They maintain the patient emotional tone that has drawn fans to their music over the years while refining their sound into something even deeper.

Balancing the intense with the delicate, BRMC’s Specter showcases the marvelous feat that music can bandage even the deepest of wounds.

Miracle Mile is fun, but the record’s sparse highs also lay bare its lows.

Love From London is the newest of the prolific jangle-rocker’s solo endeavors, but he’s still not finished reinventing himself.

There are experimental beauties, but Matthew Houck is at his best when he returns to familiar sounds.

It’s an interesting collection that lends itself equally well to both intellectual deconstruction and simply listening.

Fans of Lidell (or Prince, for that matter) won’t be challenged, but Jamie Lidell is proof that sometimes execution really is king.

For the most part, though, Suede’s newfound maturity suits them well.

The band’s fourth release, Christopher, falls flat despite containing one of this year’s (possibly this decade’s) finest pop songs with its opener “Desert of Pop.”

Less dense than New Brigade but equally as prowling, You’re Nothing spits and stuns.

With major-label R & B still getting a bad rap for being too verbose and sappy, in slides inc. with a tactical and tactful blend of seductive strains framed by minimal instrumentation.

While it’s likely that Push the Sky Away will not cause the seas to part before him, it will surely ephemerally deliver us from this evil wasteland of vacant contemporary culture and mutilated morality.

The Montreal quartet has their fingers in many pies, and the combination of noise, space, art and good old rock come together in a mix that creates its own gravitational pull.

The songs possess an entrancing power but lack a certain amount of dynamism, the kind of tonal shift or chord change that sets your hairs on end, which is the hallmark of great pop music.

Combined with the head-in-the-sky ambience of the subgenre, the result is an album far more interesting and ambitious than mere nostalgia rock.

One can make out here and there traces of American roots music, but those are alas, buried within the breathtaking bluster, ’cos ultimately, you can’t separate The Men from the noise.

Pissed Jeans satirize the languor of adulthood and unleash punk malice on unsuspecting targets.

Siket’s haze blunts the sugar-sharp edges of Harding and Bruun’s melodies, but it also ripens their latent nostalgia.

While Sound City Studios was unforgettable, this glorified jam session is not. It’s uneven and top-heavy.

Whereas Widowspeak suffered a touch from homogeny, Almanac casts its entrancing firelight in a variety of attractive bearings.

[2009’s What Will We Be's] malady of stylistic disparity has been curbed to the point of what feels like a cohesive body of work.

Even though the record is part of a series, the Swedish duo--comprised of David Lehnberg and Elin Lindfors--travel through a full electronic arc within this album alone.

Waiting For Something To Happen, is something both sinister and sweet, dripping with shoegaze guitars and harmonies abound.

The result: catchy and chilling songs that cling to the corners of your mind and remain with you through and through.

The 33-year-old Owens has funneled his usual druggy, droogy Flaming-Lips-stuffed-into-Beach-House tone into something cohesive and made it into Cali-folk popping and bright.

Holy Fire isn’t a straight home run for the Oxford-based quintet.

The Norwegian band’s debut full-length Between Places drips with a youthful joie de vivre.

Powers affords himself a more experimental stance, lacing warped warbles and sketchy interludes between the seams of his brand of kaleidoscopic builder tracks.