While Trans Am's need to express their political views and their cliché-busting approach are both admirable, unfortunately their ways of expressing their dissent aren't all that inspired.

Where Director's Cut was a variation of different '70s film themes, Delirium Cordia is a score to Patton's own horror imagination.

The slower tracks don't match up to their opposites, or even the bittersweet midtempo cut 'Alienated,' but they're not enough of a snag to prevent the album from being one of 2009's most replayable R&B releases.

Moby's most unified and understated album, and all the better for it, Wait for Me is a morose set of elegantly bleary material, quite a shift from the hedonistic club tracks of "Last Night."

Because the album is so continuously lush and candy-coated with a shoegaze gleam, no particular song really sticks out. Instead, hooks surface slowly from the electro-wash, rewarding repeated listens.

Ode to Sentience sports elegant, graceful chamber-folk arrangements that make the most of the space between the instruments.

Fans need not worry; colorful, variously world music-infused, psychedelic, and ultra-rhythmic, I Need New Eyes retains Larry Gus' somewhat warped artfulness, and the relatively more coherent presentation may attract at least a few more willing ears.

Like the EP, it frustrates almost as much as it charms, but Raury's energy is ceaselessly positive, and his potential is abundant.

Their songwriting shows growth, their vocals remain flawless, the production team continues to throw the occasional curveball to go along with the softballs, and there are plenty of songs that sound like the best pop music has to offer in 2015.

Like any good album for the information age, Soul Punk is overloaded well past the point of saturation and its merciless in its attack, so it can be a bit overbearing, yet there's a real, vivid imagination behind its crystalline clamor.

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.

From start to finish, Let It Be You is a collection of appealingly loose, lush songs full of creativity.

The sound is pretty awe-inspiring, with huge molten streams of guitars, thundering drums, swirling voices, and all sorts of keyboards, sound effects, and stray noises combining together into a great, layered wall of sound that rivals My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless in terms of sonic construction.

If it's a long way from a triumph, it's a solid, heartfelt work from a veteran artist who isn't about to give up the ghost.

R.Y.C. is scattered and uneasy, but considering its subject matter and the emotions it expresses, it seems like it couldn't have turned out any other way, so it sounds undeniably genuine.

The endlessly bending array of guitar tones that make up Yeah Right still sounds raw and unrefined, trying to lock its unwieldy buzzing and blurring in with Everton and Garcia's gift for pop melodies. While the record isn't without its moments, these warring elements often do more to obscure than complement one another.

As a cohesive work, The Beekeeper holds together better than nearly any of Tori's more ambitious albums, but there's a certain artsy distance that keeps this from being as emotionally immediate or as memorable as her first two records.

Little was done to clean them up: they're rough, woolly, and loose, but they rock.

With Rush!, Måneskin make good on their Eurovision rock promise, delivering an album that's campy, inspired, and thrilling all at the same time.

Sawdust does indeed contain some moments of grand pomp, but its scattershot nature works against the band as it winds up emphasizing the lingering question from "Sam's Town," that the group has a hell of a lot of ideas but they just don't know what the hell to do with them.

It Kindly Stopped for Me is no easy listen, and its mostly mumbled outpourings don't leap out of the speakers, but it is intensely honest, which is something we don't hear often enough.

There's still a fair amount of skippable tracks here. Despite this, Goldie remains a hero and an inspirational figure, and even if The Journey Man doesn't quite stack up to Timeless, it's still a respectable effort, and its best moments confirm the man's legendary status.

A firebrand debut album, Talk About Body celebrates the struggle and freedom in defying easy classification.

They've embraced their schoolboy selves and are simply singing songs of love and good cheer, albeit on a grand scale that somehow seems smaller due to the group's insuppressible niceness.

It's a highly polished, professional sounding debut, with Lewis hitting all the right notes even when she warbles up and down the scale.

Solid and pleasing, if somewhat predictable.

As far as guest rappers, old friends like Teddy Riley, Keith Murray, Redman, Havoc, plus an especially on fire KRS-One are here, making this album short on new developments but greatly appealing to those who long for the way it used to be.

This is the problem that bands face when they go from the thrill of making the first record to the grind of having to produce something equal or better than their debut. Not too many groups can pull it off; add the 1990s to the long list of bands who have failed.