The songs, hard and soft, fast and slow, seem better than ever. Lanegan may sound like he’s done everything there is to do, but he’s clearly not done pushing into new territories and getting better.

The merging of the two artists’ sounds feels entirely natural.

Devout isn’t perfect, some tracks are superfluous, but as a defiance of white stereotypes and genre clichés, it’s a remarkable work.

Just Say No… is quite probably the group’s heaviest and most abrasive salvo to date.

The result is his most fully realized album to date, and a reminder after those lower-profile years that Lekman’s voice is a singular and valuable one.

The fact that Untouchable gets in and gets out in a little over a half hour adds to its classic rock ’n’ roll charms--the accomplished playing, engaging production and dizzying variety of mid-tempo reveries, adolescent rushes and inconsolable ballads boosting its overall appeal.

Taken individually, the album’s 10 vignettes suffer slightly from a lack of individual cohesion, their structures incorporating mostly several short, seemingly miscellaneous scraps. Yet over the course of several listens, Toxic City Music does provide some sort of overall flow, its slippery patterns serving as auditory snapshots of dank irradiated zones and heat realm communities quarantined in an airless isolation.

What makes the band so great isn’t just their utterly compelling sound; it’s that on this, their finest record, they’re not so much going for “fucking epic” as for emotional heaviness.

If the album’s second half falls off a bit due to the programming of consecutive slow burners, the orchestral layering we expect from the quartet is still there.

Bardo Pond isn’t so much about evolutionary change as the recurrent invocation of altered states via sound.

Despite the band’s articulate playing, Song of the Rose has shortcomings--regularly, Arbouretum is content to indulge in an all too familiar canon--incognizant of any current trends, their musical DNA arrested in amber.

Despite a 100% turnover in accompanists and recording locations from his William Tyler-produced debut, he doesn’t sound terribly different here. His big, distinctive voice can hold you via sheer volume and timbre even if you don’t listen to a word he says, and his robustly picked electric guitar is a band by itself.

With his piano, classical flourishes and superbly layered production a la E.L.O., it’s out of sync but, when it works, wonderfully so. Whether Lytle’s vocals work for you or not will probably be the main deciding factor as to whether the band itself works for you. Oftentimes he smooths out the edges, but his singing can come across as whiny.

It’s a richly rewarding album that offers a valuable snapshot of an evolving artist.

The simplistic, drone like beats of Borders numb the mind while freeing the body, so that each track is danceable and sedating. Furthermore, the brooding, deep tone of the beats, paired with an added static charge, are sonically rich and beautiful and draw the ear in.

What makes the piece, and much of the album, so interesting is how the players just hold things in particular spaces of tension and release. It’s not done at the expense of those imperceptible transformations that characterize the band’s work overall; it’s more like a different, less certain but possibly more engaging way of realizing them.

Sweeping, quietly incredible FLOTUS.

It returns to the sly humor, the hypnotic barking aggression, the occasional whiffs of wistful tune-ish-ness slipped in between robotic beats of Divide and Exit and maybe does it one better.

Rather than just a haphazard collection, the eight cathartic pieces that make up Infinite Worlds work as a genuinely affecting singular statement--its idiosyncrasies stitched together by a strong lyrical narrative, improbably forming a cohesive whole.

Higher-end production values and a handful of famous rock guests have little impact upon their fundamental sound, which is a swirl of unfurling guitar lines, massed voices, and clip-clopping percussion. Elwan is not a soundtrack for defeat, but perseverance.

On earlier albums, Egyptrixx proved the possibilities, but Pure, Beyond Reproach doesn’t live up to its predecessors.

Farrar, with his ever-changing band, has been doing this decades, but it seems like by looking back further, he’s found a way to energize himself going forward.

It’s not a bad album, not by a long stretch, but it feels like Miller & company are treading water, revisiting things that worked before.

With Intoxicated Women we don’t get starlets and a known bad boy tussling in the spotlight. We get Harvey and his cast of players dusting off old scripts of prior perversions, delivering them to a world that fancies itself jaded, but is just as confused as ever.

The familiarity of their sound and the ordinariness of their suburban laments do not breed contempt. They know how it is, and so do we, and we’re all in it together for as long as the record lasts. The Feelies may tell small tales and play like they’re living in them, but it all rings true.

Memories Are Now is a composed but not utterly controlled place, and within that tension, Hoop’s music and message, together, find their highest vibrancy.

Most times, Moon Duo seems to distill whole rock songs into a single measure, refracted into a million repetitions as through a funhouse mirror.“Creepin’” vamps a blues rock riff into oblivion, transforming heat and friction and diesel dust into something otherworldly. Only “White Rose” is given the room to stretch its limbs.

Their latest is just as bright, bold, and bludgeoning as their past work but adds complexity and depth to their sound.