Her third album, Cloud 9, solidifies her as a mainstream country star who hasn’t entirely submitted to the machine.

The Joy Formidable might not have the most plausible ambitions for a 21st century rock band. But Wolf's Law offers enough thrills to suspend your disbelief.

Lyrics like those [in 'Whiteboy'] make up for the clunkers, but more importantly, the music itself sounds shockingly vibrant for a band only recently taken off ice.

Given all the blood, jism, and other bodily secretions the dot Bug’s lyric sheet here, Pop. 1280 are still very much the sort of band that demand a post-listen shower--this time, though, you just won't need as much soap.

The band’s defeatism takes on a new tenor: battle-worn, sincere, and not quite so antagonistic. That may mean that New Material lacks the punch of their feisty debut, but it also lends these songs a soothing quality.

Even though the surface is smoother and and the vocals less garbled than usual, it’d be a mistake to read Bubblegum as a true unmasking. Filters swaddle Copeland’s voice throughout, distorting and distending it but stopping short of intelligibility; lyrically, he’s striking a tricky balance between deadpan nihilism and pop troubadour nostalgia.

For all its finesse, it can obviously never replicate the futurism that defined its biggest inspirations; these classy reproductions only highlight the chasm between us and that halcyon moment.

Laced is indeed bigger and bolder than previous albums, which is somewhat ironic since it has a more intimate, made-in-the-bedroom feel than the band's earlier basement forays.

[Big Sean is] prone to rambling, will drag schemes out too long, and he isn't afraid to overcommit. But he strings together enough solid stretches to keep tracks moving. Still, Aiko is often the saving grace, holding songs together and delivering the better verses.

It will please fans looking for Another Gucci Mane mixtape. Everyone else will likely find it a bit spotty. Certain songs fall into familiar--now six- or seven-year-old--formulas. His vocals, no doubt out of practice, sound a bit rusty. But most of all, it just feels unfinished, rushed.

For the most part, Sorcerer succeeds, moving their sound forward while maintaining their penchant for detours.

Echoes is more of a grab bag: Enormous festival fillers and hard-nosed club bangers rub up against wondrously bizarre studio experiments and some of the best pure pop songs Rowlands and Simons have ever made.

Ullages opens up a greater sense of space for Eagulls to soar, but can feel more distant and isolating as a result.

It's a pretty and intimately rendered collection of folk songs, but those moments of jarringly direct, piercing emotion are few.

Armed with more ideas than should probably be legal, Architecture in Helsinki can't be bothered to dwell for too long on any one of them, and it's this fickle nature that will make you either adore them or deplore them.

At times Davies matures backward, trading the Kinks' tergiversating sophistication for rash generalization.

A deep, abiding melancholy runs beneath the record’s house-party vibe. Bear’s cool sigh frequently sounds like the aural approximation of bedhead, his vowels tousled, his consonants shying away from the light.

Southside’s experiments are made with enviable effortlessness: It’s a little rough around the edges, not self-consciously provocative. Hunt doubled down on his initial mission—making hip-hop and R&B in country sound hip instead of hokey—and it paid off with this collection of songs that are, more than anything else, fun.

The best moments on Up and Away reinforce what’s missing in the worst ones.

ATUM doesn’t necessarily suffer by comparison to past albums. Its highs are more modest. The ferocity is long gone. But in its own ponderous way, it is generous.

Aesthethica is inventive, alive, and shrieking with more ideas than many bands explore over an entire career.

Highway Songs ultimately feels hopeful rather than weary, upbeat rather than defeated.

Born Again is superior to its predecessor in nearly every respect.

Give Me the Future is almost perverse in its inability or unwillingness to develop its premise beyond the most basic and obvious elements.

Results are mixed--"Sun Is on My Side" offers lovely accordion and a weary, haunting refrain, but the midtempo "Uma Menina Uma Cigana" feels flat and perfunctory, while the lugubriousness of "When Universes Collide" actually undermines Hutz's harrowing, poverty-tinged lyrics.

