I don't suppose this is an album for the ages, but as tasty trifles go, you could do far worse.

Jurado and Swift are onto something in the conjunction of rough-hewn folk and atmospheric electronics, and if anything, they have gotten better at integrating the two elements into a whole.

It retains Mountain's dense production, but swaps out its calculated affectations for raw sexual urgency, deep-black humor and desperate foreboding.

Some of the best songs that the Louvin Brothers ever wrote.

These songs still jangle, still twitch, still pulse, but there's an undertone of serenity and philosophical acceptance that makes them resonate, too.

The music is too monochromatically saccharine (whether cheery, wistful, or both) to faithfully conjure anything more than a narrow and fleeting slice of human experience.

No One Can Ever Know is quite a good album, not as fresh as the debut, but more complicated and premeditated.

Beautifully played, immaculately recorded and bloated to the gills with 1970s album rock pretensions, it's a throwback to a time that most people don't remember very well (and few of those have any desire to revisit).

On Lambchop's more ambitiously simple albums, such as Mr. M, that darkness is all the more affecting.

It's not a bad album by any stretch of the imagination. But it also feels (not necessarily is) like someone forcing a turn in their art instead of allowing it to naturally come out of them.

Acoustic guitar, electric often played clean, and politely-tapped drums have never married pop beauty and frightening moodiness like they do when Supreme Dicks hit a stride.

["General Hospital" is] a rare mis-step on a collection of songs that's beautifully judged, possessed of an idiosyncratic melodic logic that few can equal.

It is a very accurate document of Wire's 2011 live set; its strengths and weak spots correspond exactly to the ones of the concert they played in Chicago the same year.

It remains delightfully messy and is all the more viscerally resonant.

This third Zomes album is far more static, yet the statis itself is arresting.

Six Cups is a busy, urgent and joyous trip that sidesteps categorization, a feat unto itself in field where new micro-genres are described every few months.

It's a fantastic body of work, as vital and fresh-sounding now as it was when first released.

he's made one of his strongest, and certainly his oddest, albums.

A gorgeous, fully realized expression of her potential.

By turns languidly bluesy and as stark as an oak branch against a February sky, her music is a treasure, and this record fills in a story-line with far too many gaps.

It's Bowles's reflections on the silence of the desert, the way its stillness rearranges your molecular structure, that resonates with Travels In The Dustland.

It's some of his best work, but it's done with the gimmick of relying solely on the ARP 2600 analog synthesizer.

At its best, then, Vanity is Forever seems to be an album where the nostalgic references are intentional: New Wave as touchstone rather than simply gazing backward fondly.

Their charisma lets them make a few risky moves (such as the African percussion on the extended closer "Church") and yield massive returns.

Its appropriation of G-funk hooks and production is really off-putting, and makes me wonder exactly who this record is for.

Even with bursts of ill-tuned twang, Prinz and Horn's harshness is centered and tame.

Imperial Teen crafts a super-clean, super-sharp, inordinately complex collection of songs that, nonetheless, go down like cherry cola.

It is a difficult piece to listen to on many levels.