With each track designed as a showcase for the featured guest, Mean Old Man winds up playing a little like a collection of moments but it's hard to complain when the moments prove that you can still be vigorous and vital at the age of 74.

Most of the album stays sludgy though, and Seeing Eye Dog tends to drag more than it hits.

While they might miss some of the drive that the band brought to the table in their earlier work, the depth of slower and more spacious songs like "Take Me (As You Found Me)" should ultimately prove more rewarding in the long run.

As an experimental piece of electronic music, Old Punch Card is an engaging and soothing album that will reward the open-minded and baffle anyone who expected the album to carry on in vein of his previous, more Sea and Cake-like efforts.

If Everything Under the Sun often seems a bit candy coated, it's a high grade of confectionary that they serve, and most folks who get a taste of this album are likely to come back for more.

It's always great to see a band that's able to tweak its sound without watering it down, and that's exactly what Stone Sour have accomplished here, showing that it's possible for hard rock bands to make their sound bigger without necessarily making it blunter.

Fin Eaves' mix doesn't have anything in it you haven't heard before, but you've never heard the elements put together like this before, either. It's a powerful, massively textured thing whose heavily treated grooves (yes, grooves) are drenched in ambiguous, deeply poetic beauty.

Our Cubehouse Still Rocks has no shortage of guitar firepower, and with tough six-string snarl dominating much of the album, these 16 songs have more than enough rock & roll muscle to give shape and power to Pollard's pop-flavored melodies.

What really sets Disturbed apart from other 21st century metal acts is their ability to consistently re-package and resell their sound in a way that avoids redundancy.

Its casualness sometimes surfaces in its tossed-off jokes or sing-song melodies, but that only underscores that Jenny & Johnny are having a good time -- and it's a good time that's easy to share even if one of the hosts doesn't quite hold up his own end of the bargain.

Red Velvet Car has something of a meditative mood -- the punchy Townshend power chords are used as color, not fuel -- triggered somewhat by a preponderance of textured, acoustic-laden arrangements and miniature epics, all elements that hearken back to Heart's golden age yet wind up feeling right in line with their vibe in 2010.

Like most live albums, Dream Attic is more about the playing than the material, which is a bit different from the way a new Richard Thompson set works, but when it captures a band this good playing with this authority, that's hardly anything to fret about.

Bingham has delivered a set of songs that mirrors our uncertain times in a musical language that doesn't unduly distort or romanticise them.

Something for the Rest of Us is an album to play on the drive home.

Minotaur is as essential as anything else the band has released and whether as part of Bonfires or on its own, the record stands as a welcome addition to their legacy as one of the great indie pop bands of their era.

These largely acoustic songs, occasionally embellished with electronics and other effects, are geared for a quiet evening spent alone. Subtle, touching albums like this should be made more often, preferably by Selway and his associates here.

It's a macho, muscular attack that fits the braggadocio of the title yet it's hard not to shake that this alt-metal grind feels like a forewarning of a Y2K annihilation, not something suited for a decade into the new millennium.

To sum it all up succinctly, there is no shortage of psychedelic jams to be found throughout Quest for Fire's Lights from Paradise.

All Birds Say isn't concerned with aping anyone else's sound, though, and it wields the sort of casual confidence that's rarely heard on a sideman's solo project. If Carl Broemel ever decides to quit his day job, he's got a promising future here.

Ultimately, Beautiful Dreamers is a wonderfully balanced trio exercise.

If you were figuring that the Murderdolls were going to expand musically upon what they laid down on their debut album, Women and Children Last will prove your assumption wrong--they're sticking as close to their original vision as possible.

Strange Weather may get some static for not being groundbreaking or risk taking but that's okay. It's just !!! at their best and that's good enough.

Fantasia doesn't invest the songs with subtle emotion so much as she indulges in balls-out emotional overdrive, overloading these simple songs with histrionics that are compelling in the short term and even if they're exhausting over the long haul these full-throttle pyrotechnics make Back to Me her most interesting album.

Rivers isn't as immediate as either Heartcore or The Snake, but fans should find it satisfying once they've had time to let it soak into their ears, brains and hearts. Rivers isn't as immediate as either Heartcore or The Snake, but fans should find it satisfying once they've had time to let it soak into their ears, brains and hearts.

The album itself is almost incidental to the self-styled fantasy that Katy Perry sells with this entire project.

Hawk isn't as startling [as Ballad of the Broken Seas], but it's encouraging to know that the magic between Campbell and Lanegan not only hasn't worn off, it's manifesting itself in new and compelling ways.

While some of this album feels a bit rushed at times, as a whole Tomorrow Morning is a welcome contrast to the darkness of its predecessors, and a deft summertime pop record. Lord knows, a little optimism in these strange times is welcome--even if it comes from an unlikely source.

For the most part, Versus falls in line with its parent release's mix of detached hedonism and pleading heartache.