The lyrics can sometimes sit at the surface of a feeling, and you wish the stories said more. Still, Shannon in Nashville feels humbly victorious.

The best songs give Arrington the room to sprawl out and flex those ever-charismatic vocals, nearly untarnished by the sands of time.

Throughout Cracks, Giske appears to be striving for an alien, private vocabulary with an instrument saddled with 175 years of tradition and tropes. Against great odds, he succeeds.

A collection of balmy dream-pop ballads centering Wolfe’s feathery voice, soft and slow guitar melodies, and spacey synths. It’s striking how conventional it frequently sounds, reminiscent of canonical acts like Beach House.

Ending with what sounds like a tape spinning off its reel, it's a welcome break from the amorousness of the remainder of the album, which is charming, but may have a harder time finding a place in your record collection during the year's colder months.

Too often Mowgli feels like a series of exercises, its mantra-like repetitions eventually rendering themselves somewhat directionless. Other times, things simply don't pan out at all.

Though Krill aren’t quite ready to let go of the anxieties that inspired them to write their eccentricities in excrement in the first place, Fist suggests that there is light at the end of the sewer drain.

Requiem is a double album, granting the band the real estate to stretch out more than usual and, at times, you wish they’d go even further.

Though Madlib's restless joi de vivre keeps Beat Konducta moving at a quick clip... the lack of MC firepower considerably limits its real-life enjoyability.

The fact that this dorkiness has enveloped a few usually-on-point guests (MF Doom, Mr. Lif & Akrobatik, DJ Shadow) is unfortunate enough; that it's being perpetrated by two MCs who've been consistently great since the early- to mid-90s just makes it more frustrating.

I'd never wanted Calexico to change, but the new direction suits them well, proving that even in the face of radical metamorphosis, they remain as stunning and distinctive as ever.

Pl3dge is constructed simply as a sturdy platform for one of rap's fiercest and most incisive voices, and it achieves that goal completely.

Ward's real saving grace on Parodia Flare is the guitar, which he utilizes in unexpectedly welcome ways to propel his compositions, keeping them from dissolving into murky keyboard washes.

Everything Wrong Is Imaginary never quite feels like the career-culminating record it should be.

At four songs, Ringer is economical, but the diversity within its half-hour run time makes it surprisingly robust as well.

Bits is streaked with irreverence, whether for C&W formality (the intuitively simple melodies of 'Featherbeds' and 'Young Love Delivers'), instrumental tightness (at times, they can make No Age sound like the Famous Flames) or lyrical artifice.

That kind of less-is-more approach, where all the clutter is shaved down to a paper-thin framework, is where Ices produces her most affecting material, potentially sketching out a new strain of inspiration for her to follow next time out.

Like its predecessors, Dodge and Burn can leave you wishing for more interaction between the two leads--the duets are always the highlight of any given Dead Weather record, the moment when all that simmering tension boils over. But Mosshart once again handles the heavy vocal lifting with menace to spare.

Her voice, raspy and harsh against the gently ringing acoustic guitar, makes you expect a gloomy, even maudlin disc. But that can distract from what makes it great: its ambiguity, the way she expresses herself in such strangely personal terms yet never settles on an emotional tone.

The music offers few surprises this go around, relying instead of the tried-and-true guitar arpeggios, atmospheric noises and orchestral, rainy-day crescendos.

A worthy, but occasionally frustrating album...

A maddeningly spacy, fairly inconsistent, but very rich set of songs that capitalize on the leftover space from guitarist Gibb Slife's departure.

Wonderland takes the sound of that last album and pumps it full of the energy that dripped from the band's previous releases, resulting in a record that can oddly be both fragile, danceable, and anthemic all at the same time.

As a whole, Have a Nice Life stands as a decent collection of songs that, while palatable, casually floats by in a sea of average beats by Jesse Shatkin, who produced much of the album.

The music is infinitely interesting, possibly more so than the artist singing it. But then again, you shouldn’t count out anyone releasing an album like Nightride.

Their 10th album, Medicine at Midnight, adds very little to their extensive catalog of interchangeable power pop and hard-rock sing-alongs. But you can’t hang them on their own music, because Foo Fighters would never dare to give you enough rope to do it.

More color-by-numbers post punk that uses too many grays and not enough pure blacks.

Morningside is what happens when a bedroom pop record gets too big for just a single room, but all the while never loses its intimacy.

There is no pretense in their simple arrangements, but you can hear their motor revving, and you know they'll never run out of gas.

Sunflower Bean are excellent song-crafters with a blurry point of view. But there’s some new dimension here that makes the band more than just parrots of politics and sound.

Despite their comfortable distance from the industry machine they came up in, Aly & AJ still gravitate toward brightly-colored, big-hearted pop: an old-fashioned stance that dulls the shine of their new direction.

The album as a whole is more suited for seated, solitary brooding than for anything as lively as moving your body.

As it is, the album feels slightly cluttered by a surfeit of dry minutiae that calls for a cutting room floor of its own.

Not the Actual Events turns out to be so slight, at just five tracks with no dramatic shift in form. It’s the least essential non-instrumental album the band has released.