It might be subject to less scrutiny had it not followed Interstellar, but then again, it might not be subject to scrutiny at all, and simply filed away with any other competent and unexceptional dream-pop.

Throwing discordant elements into the mix to see what comes out is firmly in keeping with the spirit of the times, but the desire to create another fork in the road, to not just slavishly replicate what came before, is what makes this album (and post-punk as a genre) such a consistently fascinating area to re-explore.

At times it almost sounds as if they know they've taken their current sound as far as it can go and seem palpably frustrated they can't figure out their next move.

Even as it revels in new-age proselytizing, Under the Spell of Joy never treats inner peace as a given—it’s something achieved by going on the offensive, by engaging in continual struggle.

Although Alpers has found a winning sound, she's still scrambling to gather her notes and draft a theme she can deliver with conviction.

TOPS are at their best when they keep digging. Elsewhere on the album, though, they’re just chilling. They’re as despondent and nostalgic as ever, but back to the kind of windswept indie rock that is their trademark.

Even if the lame parts of BlakRoc are more noticeable than the enjoyable, what really sticks out is how easy this all feels--- not once does anything feel like awkward ambassadorship.

36 Seasons is more in line with the spirit of Ghostface’s recent output, where he’s more prolific and "for the love" than ever and somehow lazier at the same time.

She does so much work on Get Gone that you wind up hoping she follows through on her promise.

If his work with Washington contains all the weight and gravitas of Sunday church, Coleman’s Resistance has all the fun, breeziness--and yes, sunlight—of an afternoon church picnic.

The ease of his melody is matched by his own ideas. It might be a small notion, but that’s where Woods operate most efficiently, for a moment achieving the solidarity that Love Is Love desperately seeks.

On Kidsticks, she no longer sounds like she has anything left to prove, which is precisely what's allowed her to make the riskiest album of her career. And she sounds like she's had the time of her life making it, too.

She's onto some good shit here, but there's too much learning on the job.

They've operated as FIDLAR since 2009, and released a couple of EPs prior to this collection. That time was spent honing a brand of hopped up, surfy garage punk that comes with more variety than you might expect.

The oily, immersive Joyland's very nearly the equal of its predecessor. But with so many similarities--and so little growth--between the two records, it's a little like spending another night at the same club: once you've gotten the lay of the land, the thrills are never quite so thrilling.

There are times throughout Iteration when Haley sounds trapped in the same old rut. Overall, though, the album balances between bombast and gestures that are a little harder to read. That contrast gives Iteration a texture that’s missing from previous Com Truise releases.

Avalanche’s obsessive squeaky cleanness keeps its audience at a distance. Coco might insist that she’s still looking for trouble, but there’s none to be found on Avalanche.

The album is too inoffensive to leave much lasting impression. Over 18 songs, its initially appealing tastefulness becomes cloying and monotonous. Instead of the dynamism of mixing colors, the album mostly yields just a uniform pastel wash.

Despite his reputation as one of rock’s great thinkers, Byrne has never sounded more like a stoned teenager staring at the clouds and spit-balling deep thoughts about the universe. And yet despite its many misfires—including a truly unfortunate pun on the word “duty” in that dog song—American Utopia manages two unblemished triumphs in its final stretch.

This album is weighted heavily with [Efrim] Menuck's quavering, strident vocals; a fact some listeners might reasonably regard as an obstacle. Thankfully, however, his bandmates frequently come to his aid both instrumentally and vocally.

In the three years since Last Broadcast, Doves have cultivated a better understanding of their strengths and limitations, and Some Cities beams with a revivified looseness.

DeVotchKa cycle through and marry varying strains of world music with great aplomb. It's very rare that you'll find a seam.

Another Fine Day offsets some of what it lacks in freshness with aw heck poker-night camaraderie.

