With a sharp ear for hooks, quirky phrasing tendencies, and visceral, spontaneous-sounding accompaniment, ultimately making Melt the Honey play out something like a guilty pleasure.

People Who Aren't There Anymore is another refinement rather than a reinvention or bold step forward. It feels slightly less glossy than some of their other 4AD releases, coming a little closer to the lo-fi textures of earlier albums, but from the perspective of artists who have been working hard for nearly two decades.

Fans may be relieved to learn that while Broom did ratchet up the intensity of their sound a notch in the studio, together they keep things raw, frank, fun, and friskily psychedelic on the resulting The Joy of Sects.

A careful listen reveals he's not shy about constructing a pousse café of six-string textures, but he's smart enough to know when to reign himself in, and most of the time Three Bells sound admirably open and dynamic, leaving just enough daylight between the overdubs to allow each to have some personality of its own.

While just about everything here is darkly anxious yet engaging, highlights include the line “Life’s just time chasing your mind with the body you get" (from "In the Red") and the bouncy, utterly infectious "Big Air," which, in keeping with the rest of the album, adds injury to elation: "I got big air/Flew and landed strange."

King Perry doesn't rank among the pioneering artist's classics, but it's an enjoyable late-period effort that reminds listeners of his adventurous spirit and inimitable character.

Robby Krieger & The Soul Savages is hip, relaxed, and confident. The quartet sounds like they're having an exceptionally good time and that translates to aural gold for the listener.

After a few more adequate songs without sonic or lyrical linearity -- a tender collaboration with simpatico Afrobeats producer/singer Pheelz stands out most -- the album hits its stride with a sequence of slow jams demonstrating that Usher is at the top of his game as a singer, still much more than a mere entertainer.

If one is looking for the more adventurous and off-kilter band of their earlier days, steer clear. If it’s introspective, somewhat epic country rock balladry one desires, then Blu Wav might be just the thing. It's certainly the band's most focused record to date and if that seems a little unexciting, the emotional payoff will make it worthwhile in the end.

The album is relatively streamlined and sleek, containing no guest appearances and showing no overt attempts at chasing trends.

It all works well together sonically and conceptually, resulting in an album that is Itasca's most cohesive and mystical yet -- and that's saying something.

A more playful, song-oriented set, if one where the lighter tone proves to be more than a little ironic.

It's not a return to form, a return to pop, or really a return of any kind, just a continuation of the band's blissfully weird frames of mind and a record that includes some of their strongest songs in years.

The piece ["Interstellar"] is easily the album's lightest and most optimistic moment, as the rest can feel cold, ominous, and sometimes challenging. Still, the album's more mysterious aspects make it worth hearing.

Half Divorced is Pissed Jeans' chosen form of therapy for folks who really, REALLY don't like Mondays. Or most of the rest of the week.

Skip the dogs, stick to the weird, raw, and experimental songs and Glasgow Eyes might be considered one of the band's best albums in a very long time. Add them back and it makes for a frustrating and exhilarating listening experience that's brutally honest, completely ridiculous, and in some ways it sums up everything good and bad about the Jesus and Mary Chain all on one slab of plastic.

Grey's voice is sometimes treated in a way to further emphasize the urgent bulletin-like quality of the material, but otherwise, this crackles with spontaneity, and the band at times plays with nearly the same ferocity displayed on some of their 1980-1982 output.

While Kaiser Chiefs aren't starting many riots these days, these shiny tunes will keep the body bouncing and the spirits high.

Scope Neglect is a disorienting, sometimes deceptive work, but it's thrilling in the way it dismantles genre tropes.

Bleachers occasionally borders on indulgent, but its tangents and loose ends are part and parcel of Antonoff's process -- and part of what makes it such a complete self-portrait.

Like the open-ended, amorphous production, the tunes all accentuate the record's general thrust of interior contentment. Musgraves, along with her regular collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, do manage to capture and sustain this delicate sensibility, creating a record that's every bit as pretty and memorable as gentle afternoon rain.

Girl Friends isn't a great Dion album, but it's certainly a good one, and worth a spin for anyone who digs the Pride of the Bronx. He's still got it, and you can hear it on Girl Friends.

Some of the tracks on Three cover similar territory, but overall, the album is much more tightly focused than the abstract yet personal Sixteen Oceans.

On Real Power, Gossip don't try too hard to recapture the past or fit in with the sound of the sound of the 2020s, and that's what makes it a dignified, down-to-earth return.

El Perro del Mar stares into chasms of being and nonbeing on Big Anonymous, calmly dictating back the horrors and revelations she sees in a steady voice.

Ohio Players isn't the most frantic celebration the Black Keys have delivered, but more than enough of it will get your body moving that it qualifies as a success.

While Echo Dancing is uneven, the hits outnumber the misses by a margin that qualifies this as a successful experiment.

While the Libertines still haven't fully seized the opportunity to define what they could be as veterans instead of upstarts, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade still sounds more like the product of a working band than Anthems for Doomed Youth did, and offers enough good and great moments to keep fans believing.