as it is striking, skillfully marrying the sedate melancholy of Elliott Smith with the sly, darkly comic lyricism of The National.

Lacking real excitement, verve, or even the stupid type of fun we're used to from him, will.i.am sounds remarkably like his heart isn't in it throughout the record, bored on the job even though it's his job to get the party started.

Spring and Fall is a record for heartaches and healing, another understated gem from a singer/songwriter whose catalog is littered with them.

In their best moments, No Joy not only expand on these ideas, but improve on them.

The results, though often feeling abrupt and sometimes overly academic, are mostly warm and curious, stretching out in eternal open-endedness that isn't really looking for answers or understandable conclusions.

It's an entertaining, vibrant, and artistically filling album, so consider it a "presents" effort and enjoy the show.

Resilience mostly lives up to the promise of its moniker, delivering another well-executed, purely fan-centric collection of testosterone-fueled, post-grunge/processed metal jams with a complete disregard for subtlety.