What makes everything tick is Berman's plausibly gooey hooks, matched by guitars sparkling like diamante--just the ticket for shiny, happy people. [Jul 2014, p.95]

The FB's ragged, slip-sliding DNA is too irreverent to make them true inheritors of The Band's mantle, and that hasn't changed. Neither has the way they're one minute bursting with exuberance and the next resembling a burst tyre. [Jul 2014, p.93]

Luck is more satisfying than Leisure Seizure, but it's still not throwing sixes all the way. [Jul 2014, p.90]

Not quite essential, unfortunately, and you might even long for a bit more shredding. [Jul 2014, p.90]

The resulting arrangements are masterful affairs that frame LaMontagne's material with great taste and flair. [Jul 2014, p.90]

Heal's molten flow of grandiloquent '70s rock and '80s electronica is unstoppable. [Jul 2014, p.88]

Initial listens may suggest contrived incongruity. Further spins reveal the affectionate smarts behind these acts of desecration. [Jul 2014, p.87]

Familiar BJM territory perhaps, but they still inhabit a different, more enticing cosmos to their peers. [Jul 2014, p.87]

This is a resolutely up record, for the most part. [Jul 2014, p.92]

The Soderbergs seize the day. [Jul 2014, p.91]

The songs are rigorously infectious. [Jul 2014, p.96]

More non-threatening folk-pop. [Jul 2014, p.96]

An album of rich, intricate grooves that use house and techno merely as a jump-off point. [Jul 2014, p.94]

This will thrill those who believe Pavement's best album was their first. [Jul 2014, p.86]

At root, it's a heart-warming little curio. [Jul 2014, p.86]

It's an intriguing new incarnation for Bauer: Om and pop. [Jul 2014, p.88]

Celebrating both Big Bill and the Alvins' shared boyhood, this genial collaboration throws a warm light on both. [Jul 2014, p.89]

[A] slower tempii dominate the first half of Emma Jean, leaving the lapel-grabbing soul struts until the second half of the record. [Jul 2014, p.89]

Tobin's songs offer a more lucid warmth. [Jul 2014, p.96]

The soundtrack to blissful bucolic afternoons threatened by the black clouds of the coming apocalypse. [Jul 2014, p.95]

Glass Boys' legacy will likely be the Fucked Up record fans praise for its songs, rather than the risk-taking. [Jul 2014, p.95]

Throughout, a world weariness and wisdom far beyond John Fullbright's 25 years. [Jul 2014, p.93]

There's always a soulful undercurrent to James's work, exemplified by album's deliciously dream title cut. [Jul 2014, p.92]

Krell sounds like ha has taken a step back, seemingly trading his experimentalism for a more traditional blue-eyed soul route. [Jul 2014, p.91]

Here's a quiet rhapsody of twining acoustic guitars, cherry-sad reeds and songs that feel solid for a bit then slip away into dying-fall bluenotes and the kind of lines that provoke romantic poetic recollection. [Jul 2014, p.88]

The scale of the latter achievements suggest Kasabian and 48:13 will get by nicely with their existing fanbase. Whether this means many new converts is less certain. [Jul 2014, p.87]

The results are generally spectacular. [Jul 2014, p.93]

In no way startling, but elegantly put-together all the same. [Jul 2014, p.92]