R.I.P is Actress continually shifting and exploring, growing and rippling, being himself in the only Statement-less way he knows how. Its 15 songs aren't for everyone and with few overt melodies, it's definitely not for everyone.

The Money Store is Death Grips's next move, and they sound surprisingly ready to engage a wider audience.

Hair works because even when the pieces aren't well integrated, they are often enjoyable listening.

Mostly as enjoyable as it is edifying from start to finish, the program repeatedly underscores that without artistry of expression, associative anger and the demonizing of one's enemy, however righteous, rarely lead to lasting empowerment for a person or a people.

This uneven album takes time to break in, but each successive spin deepens the relationships among the songs and reveals more details.

Whether your favorite power trio is the Minutemen or ZZ Top, part of what makes 'em great is their ability to simultaneously exploit the format's simplicity and transcend its limitations. These guys do both. Each knows exactly what is required of his instrument.

It's a beautiful collection of 'water music' that also serves as a reminder that experimentation often works best when smuggled in, sidereal style, under the canvas cover of pop songs.

As a cohesive statement, this very well could be their best in a very long time, if not ever.

The album is full of superlative performances, and exudes an uncommon level of energy and joy, even at its more melancholic moments, and is a far cry from Roberts' often cold and hermetic (but excellent) solo performances. Despite Morrison and Roberts's being the featured performance, this is clearly a group effort, a fact further underlined by the band-credited arrangements.

It's an encyclopedia of rhythmic assimilation, perfectly executed, nary a lovingly adopted concept out of place. Catchy as hell, too.

Transistor Rhythm clearly isn't the full-force, wall-to-wall banger album that many were hoping for, but it does show that Addison Groove can successfully and consistently operate in a more relaxed mode.

Mr. Impossible feels both inquisitive and hermetic, half closed off to the outside world, half chasing noise and patterns to their logical conclusion.

Spooky Action at a Distance is an album with a lot of footholds--different kinds at that--and it spreads them out in a fashion just as lazy and distracted as the songwriting itself.

The whole is so relentlessly nasty and the riffs so good that a multitude of metal sins are forgiven.

Barry Adamson, formerly of Magazine and The Bad Seeds, has released his most commercial-friendly album to date.

The music is something to behold.

The Australian trio feedtime's 1980s recordings, which are collected on The Abberant Years box set, prove them to be traditionalists of the best sort.

Gesturing, though, is just about all it does.

For all its veneer of accessible pop, I Love You, It's Cool is too often bereft of good old-fashioned melody--still too often adrift in the clouds of instrumentation,

It's a collection of veiled promise, but only partial pay-off.

It's not that Scott has nothing to say. Instead, he suffers a fate much worse--he's boring.

Ugly is Screaming Female's Steve Albini record, an inevitability for a group like this, and the trio brings its "A" game to the project.

As an album, Brain Pulse Music feels like two things at once, a dichotomous effort in which the nobility of the endeavor is at the core of its biggest aesthetic weakness.

It's a densely constructed EP, and the more baroque and strange it gets, the more compelling it becomes.

Tallied up, the hits and the misses are about equal. But it would be unfair to describe Interstellar as middling. What the misses lack is not quality but a strong sense of self in terms of songcraft.

Maybe the problem with The Politics of Envy is that these tracks just sounded too good playing back on shiny studio monitors to a roomful of old friends. If he's struggling to say something about the wider world, maybe Stewart should consider a retreat into his own eccentric interior.

The Host is a sun-blessed electronic album drawing from the now, as well as two decades ago, and that works well enough.

Where the debut felt, at times, unnervingly exposed, Iron Gates has a sense of center, balance and calm.