As an entry in Wilson's catalog, 4½ comes off as a fully considered EP, although leaving off "Year of the Plague" would have made it stronger. His obsessive attention to detail is everywhere in the production, but more than that, most of this provides fans with another fantastic showcase for his amazing band, excellent writing, and fine arranging.

It's certainly not an upbeat listen, nor are its myriad regional allusions easy to parse for non-Australians, but it engages enough on a cerebral level that it's consistently intoxicating, even at its most lethal.

It's heavy stuff, but it's delivered with the humility of someone who has enough road behind him now that the rear-view mirror is no longer a window into the past, but a seconds-old snapshot of the present.

The ambition on this first part of Prayers for the Damned is admirable. Better still, they often manage to take this roiling outrage and shape it into something melodramatically satisfying, an achievement that suggests why Sixx had no trouble saying goodbye to Mötley Crüe.

The balance between these quiet, thoughtful songs, the needle-bouncing rockers, and the jumping Monkees-ish pop of tracks like "Stick Your Hand Up if You're Louche" makes for a thrill ride of an album, and a better example of modern guitar pop than Cosmonaut is pretty hard to find no matter where one might look.

If Terraform does little to diminish the notion that Roberts is one of the best kept secrets of Canadian pop, it goes a long way in promoting the idea that it's never too late to make a new discovery.

Even if Goddard is occasionally too reverent on Electric Lines, his love of electronic music--and the way it brings people together--is undeniable and infectious.

Nau's delivery, if occasionally annoyed that the topics at hand aren't being handled better, remains unflustered, gravitating back toward calm appreciation. It's a high-humidity set for long summer days, present or imagined.

At once exploratory, expressive, physical, and reflective, On Circles never forsakes musicality for dramatic affect but achieves it in spades nonetheless.

It's hard to believe that after two decades together as a band Peter Bjorn and John are still making records as intense, energetic, inventive, and vital as Endless Dream.

While a bit muddled and confusing, the album certainly invites the audience to listen attentively and figure out their own interpretations.

It's fun, mischievous, and wildly enjoyable, Brettin and friends turning straight-laced soul-funk and Weather Channel jazz inside-out and dancing gleefully around the confusing and wonderful results.

Another step in the direction of propriety may have been one too many, as it stands Backhand Deals slides right into the corporate power pop timeline with just the right amount of vim and vigor.

Though it lacks the well-edited flow of Heartbreak, it shows Unloved can still push pop's boundaries with vivid results.

Now that they're veterans, Nickelback doesn't try so hard to be heavy, nor do they indulge in their tasteless side: they're craftsmen who know how to deliver the goods, which--on its own terms--Get Rollin' certainly does.

Other One feels like it was pulled through a wormhole from a universe where a committee writes Babymetal's metallic pop emissions, intent on flowing with the current instead of against it.

With A Modern Day Distraction, Bugg further establishes his reputation as a modern-day British rock troubadour.

. isn't just a good album, it's a decisively great one, full stop.

Whether or not Wild at Heart stands as Diamond's final album, it completes a tidy trilogy of Rubin-produced records that are among the most satisfying of his long career.

Without reinventing the wheel too much, Newcombe delivers another slice of his breed of highly evolved rock & roll genius with this album, further polishing his ever dangerous songwriting skills and offering a vivid spectrum of production, stylistic distractions, and psychedelic black holes for the listener to get swallowed up by.

With The Digging Remedy, Plaid remain eclectic as ever, keeping their oddness and exploratory nature intact.

Pollard truly delivers the goods with his album, and he's advised to follow this method more often, since it sure seems to work for him.

Even though Old Friends New Friends doesn't contain any obvious epics similar to the most well-known pieces from Frahm's ambitious albums like All Melody and Spaces, there's still an abundance of highlights, and even his smaller-scale works can resonate in a big way.

Still in command of strong technical skills and now rapping over instrumentals crafted with bigger budgets, Cordae falls short when he starts sounding a little too comfortably at home in the mainstream.

Its seven tracks are rhythmically labyrinthine, unhurried in tempo, with clamping drums and cosmic synthesizers that burble, prance, and sometimes create a sense of menace.

Vocalist/guitarist Emma Pollock has crafted one the group's [the Delgados] finest efforts to date, albeit as a solo artist.

On In Between they ditch any SY trappings and go full shoegaze, removing much of the energy and dialing the tempos down to mid. It works really well, allowing the band to create a mood of wistful, well-produced melancholy that builds and builds until the album ends in a swirl of barely expressed emotion and guitar clatter.

Given how good the Felices are at what they do, fans are still likely to enjoy Life in the Dark's rambling take on American roots music, but casual observers might find their minds wandering by the time the album makes it into its final innings.