Little was done to clean them up: they're rough, woolly, and loose, but they rock.

If you want to know why Snider has a loyal and growing following as a live act, Live: The Storyteller will tell you all you need to know about his rapport with a crowd and his way of making his songs and stories come to life.

These may be Bird songs, but they are not played the way Bird played them. Lovano and crew tend to slow them down and consider them, as if appending musical footnotes; if Parker was the quintessential bebop player, this is a determinedly post-bop interpretation.

A firebrand debut album, Talk About Body celebrates the struggle and freedom in defying easy classification.

All in all, Stay Home is a step up from the Beets' debut, though it's hard not to imagine they're going to have to face the choice of either learning to play or hitting the creative wall some time in the future.

Life Coach is surprisingly mellow considering the heavier and louder sounds Manley has pursued for most of his career, but it's never boring: the way it encompasses the pop and avant sides of his music will please fans of his other work.

While there are a few moments where Violet Cries' potent atmosphere turns meandering and atonal, this is still a promising and often captivating debut from a band with a bold sound.

Mostly, though, the album is burst after burst of cheerful, weird pop songs that will have you in a state of nostalgic happiness.

Any band can go out, buy the right pedals (or dial up the right effects on a computer), and come up with a reasonable facsimile of the shoegaze sound, but it takes a band with extra skill and imagination to make it sound fresh and vital like No Joy do on Ghost Blonde.

Mayfield's songs are darker, with more discontent, and all contain elements of the subtly sinister or perverse.

It's true that Tre3s still finds Chikita Violenta seeking a sound completely their own, but they're closer than ever, due in large part to the improved quality of the songwriting and arrangements.

At times, it almost feels like too much at once, but the band's music is so buoyant that to bring it down to earth too much would be a shame.

Perhaps it lacks ballast and gestalt, but Bright Eyes arguably operates better on a smaller scale, trading pretension for fractured pop that cuts into the cranium with skewed precision.

It's a melting pot to be sure, and the band has a tendency to go heavy on the atmosphere and light on the hooks, but there's never any doubt that it's a brew tended over by some awfully talented cooks.

While Savage and Kelly clearly get big kicks from genre-jumping and trying to trip out listeners, "Baby Boomer," "Michael Kelly," and "The World Never Stops" show that they can rock earnestly as well.

Jonny's 2011 self-titled debut is a collection of bright, literate, and catchy '60s-influenced pop.

Dulli thrives on atmosphere, and while his inability to write the kind of sharp hooks or memorable choruses that have elevated other semi-dystopian malcontents into the relative mainstream is evident throughout the album, that sense of place makes Dynamite Steps feel less like a collection of songs and more like a long, dangerous, and unpredictable night on the town.

It's a confident debut, bristling with energy.

So while this disc is clearly aimed at Killswitch fans, anybody with an appreciation for modern metal and hard rock generally could find much to like here.

Lowery might not want to make a career out of his serious side, but The Palace Guards shows he can wise up and still make music that's smart and satisfying.

Grown Unknown explores a kind of lost elegance: it's half drowned-in-gorgeous-reverb country of the kind Gram Parsons could nod sagely at, half stately post-'60s rock & roll as elegant mood music via the Band rather than Roxy Music.

Sounding grand and intimate at the same time isn't easy, but on Old Friends, I Was a King make it seem as simple and as pleasurable as walking barefoot through the grass on a warm day.

These are the album's best songs, but the rest are good, too, and the whole is a worthy addition to the ever-growing catalog of sly Texas country-rock.

Doin' It Again is unlikely to cross over in the same way as its several collaborators have done, but hardcore grime fans should be satisfied that at least one of their originators hasn't surrendered to the ubiquitous electro-pop sound just yet.

Much of the album is ruminative in a way that leans heavily on Dylan and Costello. Despite these echoes, the album is quite clearly Geldof's creation.

The Year of Magical Drinking is a solid pop album in its own right, with all the economic hooks of a Fountains of Wayne record but none of that band's antiseptic production.

Genre-hopping, Indianapolis-based singer/songwriter Liz Janes' fourth studio album for Asthmatic Kitty plays fast and loose with traditional indie pop themes.

For 12 Desperate Straight Lines, the songs are still there, only this time some of the looseness of the self-produced sessions comes into play and the end result ends up being a marked improvement.