The subject matter here is repetitive, pseudo-intellectual pandering runs rampant, pointless skits and mid-song dialogue sessions interrupt the flow, and most importantly, wasted beats fall at the hands of Slug's newfound penchant for verse-long tracks and poorly realized singsong bridges.

Monkey comes off resembling either a padded greatest-hits comp or an "inspired by" soundtrack for a non-existent movie. What it certainly isn't is a DJ mix where previously hidden links between seemingly unrelated songs are unearthed through the ancient art of juxtaposition.

What we have here is a long-awaited stepchild of IDM and hair metal sensibilities, joined by the omnivorous appetite of hip-hop.

Finds them as able as ever, playing as though they'd never been gone, and offering their most organic album in ages.

So, essentially, this is the pop record '70s prog bands would make in the '80s-- Big Generator and Power Windows for a new generation. Aside from two major blunders nothing is overtly offensive, but simply lachrymose and lactose.

With Maladroit, Weezer has finally given the full punt to the nerd-rock label they sorta invented and always shunned, settling instead for being our generation's version of Cheap Trick.

'64-'95 succeeds when Lemon Jelly stick to their bread and butter: pleasant and facile ambience.

[An] entertaining, varied rock record.

The album's laissez-faire production fails to anchor its quaint, melody-allergic songs. In turn, Elverum's retiring vocals float to the top, which is a horrible place for them.

In the end, it's hard to decide if Descended Like Vultures is better or worse than Rogue Wave's debut.

Throughout Free at Last, Freeway displays a deft ability to play the foil to less exuberant MCs, with the exception of a firebreathing Busta Rhymes cameo on 'Walk With Me.'

If you're able to view it through that lens, then New Clouds has much to offer as an unscripted, decidedly un-pop kind of album: mood music and drug music, yes, but more than that, the uncompromising work of a dude making sounds strictly on his own terms.

As with generations of Swedish popsters before them, Sambassadeur excel at picking up sounds from the U.S. and UK and refining them to their catchy essence.

Light Chasers improves on 2008's Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) by focusing on what Cloud Cult do best, though it lacks the colorful songwriting and hooky inventiveness of the band's most endearing songs.

Koima is a beautiful album, and at times beautiful to the exclusion of anything else.

Dense and darkly lovely music.

Yakuza continue to forge a specialized and strange alloy [of metal and experimental music] on Beyul. Don't expect to love all of their recombinations. Do, however, expect to be surprised by them.

It sounds uninviting on paper, but there's frustrating murk and there's haunting murk, and Growing Seeds is the second kind.

Loyal is a hypnotic record, siphoning in and out of repeated, textured loops that soothingly chafe against each other like fingers performing a head massage.

Mala is Banhart's best record in nearly a decade--largely because it's his loosest and funniest.

On Palms, the underlying parts fit together so smoothly that there's never any friction that could lead to a spark.

The five songs on the Crosswords EP sound like tracks that come easily to him, songs he knows how to make without stretching himself.

All in all, the sparks are overshadowed by poor choices and general lack of direction.

If this is his new beginning, it’s an unambitious one: Lidell has never sounded like more of a traditionalist than he does on this amiable but uncomplicated record.

If Flying Microtonal Banana’s randomized approach is ultimately less transfixing than Nonagon Infinity’s maniacal focus, it nonetheless shows that, after eight previous albums, this band’s creativity and curiosity knows no bounds, and their singular balance of anarchy and accessibility is still in check.

Instead of dividing the album into a house-tempo disc and a downtempo disc, Coles alternates between the two modes. But after five or six tracks, the strategy becomes as predictable as her by-the-book chord progressions; the fast/slow/fast/slow sequencing kills any kind of momentum the album might otherwise have achieved.

Love Jail goes beyond a mere glance in the rearview mirror. It sounds vintage, but it feels current. Dommengang find some potential for escape in this music, some freedom in that absence of a destination.

The Deconstruction produces no eccentricity, pop smarts, orchestral creativity, or emotional revelation.

