Tiger Suit wears a different skin than her previous recordings, and the highs and lows are obvious.

The five-piece band's new album, Easy Wonderful, is full of those same universal ponderings and investigations of love.

Familiar but undeniably brand new, Halcyon Digest is forty-six minutes well spent--a loop that can repeated as many times as you'd like. Stay patient. If you skip out on a track, you'll be missing something.

This will be a good record for backyard barbecues and beers, but not for much serious listening.

The unrelenting earnestness of the album may appeal to some listeners and repel others, but in either case Franti has achieved his goal of capturing the "sound of sunshine"--and it seems like he's having too good a time to care what anyone thinks, anyway.

Even the most rock 'n' roll track, "Bobcat Goldwraith," starts with and then later, after much cacophony, unravels to reveal the same building blocks underneath. The plinking and plunking riffs of No Ghost prove inescapable. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, mostly because what follows those riffs is done so well.

As with most feature-heavy albums, some of the duets fall flat....Still, there is some real magic to be had on Mean Old Man.

What matters is that this is a really good record, and while it would have been nice to hear some instrumental breakdowns--especially from banjo player Richard Bailey, who is way understated--it's nice to know that Nashville is capable of putting out something besides more bad pop.

Bingham made a challenging record, opted to go the Bad Blake route instead of going down in a blaze of ponytails and designer jeans, and that ensures his relevance for years to come.

If Dream Attic is any indication, recording studios may soon be as irrelevant to Richard Thompson's career as big record companies are.

All Birds Say plays like some east coast indie darling took his acoustic guitar out into the great west, met a kindred soul with a steel guitar and shared a few sweet and unambitious thoughts on life. Broemel chooses his instruments well, and if the album never raises its voice, with a consistency in tempo that approaches droning, it's still a pretty haze.

The now mature musical relationship pays dividends as the baritone crooning of Lanegan and Campbell's breathy, Nico-inflected singing continue to deliver an atmospheric payoff.

As its' title suggests, this record is not what it seems at first listen, but one that's worth the extra effort to decipher all of its introverted intricacies.

The problem is that the band seems to want to go mainstream as it stood in 1995. As a result, they've lost a lot of what made them unique.

God Willin', while a pretty record and certainly head and shoulders above so much of what has been released this year, it is nearly completely bereft of the emotion that we've come to expect from LaMontagne.

The songs are pretty, well-written and well-constructed, but the album as a whole lacks the vitality that would give it necessary variety.

It's about people, and Mellencamp continues to write and sing about them better and better with each passing year.

In the end, Alive As You Are is a polished and impressive effort that heralds DML's chameleon like musical ability by exemplifying you can in fact teach an old dog new tricks.

Coming in at six songs and a lean 22:30 run-time, Blake Shelton's All About Tonight is what I imagine being in the studio audience for an average sitcom would be like.

It works. And not just because Tilbrook's high and mellifluous voice has only ever-so-slightly thickened and Difford's lower register--used for great deadpan effect on "Cool For Cats"--defies aging concerns, but because these effortlessly clever, tuneful and pithy songs never got their full due in the U.S.

The Suburbs ends on a dark, dystopian note with a little 90-second deconstruction of the title track, leaving you to wonder if the "screaming" alluded to earlier might not always be the joyful kind. That kind of ambiguity is what makes Arcade Fire's deceptively simple music all the more intriguing.

With guest artists like '60s organmeister Booker T. and Americana legends Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, Jones and Johns have made a real statement in the same way that Rubin, and of course T Bone Burnett, do almost every time they produce an album. That statement is that the same people who set the bar decades ago for so many of today's acts to measure up to are still making a lot of today's best music. Praise and Blame raises that bar just a little higher.

In the moving disc closer "Mimi Song," she asks her listener to "tell them about me when I'm gone" and to "remember me." With an alluring album such as this one, that request shouldn't be hard to do.

It may have taken her over 20 years, but today Sheryl Crow is retrieving and expanding upon those parts of her artistic sensibility that had always been there.

These United States' lead singer Jesse Elliot has a scratchy, affected voice--maybe a super-strung-out Ryan Adams, if you're looking for a point of reference--which makes for a varied listening experience: Sometimes you want it to lead you to the Promised Land ("Just This"), sometimes you just want to make it stop ("Ever Make You Mine").

Dark Night mostly fits together as an accomplished piece of downbeat concept-rock. The mood can get--to quote Chesnutt's song--"grim," but the artfulness shines through.

For the all the bang of "Saturday Sun," "Elephants," with its slow-paced piano, closes out Intriguer, drowsily, though perhaps fittingly so.

On their 5th studio album, North Carolina string band Chatham County Line show no signs of ruining the good thing they've got going. Each album they've cranked out has been a keeper, and Wildwood is a grower, to say the least.