Carry On stuns from start to finish and the quality only increases with each repeat listen.

Golden Suits’ debut brims with great ingredients, but leaves us more excited about Nicolaus’ next effort.

Give Mayer credit for keeping his languid country pop organic and as rootsy as someone with his honeyed voice can sound. Yet that only reveals the mediocre quality of the bulk of this material and is no excuse for his sleepwalking performance of it.

Where You Stand is a welcome, beautifully crafted and timeless return.

These strummy rockers, highlighted by the group’s established three-part harmonies, are some of the most incisive and powerful in their catalog. Those who acquire music one track at a time need to rethink their position here since these songs weave together to form a tapestry that works as a beautifully constructed unified whole.

Ultimately, Crash My Party is melodiously rewarding despite its sporadic lyrical missteps.

His latest album isn’t a pop masterpiece, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few enjoyable tunes that even non-fans should be able to find themselves hitting the rewind button a time or two.

Surprisingly the results are pretty great and even if they won’t make you forget the often charmingly dated originals.

Perhaps the greatest strength holding The Olms debut together is it’s total lack of pretense: it is what it is... just because. And on that level, it works just fine.

While it’s not the place to start for newbies, this is a refreshing, consistently well-crafted comeback that shows there is plenty of gas left in the band’s tank.

The Civil Wars is a testament to the power of their undeniable musical chemistry. It’s even better than their Grammy-winning debut, Barton Hollow.

If this sounds like something of a scattered mess, it is, but it’s a charming one and well worth a go-round for the more adventurous listener willing to let themselves take a wild and wooly trek back in history.

This is a great example of what a “tribute” album should be when compared to the countless other such recordings that are out there that are made primarily for the sake of money. This is real country music, albeit from the arid oil country of California and not the hills of Tennessee, with two of the finest living practitioners of the genre paying tribute to the masters of the craft and their genre-shaping material.

This is an impressive first effort for the multi-talented Johns who is clearly determined to avoid spending his life in the shadows of others.

This terrific batch of songs needs no such handicap to be recommended as a perfect way for newcomers to start a musical relationship with Clark’s burnished Americana or for existing fans to continue theirs.

LaFarge’s slight country drawl and understated twang nails the ’20s period the music evokes, and the effort is even more rewarding than Diana Krall’s recent endeavor in the same genre.

For all of its immediate sonic beauty, however, IE//CM’s slow, languid reveal requires patience and time to get acclimated.

The Ballad of Boogie Christ weaves beautiful narratives in and out of folksy numbers and rock songs, adding a layered palette of horn solos and soulful back-up singers.

Hawthorne mines polyester grooves, crackly sample beds and rich, analog production for his vintage soul sound, and it’s a wonderfully sumptuous thing.

Casual listeners will probably wish Folds had used his obviously impressive improvising skills a bit more. But as the audience reaction here indicates and die hard fans will undoubtedly concur with, anything that floats their boat out to Folds island is a good trip.

With its passionate embrace of multiple genres and sheer musicianship, Inheritance places the The Last Bison on the cusp of much bigger things.

While the blueprint of starting songs with sparse accompaniment and gradually building to resounding sing-along levels isn’t exactly fresh, the music is so well written that it avoids sounding like a cliché.

It’s an excellent way for new fans to have a pure entryway to their music, and the only possible appetizer before diving into the extras that come next: some an acquired taste, some amazing snapshots in time and some quirky bits that will probably only get a nostalgic spin or two.

Tape Deck Heart [is] the kind of album that doesn’t just tell us what it feels like to have your heart cut out, it practically puts us on the operating table during the surgery – which, of course, happens before the anesthesia kicks in. And he does it so well, we willingly bleed right along with him.

Nile delivers one of his finest and most passionate projects with American Ride.

All of this makes for a satisfying comeback for a cult artist who has several cults anxiously waiting his return. Those fans will no doubt love Dear Mark J Mulcahy, I Love You. Newcomers used to straight-line songs might want to try it out as well, because they might be surprised at how refreshing it is when a songwriter reaches his destination zig-zagging all the way.

An album that’s probably not as good as The Front Bottoms are bound to get, but is just fine for right now.

His keen insights into human nature and today’s America are revealed in melodic, deeply-felt tunes on Still Fighting The War, which ranks as one of the year’s best singer-songwriter albums.