Like its predecessor, the album revels in the dark and danceable timbres of English, German, and American clubs circa Joy Division, Suicide, early Cabaret Voltaire, et al.

Taken together, they're still a bit of a mess but the joy in The Third Eye Centre is that it presents Belle & Sebastian at their most human and ungainly.

The giddy quality may stick more than do individual songs, but they succeed in capturing some of the wooziness of new love.

in•ter a•li•a is solid enough and more refined than its predecessor, but will nevertheless disappoint those attacking it through the lens of Relationship.

Their music is solid, Southern-style meat-and-potatoes rock at its best; it's a formula they've mastered over the years, and Lean Forward shows it's still delivering soul-satisfying results more than a decade and a half on.

Into the Diamond Sun shows the trio has its own ear for how to combine and recombine those elements [moody psychedelic jamming, entrancing female vocals and slow-burn tunefulness], not least thanks to a balance of sprightly clarity and sudden shifting in the arrangements that feels more like a hip-hop mix transposed onto past approaches than just a jam.

Altogether, LNZNDRF do their post-punk revivalism very proficiently, from textures to musicianship, creating solid fodder for headphone meditations or basement gatherings of any size.

While Serpentina manages to add some fresh highlights to Banks' catalog, it never veers too far from her established formula, for better or worse.

Written on a toy Casiotone, with fleshed-out productions later recorded in London with her co-producer and partner, James Howard, the album reflects those struggles more in lyrics than in its graceful, subtly underworldly, and frequently Baroque sound.

Madame X not only amply rewards such close listening, but its daring embrace of the world outside the U.S. underscores how Madonna has been an advocate and ally for left-of-mainstream sounds and ideas throughout her career.

While Middle Kids showed plenty of promise on their 2017 debut EP, Lost Friends is where they show they can make a proper album and actually improve on their bag of musical tricks, and it's a strong and engaging work.

While Broadway fans wait, they and others who can embrace the album's occasional leaps in tone have another distinctly Spektor song set to enjoy. Ultimately, the sweetness that's always been as much a part of her musical persona as quirkiness overrides any embellishment, offering a touch of drama without pretension.

As super-stylized as its sounds and emotions are, Saturdays=Youth always seems genuine, even when it feels like its songs are made from the memories of other songs.

Widow City's major accomplishment is how it captures the band's live power and sheds some of their mannered studio sound. It rocks hard, and often.

Elefant frontman Diego Garcia must have memorized nearly every song by the Cure while he was growing up, because his band's debut album, Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid, is a shameless, abstract pop mix, a solid indie pop record heavy in new wave aesthetics.

There are too many stumbles and missed opportunities to consider the album anything but disappointing.

Sometimes being bad can be more fun than being good, and on Phosphene Dream The Black Angels hit that sweet spot more often than not.

Self Made 2 is an interesting mix of in-house and all-star, and another reason to take Ross the ring-leader seriously.

Diluvia offers up a perfectly rendered snapshot of the cresting East Coast indie pop scene, conjuring up images of nomadic laptop studios, vintage bicycles, endless stacks of tattered Tor paperbacks, and heavily tattooed, non-smoking urbanites noshing on locally grown produce.

The ultimate irony and triumph of Record Collection, is that on an album all about how Ronson's own obsessive music tastes have defined his life, we finally hear him step away from the turntable and produce one of the best albums of his career.

Rad Times Xpress IV is some of Herrema's most cohesive music with any of her projects, and Black Bananas pull off the neat trick of sounding quintessential and like a rebirth at the same time.

Adiós ultimately seems more like a coda than a grand farewell, with the album displaying a suitable modesty that suits the somewhat reduced circumstances of the artist. But it's also a potent reminder of Glen Campbell's talent, style, and musical legacy, and this album is the recorded curtain call he truly deserves.

Electric Six's m.o. of inflating rock clichés to grotesque proportions, adding a dash of tongue-in-cheek pomposity, and then laughing at the results can generate more than just a great single. Granted, that single is still the reason to own Fire, but fans of that song probably won't feel burned by the rest of the album.

At times, the intense-yet-underdeveloped feel of Lay of the Land makes it a claustrophobic experience, but its quieter moments, such as "No Questions" and the angular finale "Fog," still throw off sparks while allowing a little more breathing room.

They're fresh and clean, delivering spiky cut riffs while lyrics are unpretentious about love and heartbreak.

Seems oddly lacking in passion.

One of his most consistent and accomplished albums, sounding better with each repeated play.

Graceless he may be, but Timberlake is nevertheless kind of fascinating on FutureSex/LoveSounds since his fuses a clear musical vision -- misguided, yes, but clear all the same -- with a hammyness that only a child entertainer turned omnipresent 21st century celebrity can be.