On When I See the Sun, they seem to want to prove they also recognize great songwriting, and it turns out they not only have impeccable taste, they also have an instinctive understanding of the type of songs that tend to increase in mystery and intimacy when swaddled in an impenetrable fog of guitars.

Matched to this sophisticated, admirably restrained music, Turner's Submarine songs have a backwards-looking quality, a guy who's been through it calmly reexamining the scars and renavigating the pitfalls.

Pharaohs succeed principally because they don't feel the weight of all those influences bearing down upon them.

Sometimes, Pelican suffers from being too weighed down by its roots. That said, when Pelican rages--in a way they never have before--they prove they still have plenty of life left.

Bermuda Waterfall was written for his friends, whom he memorializes on "Hangin On" for being so thoughtful as to wonder when he might be coming to a party. That's the type of inconsequential, commonplace interaction that sometimes means the world to an individual, and Savage’s ability to locate an oasis of connection in a desert of heartbreak is what makes Bermuda Waterfall endearing rather than irritating.

While Lithium Burn is an easy album to empathize with, you wish it'd do more to make you root for the band.

The purest pop song is “Switch,” the one track that can pass for uptempo and boasts a hook that sticks. A few more fun moments like this would have helped keep the record moving.

Sigur Rós’s music has always felt panoramic, and Odin’s Raven Magic is no different; its sweeping melodies harken back to landmark albums like Ágætis byrjun, but this time, the music foregrounds orchestra and choir. When the sprawling sound becomes overwhelming, it’s the hidden details that prove most tantalizing.

The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light is baggy and unfocused. If he wants to sell a promise of salvation, he needs a better story to tell.

The fattened sound, however, doesn't mean an altered band, just a better one.

Were they based in an indie rock hothouse, it's easy to imagine Eternal Summers feeling somewhat pressured to streamline or smooth out their sound in a way that would be more easily describable and digestible. Instead, the duo happily flits back and forth between nervy, combustible raves and languorously pretty head nods without a care for thematic cohesion.

It's all done well enough to make for for Club 8's best album since 2007's The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming, and a sure bet to become someone's favorite.

For every bit of overcompensation--he actually cracks a bottle over a dude's head in "Raw"--there's something vividly rendered and honest.

It's best to think of Prins Thomas not as a speedbump but as another iteration, slightly undercooked, of his still-developing style.

It’s a lot to tackle in seven songs, but there’s a depth and richness in both texture and songwriting that show glimpses of a new direction, one that might free them from their own drone-rock noose.

From its gentle textures come a calm centeredness, from its soft words a sense of strength.

For the kind of soul-caressing folk bobbins Adem aspires to deliver, go with Grizzly Bear.

By reimagining the weighty concept record as light, escapist entertainment, King’s Mouth is as strong a candidate as any for Baby’s First Prog Album.

Menos el Oso ultimately stumbles on its own self-conscious maturity.

This agreeable sameness infects much of the score, turning the voices of two inimitable musicians into hack work for hire, churning out glossy tones for images of cheap thrill and intrigue.

Nots’ third album is a guerilla campaign against surveillance in the service of systemic control. With 3, Nots make fierce rock music equally apt for moshing in solidarity or smashing an Alexa--all forms of control in chaos.

Planet’s Mad careens through its bungled cyber narrative, tingling and whirring, daring you not to take it seriously. The planet warms, the pop stars reel, and we’re still trying to dance.

Here A-Frames teeter on the line between consistency and monotony, falling mostly on the former side-- their endless doomsaying can grow tiresome but more often it's fun to play along.

Danilova has taken these compositions about as far as they can go, and still there remains something intriguing about Zola Jesus, not just for her ghostly enigma or art world appeal but now for what really comes next.

The notion of a 2xCD set of rehearsal recordings smacks of unnecessary indulgence, but whether you take this as an alternative canon of R.E.M. music or a document of a band working hard to find its future by revisiting its past, the album is successful in providing a new perspective on a classic group desperately in need of a new narrative thread.

There are triumphs here, but they're modest; there is, after all, little fanfare to be found in just getting up and on with it day in and day out. Consequently, Teeth Dreams--even more than the flavorless Heaven Is Whenever--occasionally feels like the first Hold Steady record that's just going through the motions.

Frenetic, mercurial, and of wildly variable listenability, theFREEHoudini feels like a retrospective and a retrenchment of forces, but it also serves as yet another step in Anticon's breathless, never-ending push forward.

The three slick, glitchy tracks on You Know You Like It also pull from the left-field sounds associated with the LA label Brainfeeder and the Knife's creepily synthetic vibe, but a large part of their appeal comes from their glistening pop sensibility.

He doesn't really offer sharp, pointed lyricism, but he does give the album a haze of depression capped by a few moments of catharsis.

The result is some of his most exciting work since Isis disbanded.

Crybaby displays neither the maturity of a band in a retrospective era, nor the sense of fun of a band trying not to grow up; instead, there’s something loose-ended about it—like it’s a companion piece to all the mythmaking and nostalgizing, rather than the other way around.

They try to create atmosphere in an airlock, lumbering instead of fostering groove, failing to generate any heat or friction as nearly every interesting turn on these songs happens within the first minute.

