For anyone who feels similarly disenchanted about country music, Outlaw’s songs--closely bound to tradition, endlessly romantic--are the perfect remedy.

Rather, at 72, Jeff Beck continues to push the envelope and stays as edgy and restless as those less than half his age.

It’s intimate and sprawling, personal and universal, affectionate and daring.

Even if this generally melancholy collection takes a few spins to sink in, Watkins has delivered a deeply personal and moving album infused with maturity and unflinching truth in both its lyrics and overall approach.

The full-band electric tracks have many intriguing elements, including a vibe that captures the wonder of Crazy Horse while infusing that chunka-chunka sound with skittery guitar riffs and other young-blood input. But the new-era tunes tend to be marred by seriously clunky lyrics.

On Life In The Dark, the Felice Brothers continue their decade-plus quest of chronicling our crooked national pathologies with quirky humor, slacker indifference and guarded folkie optimism. Never before has the Felice Brothers taken in their country with so much wide-eyed wonder.

The sometimes heavy quality of the concepts never overwhelms music that takes Dusty in Memphis as its stylistic template and moves it into a contemporary, but not slick, setting.

It’s impossible not to be enchanted by one of this year’s freshest, most delightful and all around grooviest releases.

The end product is an incoherent jumble of occasionally pleasant soft folk with mind-numbingly aimless pieces that seem arbitrarily constructed with little direction or focus.

It’s impossible to overstate how marvelously moving and purely enjoyable the end result is, paving the way, we hope, for a follow-up.

Robert Ellis’ self-titled album is the sound of a young songwriter solidifying his blend of East Nashville country with whatever sounds, styles, and sentiments that suit his interests.

Typical of many timeless albums, the whole of The Exodus Suite is greater than its impressive parts. Carve 50 minutes out of your life and spend time reveling in its thought provoking, often mesmerizing and riveting pleasures.

At just over 30 minutes, it’s over pretty quickly so let’s hope this is just the beginning of a fruitful musical relationship.

By shifting back to his roots, Eli Paperboy Reed swings into the future for his most direct, honest and propulsive set yet.

What could be a raucous mess is smartly written, well produced and arranged hard rock/power pop with slight prog and punk tendencies.

Existing fans will appreciate the uptick in sheer moodiness and offbeat experimental tendencies matched with fluid, often hypnotic melodies the quartet displays on the majority of Strange Little Birds. Newcomers to the Garbage experience can start here and work themselves backwards through an impressively edgy catalog brimming with more of the same.

It’s hard to imagine that after a few spins, most won’t file this with Williams’ other similarly styled albums that, even with his distinctively wacked-out approach, are starting to sound routine, if not flat out lazy.

Taken individually, the songs resonate better. But lumped together the effect is claustrophobic and cheerless.

The result is this consistently enjoyable, often terrific, frequently challenging 11 track, 51-minute aural rocket ship exploration quite rightly tagged “delirium” by its duo of frontmen.

This album is just more evidence that few have ever been as fluent in that tongue as Paul Simon.

Even with the slight stench of commercialism tainting this release, and some sub-par material Good Times! exudes enough, well, good times to capture what made the Monkees so much better than their teeny-bopper peers and maintained a dedicated fan base for five decades. If this is their final recorded bow, at least they’ll go out in style.

He’s just a diehard rock and roller with a cool voice and an itchy pen slamming out another pretty great album because that’s what he has always done.

For fans that have stuck with him for the decades-long ride, Rain Crow is yet another stunning example that Tony Joe White’s uncompromising, often ominous vision, shows no signs of diminishing.

On Bloodhounds, the harder Victoria works to reckon with the dark Southern demons of her youth, the further she’s pulled back and drawn in by the music she’s discovered along the way: the lonesome wail of Junior Kimbrough, the isolationist cry of Outkast, the mournful lament of Patsy Cline. It’s this push and pull that provides her music’s driving tension.

Clearly this is a heartfelt, meticulously crafted package for a cult artist who deserves far more acclaim and respect from a wider audience. As a single disc, non-boxed set re-release, it’s everything this classic deserves and a beautifully realized example of how reissues should be done.

If you love stories of the broke, the broken, the alcohol-addled, the freakin’ fatalistic, sung and played by guys who know how vicious life can get, you’ll want this album.

As usual, Petty makes it seem easy. And with help from his fellow Mudcrutchers, the unassumingly titled 2 is proof that even Tom Petty’s modest side projects are better and more compelling than many acts at their best.

Kamikaze is another solid entry in a catalog that’s put So So Glos in a league with fellow punk rabble-rousers Titus Andronicus and Joyce Manor.