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.

The lyrics (and their alternately crooned and flat-rapped delivery) are nothing new is probably the worst that can be said of them.

It often feels vast, tracking the curvature of the Earth, but it never forgets that music is made by people, and that there is real intimacy in the consort of two individuals relating to each other through simple gestures like singing, or brushing against six guitar strings.

As strong as this set is, it still faces the originality conundrum. Rather than a group of songs individually composed and packaged under the banner of a soul album, Faithful Man can occasionally feel like one extended, vaguely monochromatic exercise in proving the vitality of a brilliant yet aging art form.

From its start, Audience of One diverges starkly from the expected; by its end, the sense of surprise is replaced by that of satisfaction.

What's emerged here is more unpredictable, a transitional record that still feels complete.

As an accidental, definitive document of time and place, Vee Vee is up there with Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, No Pocky For Kitty and the Polvo records, strong enough even to offset the hideous cover art.

The latest full-length from the latest version of The Shins has some amazing songs.... But it also has some of the worst songs The Shins have ever produced.

He may not voice things like Ellington would have, but it doesn't matter. It could never stop, as far as I'm concerned.

The Horror makes for a largely relentless, immersive listening experience.

The result is an album that is as notable on its own as it is in the historical chillwave narrative.

At its best, though, We Are Nobody nails an uneasy mood that feels like a natural evolution of the Chap's acerbic wit: waiting for a punchline that never arrives.

This is the very best kind of post-reunion album, the one that allows you to rediscover things you'd forgotten about a band you always loved.

In this possibly one-off collaboration, Shuford and his pals have dug up an archaic artifact and filled it with powerful intoxicants.