Clunkers aside, Magic Mountain comes closer than any previous offering in providing the kind of excitement Black Stone Cherry generate live, and showcases their most refined songwriting to date.

With There's a Blue Bird in My Heart, Parker circles to embrace his electric guitar and crafty songwriting again with excellent results.

Luke Winslow-King may sound like a gentleman on Everlasting Arms, but one listen to this album will convince you that when it comes to music, nice guys really can finish first.

The societal ruminations within the fiery judder of "1000 Deaths," the dreamy churn of "The Charade," and the falsetto blues of "Till It's Done," fueled as much by current planetary ills and race relations as the same ones that prompted the works of D'Angelo's heroes, strike the deepest.

By Shonen Knife's standards, Overdrive does sound like some sort of hard rock album, and the attempts to make like Kiss, Thin Lizzy, or Deep Purple come off better than one might expect, though Yamano's guitar skills are less impressive than those of the average metal axe slinger.

Beneath their poppier melodies and anthemic choruses underlies the D.I.Y. garage-rock ethic that inspired their quick ascent, and it's this mixture that places them firmly between the pop charts and dingy rock club basements.

There's a wan, vaguely Everyman lyricism at work here as well, which makes some of the slower numbers a bit of a chore, but when the band lets it rip, as in the case of top-down, desert road jams like "Hey I Don't Know," "It's a Good Life," and the aforementioned "Come with Me," Lunatic earns the shifty weight of its unhinged moniker.

As this train barrels on, there's the sense that the record never really started and will never really end, but such full-throttle indulgence may indeed be what some fans want, for there is a whole lot of bang for this buck.

Ixora (the name comes from a type of flowering plant common in Florida) finds Copeland embracing a more mature subject matter than they did on their early albums (as befits men in their mid-thirties), but with the same moody and thoughtful musical approach that marked their best-known work.

Ot overall the compilation, with all its good intentions, pales in comparison to the originals and will only strengthen the urge to hear Russell's wonderful songs again after listening to this well-meaning but flawed collection.

By the time Wheeler reaches a place of acceptance, the listener has as well, and while both parties may be a bit ragged, they're both better for the experience.

Shame he's keeping a twice-a-decade pace, but this album should stick to the bones for twice that long, likely longer.

Brooks doesn't try to do anything differently; he just picks up where he left off and the time away has only made it clearer how he's different from all that came before and all that came since.

While it might be counterproductive if Field Report were to shrink past a quartet, the streamlined approach of Marigolden is a superb example of how less can truly be more.

Homeboy Sandman's biggest attractor is still his pride, a quality that's even more up-front as his career matures. Hallways beams with it, making it one of those rare rap records where true talk meets the warm fuzzies, or the warm motherfuzzies, as it were.

These complicated combinations of sounds and feelings suggest that Reznor and Ross are nearly as skilled at emotional manipulation as the film's characters, and Gone Girl's ambiguity and dread make it their most haunting work yet.

The series is still going strong with Punk Goes Pop, Vol. 6.

This set is a major go; it extends the qualitative trajectory of The Blackening and Unto the Locust.

The majority of the workmanlike Between the Stars, deftly juggles the muscular and the melodic without breaking a sweat in the process.

Texturally, there's not much of a surprise but The Dream Walker does have its own distinct momentum.

Sounding both effortless and intricately composed at once, PRhyme is an instant classic, and one that sounds better and better as repeated listenings reveal more of the details hiding behind the album's deceptively straightforward approach.

It succeeds as an introduction to Charli XCX the Pop Star while retaining her whip-smart songwriting and attitude.

At its best Tētēma is just as intelligent and compelling as Patton's collaborations with John Zorn; hopefully Patton and Pateras will have more dangerous visions for us all in the future (if there is one).

All these flights of fancy fly freely since the album lacks an anchor. 2014 Forest Hills Drive comes off as a great, experimental, and advancing mixtape, but it's insider to a fault, as slight as that fault might be.

Berkeley to Bakersfield is one of Cracker's most ambitious and satisfying sets in quite some time, as good as anything they've given us since Kerosene Hat in 1993.

Here, it's possible to hear the band gel--Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens found a balance with Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow, something that's obvious by the group's subsequent history, but on this spirited show you can hear the gears fall into place and that's worth the price of admission, perhaps more than once.

By the time the tense album closer "Rice and Fish" arrives, Tarwater have deftly transformed what could have been a claustrophobic mire of sounds into a deceptively simple-sounding pastiche of sounds dark and unexpected.

They give these tracks the same emotional push they give to those on their "real" songs, and that means their fans should lap it up like hot chocolate on a freezing cold night.