The Russian Wilds is Howlin Rain's most accessible recording, but enormous ambition and musical mastery of rock & roll's mighty past make it an essential one, too.

Arrow is a brave and powerful work from an artist who isn't about to give up on her vision, regardless of where it takes her.

It's not a deep, demanding album, but it is a pleasant, often charming listen.

Tennis are making some of the best pop music around in 2012, and that's plenty good enough.

Dense, powerful, wild, yet immaculately rendered, Animal Joy blends the expansive, cinematic scope of contemporaries like Other Lives and the National with the arty drama of "San Jacinto"-era Peter Gabriel.

Even when Wire focuses on their not-so-classic material, they sound great in a live environment.

It's a much more focused and intriguing follow-up that may provide a much-needed shot in the arm for the guitar-bass-drums three-piece formula.

This is a worthy follow-up to its predecessor and, for all of its melodic sheen, darker and moodier.

Anyone with a little distance from their own pain will find much to admire in the honesty and craft of the album.

The third outing from the Punch Brothers picks up right where 2010's Antifogmatic left off, offering up another quality set of offbeat sophisti-grass that blends the whirlwind musicianship of Béla Fleck & the Flecktones, the spirited delivery of the Louvin Brothers, and the cinematic urban melancholy of Jeff Buckley into a sometimes impenetrable but always fascinating.

The Bats have managed to maintain a ridiculously high level of quality throughout their career, and Free All the Monsters is as good a record as they've ever made.

The whole is a portrait of a collective creative spirit that sounds as unsettled and fascinating as when the original recordings were made.

O'Brien helps them articulate their ideas, giving them definition and muscle, attributes that are appealing when the songs lack distinct hooks.

Libraries retains nearly everything that was memorable about the Love Language's debut as it improves on what McLamb accomplished before.

Intimate without being voyeuristic, and approachable without being patronizing, sparse without being cold, Barchords manages to balance all of these elements beautifully, merging plaintive folk and bluesy soul with just enough pop to make the whole thing go down smoothly.

Each track has its own kind of hushed and easy-flowing grace to it.

A calling-card track like their debut's "Enter the Ninja" is absent, making this album more an exciting celebration for established fans than an easy entry point.

These tougher remnants of the rootsy, down-home Up on the Ridge are enough to turn Home into a record that resonates longer and louder than Feel That Fire even when it shares much of the same radio-ready DNA.

It delivers the goods with its collection of summery jams while keeping nothing, not even the chord progressions, secret.

Six Cups of Rebel is chock-full of the kind of bizarre, cartoonish, sci-fi lunacy and cheekily maximalist, gonzo musical odysseys they've made their stock-in-trade.

One of the more riveting and idiosyncratic tribute albums of the past ten years.

Trailer Trash Tracys' try-anything attitude overpowers the actual songs, but that doesn't stop Ester from being a fascinating and often haunting debut that just whets the appetite for more.

Singles shows that their craftsmanship and good taste may have been their most defining quality.

An album that feels looser without ever feeling lazy.

Tramp offers plenty for listeners to enjoy as she goes.

This is a treat not just for Air fans, but aficionados of film music and science fiction, too.

Instead of trying to fit into the past, Van Halen are using their history to revive their present and they succeed surprisingly well on A Different Kind of Truth.

No One Can Ever Know reaffirms that the Twilight Sad are unafraid of challenging themselves or their listeners, and for better or worse, there's something admirable about that uncompromising attitude.