Fans of any of Mason's earlier projects will find something to love on what is easily the gifted popsmith's best solo effort to date.

Though 99 Cents is Santigold's most accessible work yet, it feels like the mainstream meeting White on her terms rather than vice versa, and the results are often irresistible.

Raitt's signature slide guitar is back out front; it shines throughout the recording. Her earthy singing voice, with just a hint of time's grain, is more disciplined and holds more emotional authority than ever before. It soars through a song collection balanced between rough, rowdy rockers and searing ballads.

The bookends are tracks that aim to be masterworks and fall just one step short, but everything in between is delightful, stunning, or both, making the album's title less than one-tenth apt, and Macklemore & Lewis both emo under-promisers and Grammy-worthy over-deliverers.

It's not quite Hunx and it's definitely not punk, but Seth Bogart is a blast.

As produced by her daughter and family friend, Lynn is in good, trusting hands who wish to present her at her best and, more or less, that's precisely what Full Circle offers.

It ends School of Seven Bells in moving form and suggests a new and vital start for Deheza.

Consistent in character and quality, WYWALDYAT is a rare debut, one that impacts second to second rather than by hook or groove.

Her quick turns of phrase and penchant for punctuating moments of self-doubt with colorful bits of impressionistic flair and left-field melodic rejoinders invoke names like Kate Bush, Nick Drake, and Sandy Denny, but the truth is, she's been perfecting her particular brand of moody, bucolic baroque pop for over two decades now, and with the marvelous In Search of Harperfield, that work has finally paid off.

The riffs are punchy, the drumming relentless, and nary a note is wasted, and it strikes that balance between artistry and economy that has always made Anthrax an elite metal force.

On Keep It Together, what they lose in intimacy with the amplified environment, they gain in musical maturity, which only seems fitting.

All of Summertime's charm is tied directly to its mellowness. Perhaps it would have been a more interesting record if it had a hint of adventure.

Eventually, the songs do sink in, but the reason to return to the album is its ability to conjure a specific feeling, whether it's the second the sun sets or the moment that paved highway gives way to backwoods dirt roads.

Grandfeathered shows them looking outward while successfully building upon their already impressive sound.

The Infamous Stringdusters actually put themselves in the background on much of Ladies & Gentlemen, letting their guests take the center stage while they provide the support, but if the Stringdusters opted to be accompanists rather than the stars of the show on these sessions, their songs and effortless virtuosity make it clear they're every bit as talented as their friends.

The album is a sharp, thrilling experience, and easily one of Funk's most focused works.

Crowded and long overdue as it is, In My Mind is a satisfying and mature showcase for one of the most skilled and creative talents in R&B.

The album constantly maintains feelings of loneliness and obsession, and serves equally as a soundtrack for fantasy exploration as well as late-night dancefloor enrapturement.

Rodriguez has been hinting at the ambition displayed on Lola for some time. What's surprising is how a record of such scope and imagination can be rendered so intimately and elegantly.

There's no pretense here: this album is pure, no-frills, feel-good fun, a start-to-finish crowd-pleaser for fans of that classic pop-punk sound.

Anyone who was into previous El Guincho albums will be satisfied by the new direction he's taken, and who knows, some R&B fans with an adventurous nature may even find his sound to be something worth checking out.

The arrangements are exquisite, the textures multivalent, and the emotional resonances cavernous, intuitive, and expressive.

Dixon judiciously edited over one-third of the tracks to facilitate flow, his craftiness most evident in the way Talc's breezy part-soft rock/part-Daft Punk hybrid melts into one of Beady Belle's graceful lounge laments. Dixon's taste dips back several decades, but he keeps it relatively contemporary all the way through.

Victorious amounts to little more than a thrown-together mess.

All the good stuff is still here, one might just have to do a little digging, hang in through a couple listens, and then the songs on Life of Pause will begin to connect with the head and the heart.

The album ends up being more sprawling than it initially seems, but no less triumphant.

Grasque proves to be the group's most elusive outing to date, favoring icy, often formless melodies that come and go as they please, and existential lyrics that periodically dissolve into ghostly, wordless repetition.

Aside from messing with his own formula, it's not necessarily the most groundbreaking or well-written LP Sartain has made and, taken as a whole, it feels more like an experiment than a major step forward.