The disc's winning blend of warm organic tones and smart atmospheric touches, recalls Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball--and could also be the breakthrough for Merritt that Ball was for Harris.

Once again, we have a very good recording from a very talented singer, songwriter, and performer.

A welcomed, warm and quality return for Helio Sequence, Negotiations yet again unveils the superlative sonic possibilities of these talented gents and how their creativity perfectly complements each other.

LaVette is in incredibly fine form, squeezing every amount of emotional resonance out of every track, her voice a well burnished, emotionally charged instrument that she plays like a master.

The quality [on End of Daze] is solid to great.

The songwriting ... takes a bit of a dip on this one. Oh sure, the first few songs are pretty good but that's it, just pretty good.

The group's strongest, most challenging and most cohesive offering in years.

Occupied with the Unspoken is a headphone trip that ultimately proves to be an enjoyable listen in spite of the complexity of its craftsmanship.

[Once An Awesome Wave] maintains a steady jog and never quite sprints into action... Nevertheless, a creative effort from this new band, Alt-J shows promise and proves they can create hauntingly catchy melodies from irregular rhythms.

Meat and Bone stands as quite possibly the band's best album to date. The Explosion breaks everything down to its root and reconstructs it all in a perfect way; it should show a generation of cool kids that may have missed him the first time around that Jon Spencer is among garage rock's main guitar slingers.

This follow-up is even better & louder, on par with the dizzying heights of her old band.

These eight songs are indeed everything you'd expect from this reconfigured version of Comets on Fire with Chasny at the controls. It's a purely transcendental synthesis of heavy folk meditation and interstellar overdrive.

Grace & Lies works best when it lays it on thick - opting for textures over latticework -and is least successful when it strips back and relies on its acoustic-folk undercarriage. Thankfully, the former predominates.

The finished product is a beautifully fluid fusion of dub, jazz and micro-house zone-outs that continues to exemplify Oswald's two-decade strong aptitude as one of the great masters of repetitive groove theory.

With its live wet vocal production, bleaker-than-black lyrical mien and varied musical layers, the album could be one of the Minnesotan folk singer's finest ever, a richly diverse and dire epic revolving around the burning suns of love, death, truths and lies with only two weak songs in the bunch.

Silver Age is another peak in a career full of them, and it's due to the quality of the material Mould uses to construct the suit, rather than the classic cut of the design.

O' Be Joyful would be their resulting--and across-the-board winning--entrée to celebrity chefdom.

The songs on Palindrome Hunches are certainly pretty and play perfectly as background music for a variety of endeavors (washing dishes, vacuuming, etc.) but not much on here really stands out and catches your attention.

The music on this remarkable record creeps up on you, and subtleties abound; with Burns' vocals mic'd very close and much of the instrumental flourishes occurring deep in the mix, it's an intimate affair.

Fans of his [Drive-By] Truckers tunes will find much to love here.

Unlike its meandering, esoteric predecessor, the gorgeous Under the Pale Moon is an affair more focused in thought and sincere in song.

The production may be a little cleaner, but the same knack for great fuzzed-out ditties is still there... a pretty good album.

On Sun, Chan Marshall is so sure of herself that she's prepared to confront not just romance's injustice, but also the world's.

Live at Billy Bob's Texas is proof enough that he's still living up to his rep as one of the original Outlaws of Country, sitting firmly beside Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.

While Rowe's deep-baritone delivery conveys intimacy, his lyrics are a grab-bag of overwrought, secondhand images.

The Midsummer Station isn't a terrible album; it just sounds as if big studio influence overshadows much of the reliable metaphors and creativity that made songs like "Fireflies" a hit.

[The Seer is] everything for which Swans stands, wrapped up in one intense package.

How good is Antibalas the album, the band's fourth, on its own merits? The answer is: pretty good, but not as great as its inspiration.