It's a confident debut, bristling with energy.

For her second solo album, the Dresden Dolls' Amanda Palmer slapped together an album-full of songs about Australia and New Zealand to coincide with her 2011 tour of the Australian continent.

If you want to know why Snider has a loyal and growing following as a live act, Live: The Storyteller will tell you all you need to know about his rapport with a crowd and his way of making his songs and stories come to life.

Those who don't like rootsy ballads are in for some slim pickings, since Barton Hollow shines its brightest whenever the tempos slow, the lights dim, and the voices rise up.

936 sounds like being nestled in a warm basement during the coldest winter in recent history, or the feeling of waking from a dream, somehow suspended all day.

The album is full of the complex love songs and working-class vignettes that McKenna is so good at... [filled] with McKenna's usual grace and subtle poetry.

If this was meant to be an experiment in art rock, it's an admirably efficient one, and it rocks out, too.

The Baseball Project doesn't do fluff songs on the subject, though, and the songs on this second outing, like they were on the first, are intelligently written and arranged, running the full spectrum of emotions that baseball can inspire in a fan, and in so doing, the best of the songs rise above novelty to grapple with the passions and difficulties of life itself.

This unforgiving return to form doesn't suffer from being over-thought and it's not even overwrought, but it is overstuffed at 14 tracks.

The best moments are bathed in a warm radiance that fosters a comforting, uplifting mood.... However, the content isn't exclusively cerebral, uplifting, and/or surreal.

A charmingly lush and wistful affair which proves that their unexpected Ivor Novello nominations were no fluke.

Fans of the early dream pop stuff may have difficulties accepting a cleaner, more synthesized pop approach.

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

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.

Goulding is able to take the best parts of all of her contemporaries' styles and make them her own, coating everything in the breathy flutter of her voice.

Moments of band interplay showcase their collective ear for the nervously romantic-sounding post-punk that's helped inspire the group's sound.

For those quick to claim that guitar music is dead, Cadenza is a sharp reminder that the genre still has plenty of life left in it yet.

With keyboard and drum machine-led swirls, higher-pitched and echoed vocals, and an embrace for what could be called art-pop-not-rock, Moonface's Organ Music is very much in the right place for 2011.

They've rediscovered what made them vital.

She's never been more as completely herself on record as she is here.

Darwin Deez is a guy who has clearly created a persona to deliver his material, but that doesn't disguise the fact he has a lot of talent and has a made an album that proves he's a 21st century indie pop prodigy with a promising future.

If summery and slick, no-frills pop-punk is what you crave, look no further.

The sheer ballast of [Jack] White's vision can be exhausting, the individual elements clanking chaotically and never quite gelling. Jackson gives as strong as a performance as she can, tearing into the oldies with ease and valiantly attempting the new songs, but she sounds most at ease with the quieter moments.

Builds on the loose and raw sound of Wold's earlier records, but [the album] is also an extension of them, pulling in strains of folk and country and adding them to his signature trance blues sound. The result is a powerfully good record.

An intimate and emotive affair which manages to pursue a slightly mellower direction while still retaining their trademark oddball sensibilities.

While the New York Dolls struggled to balance past and present on their previous reunion albums, Dancing Backward in High Heels is a product of the here and now as defined by two guys following their muse in their own way, which is just what they should be doing at this stage of the game.

Brilliant! Tragic! is a little uneven in its mix of new and familiar ideas, but for a band as clearly defined -- and sometimes confined -- by its approach as Art Brut is, to start changing the formula is a big step forward.

Head of the class, leader of the pack good, and you won't hear many rock & roll records better than this in 2011.