The album may be hard to connect to on anything other than a cerebral level, but sometimes that's the best way to connect.

Even as the record is steeped in the long history of British folk music, that balance of the tactile and the spiritual anchors these songs in the present moment.

If the herky-jerky new-waver 'Total Bloodbath,' and the 'Ticket to Ride'-styled charmer 'Partner in Crime' find Reis comfortably adapting to the pop approach, the mix can also leave Reis hanging out to dry, particularly on the smooth '70s-Stones strut 'You've Got Nerve,' where the droning qualities of his rasp are overemphasized by a chorus that simply repeats the title ad infinitum.

Drowning pop compositions in jittery polyrhythms is indie rock's move du jour, but the Shaky Hands aren't trendy; they make fine-boned, classic rock'n'roll in the Strokes' vein.

A victory lap, the most fun “I told you so” you’ll probably ever hear. The title is a red herring, because no one would confuse Sonny Moore for an artist like Andy Warhol. He’s just Skrillex, writing some of the most ridiculous dance music ever made and making even purists fall for the wubs. If that’s not Pop Art, I don’t know what is.

Unfortunately, this big-tent spirit also occasionally dilutes some of the elements that made K'naan's debut so striking.

Although How Animals Move has solid arrangements and melodies, Parish is at his best when he mixes hard work and detail with spontaneous, rough-edged playing. It's not that the slow stuff doesn't work; it's just not as exciting or even as inventive as his rock music.

"Dandelion Gum" was speckled and silly and high as shit. Eating Us feels more like the baseline: collected, repeatable, respectable.

While the album as a whole doesn't wallop the way "She's the Dutchess" does, its more spacious, ambiguous, and, yes, adult songs are intriguing and affecting.

Wonky has the one-jolt-after-another vibe of a great collection of familiar hits but without the disconnected feeling you get when a bunch of obviously Big Moment singles are slapped together and called an album, rather seamlessly covering a whole lot of musical ground without sacrificing concision or intensity

Mature Themes is as vital as anything he's ever recorded.

Occasionally a hint of shoegaze filigree or kosmische bliss gets drawn into the swirl, but it’s not enough.

The highlights of American Wrestlers reveal themselves immediately, but elsewhere on the record McClure demonstrates a curious ability to bury concise hooks in otherwise-doughy or unfinished songs.

Early fans of those raw recordings may be less than happy that she's given into the customary tropes of bubblegum pop. And Cara herself sounds a little unsure about leaving behind the walls she knew so well for ones that may end up holding her back.

Light years from a mere slap-dash rarities compilation, The Other Side of the River takes some of a seminal rock musician's most interesting sketchworks and reimagines them as his magnum opus.

Post Plague is just another stop on an increasingly adventurous course through the genre map.

While Pursuit of Momentary Happiness draws from a bottomless well of piss and vinegar, it counterbalances those urges with irreverence and grace.

While the closer may not immediately resonate with a listener coming down from 25 minutes of introspection, it succeeds in ejecting you from the album, almost as if Slow Pulp is rolling the credits and yelling, “show’s over, folks.” It puts the preceding melancholia into perspective, no longer dire.

V is relentless in its intensity, but allow yourself to be swept into its icy, alien atmosphere you’ll be utterly awestruck.

Only in Dreams isn't a perfect record, but a little while down the line it might end up looking like the beginning of something--the first steps forward for the band, or perhaps a raising of the bar for this entire revival.

World, You Need a Change of Mind certainly isn't a bad album, and the technical execution is first-rate. Its failure is ultimately one of ambition. This is music to be enjoyed while doing something else, not something you fall in love with.

Within the course of a single album, Gaye could come off as conscious, pensive, concerned, driven, committed, topical, tough, sexy, urbane, hypnotic, tortured, troubled, hip, religious, defiant, disillusioned, high-flying, defiant, blunted, and compassionate.

This affectionate tribute reveals an artist who managed--amazingly enough--to remake rock'n'roll in his own image.

The set ranges eclectically in both style and level of inventiveness. Most anyone with any kind of appreciation for the Grateful Dead will find probably at least an hour or three of music to dig and really groove with; Dead freaks might also find a good deal to snicker at.

The thing that really bothers me the most about this album is how conventional it sounds.

It's one of the strongest indie rock records of the year so far.

Surfing takes the disenchanted bits of Swearin' and blows them out into 34 minutes of honed unrest—it's a self-aware, deliberate, and ultimately truthful sophomore slump.

Ten years deep into their career, the Dodos have never actually steered too far from their roots, but the loose, unselfconscious feel of Individ proves that there is something to be said for recognizing and playing to your strengths, trusting your chops, and simply feeling things as intensely as you possibly can.

The record isn't the home run Boosie probably needs. It could stand to be trimmed a bit.

As menacing as it is hooky, this is some bracing stuff.

Dreams in the Rat House combines elements of their debut, I Wanna Go Home (particularly the off-the-cuff hijinks and threadbare fidelity), with the songwriting focus of their great second effort, Sleep Talk.

Tear aims for cohesion and produces fun, prismatic songs in the process.