It may just be his best record. I’m New Here manages to pack a lifetime’s worth of artistic growth in one completely unobtrusive half-hour.

Real Gone... is Waits’ grittiest work to date and is an excellent introduction, for those unacquainted, to his hard-boiled thirty-year run.

While it never outshines the alt-country canon that precedes it, The Brag & Cuss is a welcome addition to the genre, an album that understands its influences and rarely oversteps the boundaries they’ve set.

The Broken String is a collection of mostly likeable songs, one dud, and one song-of-the-year-quality track.

His delivery is exhilarating, but it made me nervous, jittery. It’s kind of like Miles Davis scatting, but instead of a trumpet he’s playing the entire writing staff of The Simpsons.

It’s in the songs that teeter on the edge, where the twang feels like the last button pressed before an apocalypse, that Shrink Dust becomes special.

An album that does the exact same thing as their previous records, only not as well.

Lullabies to Paralyze loses points for a handful of uninspired tracks and questionable production values, but I can’t imagine anybody who’s enjoyed the Queens in the past not taking to at least half of the songs on this album.

[A] beautiful little album.

Sometimes this gets boring, when tracks lull and hunch into the next and Sam’s voice doesn’t do much to challenge the monotony. Sometimes it’s confusing to hear such graciously restrained music eventually show itself as meticulous, experimental, and deep, deep, deep. Well, not confusing. Refreshing.

The Winter of Mixed Drinks is a minor disappointment, then, in that in wake (and perhaps as a result) of his heart’s subsequent rehab Hutchison’s songs can’t really sustain the weight-loss of their ego.

On Cassadaga Bright Eyes sounds like John Mayer.

Inevitably, most of the studio design on each song is greedy and belabored. Everything is in its right place, but everything is too obvious or too proportionally gaudy to warrant more than a signatory “lo-fi” moniker.

Lookout doesn’t have the feel of a major step forward for the Silver Jews: sonically, it falls pretty comfortably between "Bright Flight" and "Tanglewood" and doesn’t have the sort of big events that marked those two records.

Akron/Family are in a state of constant flux, ever changing, so Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free strikes me as no great sea change (no more than usual, anyway). It’s just the latest iteration of a band that’s never twice the same.

Regardless of his collaborators or how he chooses to approach his songs, The Life of the World to Come is further proof of Darnielle's ability, evident since long before he traded a boombox for a studio, to imbue his imagery, his sentiments, and his many characters with astounding weight and power.

Parc Avenue often strays too far into excess and departure for departure’s sake to enjoy the brand of a songwriter’s tour-de-force.... But as a fully realized and lovingly sculpted aesthetic, there may be few stronger full-length debuts waiting in this year’s wings.

Habits & Contradictions is a pleasurable listen with head-scratchingly pretty samplings and lyrics more or less liberated from value care of Q's devotion to "weed and brews" and the delirious enjoyment of something so simple as saying "fuck" a lot.

There's nothing but clouds on Occasion for Song, but rather than uninviting it's eminently listenable; an unflinching, graceful, truthful exploration of how to go on living when you've lost a friend, of how to recognize a world that suddenly seems that much darker and less hopeful.

Jim White’s latest collection of songs has a humanity about it that is too multifaceted to categorize in broad terminology or flowery descriptors and is quite possibly beyond adequate summation; overthink or undersell as much as you please.

There may be more pop structure and less willful wandering than, say, cLOUDDEAD, but there is still something strictly subconscious about the album at its most gripping, even as it consistently engages over repeat visits.

What Fortino and Harris have done here and across Foreign Body is construct a kind of suspended reality, where the consequences of day-to-day life fail to adhere to their distended sense of duration.

This is an not an album designed for navel gazing introspection, but rather one to be played at neighbor-annoying volumes before you hit the town on a Friday night.

A sturdy if frustrating effort that exceeds and disappoints expectations all at once.

Comfort of Strangers isn’t only Orton’s best album to date, it’s her most daring.

While No Wow certainly has its missteps, they largely come as a result of the band’s most basic concept: simplicity and repetition.

All of this provides a great recipe for exactly one good listen. That one listen is best the volume down though, as Death Magnetic might very well be the most distorted, punishing mastering job since the advent of the CD. After that, the charms of the album become significantly reduced.

A textbook example of restrained, stylish writing, Here We Go Magic have found their muse: a 40-something producer from England who just knows well enough to get out of the way.