Themes for Television’s highlights effectively double as a showcase for Jewel’s impressive sense of arrangement and mood-setting.

Lyrically, the album is about insecurities and the burden of carrying a loved one’s feelings (see “Ugly/Bored” or “Borrowed Body”), but the straightforward way Medford sings about those subjects spotlights an increasing self-assurance that bolsters her words.

Opener “Lily” falls into this liminal ground, as does “Blue Spring,” and while these tracks don’t seem pointed towards anything particularly urgent, their instrumentation (like the rest of Spring) remains rich and resonant, each component part augmenting the others.

ENERGY is a manic attempt to relight the fire, as well as a confetti-strewn soundtrack for a world tour that never was.

Uncool is not bad, and if anything, DISCO could stand more of it: to evoke actual disco in all its frisson and desperation, rather than the remembered-40-years-later version, full of kitsch and clip-art disco balls. The album, with a couple exceptions, has two modes: overly tasteful cruise-ship programming, and gauche rehashes.

If A Billion Little Lights doesn't always awe quite like it should, given its considerable zeal and craftsmanship, it's because of that familiarity. The album has a big heart and big ambitions to match. The only thing missing is the very thing these songs long for the most: the thrill of discovery.

The back half of the album drags a bit, with the organ lines of “Heatwaves” and the martial figurations in “Solid Light” never quite catching spark. .... Still, the band deserves credit for being confident enough to release all this material as a single gesture, rather than back-ending the leftovers into a “deluxe edition” a few months later. Ladytron arrived full-formed all those years ago, but they keep flowering into strange, vibrant forms.

Rkives is a full-sounding collection that reads like a long-lost Rilo Kiley album from the early-2000s.

It's business as usual: spastic pounding, warp-speed scalar runs, and various math-rock feats of strength.

Following those pleasantly modest, Paste-worthy beginnings, however, Adams draws the blinds entirely and Cardinology starts sliding into self-indulgent banality of a sort so pinched and uninviting it makes Conor Oberst seem like Will Rogers.

Though they could still stand to pull back on the vocal fanfares, brushing away some of the gunk that mottled up their earlier records and doubling down on melody each open up new avenues in their sound, and Still Living finds Ganglians delivering on their early promise while stepping confidently toward whatever's next.

King Night, accordingly, finds Salem pushing their sound far enough to create artistic distance from the rest of the pack.

They still gets bogged down in places, padding the album with go-nowhere interludes and a six-minute centerpiece that's mostly too chaotic to make any impact, but on the album's best tracks, it's great to hear them again, doing what they do best.

Ital's sense of abrasion and his notion of groove are both finely tuned, so it's all for the best when they work in parallel.

The clear ambition of X-Communicate is to leave Welchez’s old persona behind and emerge, fresh and new, as something completely different, and by and large, that objective is achieved.

Like a lot of indie-pop albums, Program 91 is relatively quick and dirty. But despite its brevity, the album's second side drags a bit, as the skanked rhythms begin to bleed into each other with a lack of individual distinction.

Even as pop culture continues to diverge sharply from Spencer’s definition of cool, he remains too spirited and unhinged as a performer to harden into cranky-old-man bitterness.

Colores’ concept is steeped in this earnest (if slightly indulgent) pursuit. Each of its 10 tracks corresponds to a different color, in a sort of sonic mood ring.

On the whole, Ounsworth’s candor gives New Fragility a necessary charge as he leans into balladry.

While Preoccupations’ message remains honest and earnest, it doesn’t create enough friction to cause a spark.

Those out-of-character moments are few and far between, but listeners willing to roll with the lack of punch Little Joy offers will find that shortcoming easy to live with.

Barnes seems playfully aware that his lyrics are Gordian knots, impossible for even the most devoted Of Montreal fan (including, possibly, himself) to untangle completely. And yet there are moments of clarity on Lousy with Sylvianbriar that prove Barnes is both his own harshest judge and most lenient jury.