These are brightly produced songs perfectly suited to Midler's vocal style, stage bravado, and cheeky sense of humor.

Nothing Important's best moments clearly belie its title.

Songs like "Transparent Powers" and "Selfish Thoughts" find this variety of musical muses floating by beneath Amos' emotive, Will Oldham-esque howl.

Palme doesn't mince words; its pleasures are meticulously crafted and perfectly executed, and they succeed or fail based only on which way the listener falls in regards to Arnalds idiosyncratic voice, much like Joanna Newsom's.

Still, being 16 tracks long and Ross' second album of the year means mixtape gimmicks like "Heavyweight" ("I step into the ring/Ding! Ding!") get to graduate to an official track list and muddle up the flow. They only keep the often surprising Hood Billionaire off the top shelf of Ross releases, so bring some patience as this mixed bag is certainly worth sorting.

A smart and resourceful exercise in pop that works on several levels, Springtime Carnivore is an impressive calling card from an artist who clearly has interesting things up her sleeve.

His castoffs and extras equal other people's gold, and $ingle$ 2 is worth its weight in trash.

Each of these albums is full of Cooder's superb, goose pimple-inducing guitar work and rich musical thinking, but given how impressive his film work has been, Soundtracks is a fine collection but ultimately something of a disappointment.

More versatile and more deliberate, this new set of tunes sees Rhyton finding their collective voice more than ever before.

Decades after their freewheeling beginnings, Just Us still shows a picture of a band as playful as it is fearless, willing to pick up any object, idea, or unlikely concept and transform it effortlessly into something strange and captivating.

The digital kick drum sounds wander across the stereo field as Ambarchi deftly mixes in sounds ranging from his own haunted guitar harmonics to synth gurgling from Jim O'Rourke and even long stretches of heavily lingering string arrangements from the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.

Ultimately, with Creation, the Pierces have delivered a lovingly crafted album that showcases their creative growth.

Given that Nelson had built a remarkable career out of mostly doing just what he feels like, this album, charming as it is, isn't as revealing as it might have been coming from other major country artists, though for Willie's die-hard fans, it's a must and it is a sweet reminder of how much Bobbie Nelson has brought to Willie's music over the years.

All these flights of fancy fly freely since the album lacks an anchor. 2014 Forest Hills Drive comes off as a great, experimental, and advancing mixtape, but it's insider to a fault, as slight as that fault might be.

Black Beauty is one of the strongest and most consistent albums of his hard rock period, and if it isn't quite a lost classic, it's the missing link between Vindicator and Love's Reel to Real; it's nearly as good as the former and genuinely superior to the latter.

They give these tracks the same emotional push they give to those on their "real" songs, and that means their fans should lap it up like hot chocolate on a freezing cold night.

By the time the tense album closer "Rice and Fish" arrives, Tarwater have deftly transformed what could have been a claustrophobic mire of sounds into a deceptively simple-sounding pastiche of sounds dark and unexpected.

The majority of the workmanlike Between the Stars, deftly juggles the muscular and the melodic without breaking a sweat in the process.

Ixora (the name comes from a type of flowering plant common in Florida) finds Copeland embracing a more mature subject matter than they did on their early albums (as befits men in their mid-thirties), but with the same moody and thoughtful musical approach that marked their best-known work.

There's a wan, vaguely Everyman lyricism at work here as well, which makes some of the slower numbers a bit of a chore, but when the band lets it rip, as in the case of top-down, desert road jams like "Hey I Don't Know," "It's a Good Life," and the aforementioned "Come with Me," Lunatic earns the shifty weight of its unhinged moniker.

Beneath their poppier melodies and anthemic choruses underlies the D.I.Y. garage-rock ethic that inspired their quick ascent, and it's this mixture that places them firmly between the pop charts and dingy rock club basements.

The results are more intriguing than a mere collection of odds 'n' sods or remixes.

Clunkers aside, Magic Mountain comes closer than any previous offering in providing the kind of excitement Black Stone Cherry generate live, and showcases their most refined songwriting to date.

[Chad Kroeger's] shifting his band away from its antiquated post-grunge into a sound that is self-consciously fresher and mature. It's not only a commercially canny move, it generates the best Nickelback record to date.

Far from consigning her to one-hit wonder territory, the blend of strength of personality and music-biz savvy on Title shows that Meghan Trainor is clever enough to parlay a big hit into a real career.

Neatly tied together by opening and closing cuts that include Stevie Wonder on harmonica, because Ronson could swing it, Uptown Special is another nostalgic fantasy that provides light entertainment and provokes backtracking.

Somewhat disorienting, MIFLSA is a messy, incredible collection of damaged pop, and shows a band that's been forming for a while stepping into its full capabilities.

By singing these songs as sweet and straight as the dusty old standards on Glad Rag Doll or the bossa nova on 2009's Quiet Nights, she demonstrates how enduring these once-dismissed soft rock tunes really are.