By sticking so closely to the script laid out by their debut, II is the one thing punk rock should never be: careful.

Fated is an overwhelmingly pleasant listen. It is decidedly un-dazzling.

California Nights is a professional album: heavy-ish, filled with hooks, somewhere between "fast enough to dance" and "slow enough to sigh to while looking out of a window."

McCaughan has a gift for capturing simple, affecting moments without tipping the scales to sentimentality.

The busy arrangements and serious frontloading make Born Under Saturn’s 54 minutes a demanding investment, and the effort it takes to simply get any sort of visceral pleasure out of it makes it feel twice as long.

Hairball is certainly an evolution for Nai Harvest, but it’s tough to really call it progress.

Fading Love is set up to reward the same focus it demonstrates: if you dig into each new muted meditation and immerse yourself in FitzGerald's bubbling little temples of thought, you'll find yourself entranced.

For as bullish and dramatic as the music seems, the songs here often escalate for several minutes before making a point you think they’ve already made, like a series of false floors that open to bigger and bigger rooms.

Mew’s most consistently engaging record, even if it’s also the longest on both a cumulative and per-song basis.

Each song on Fast Food, her second LP, feels offered up and expertly framed, a series of rock songs given the lighting and treatment of museum objects.

The Waterfall stalls the most during the usually incendiary guitar workouts. But this is Jim James accepting where he and My Morning Jacket are at the moment: a bit older, a bit broken, more skeptical but very much among the living.

The glitchy, warped surface is offset by the clarity and versatility of Standell-Preston’s narrative vocals, which pull everything into focus.

Trickfinger often provokes an engaging anxiety, but when Frusciante's not pushing at the edges of the form it can lack the magic of his otherwise unapologetically experimental solo work.

For all its minor stylistic differences, Ripe is very much forged in their image. But if any traditions in British indie rock are worth perpetuating right now, this inventive, engaged stable is the one to back.

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.

For all the album's modest ambitions, it doesn't lack for variety.

Even more denatured and opaque than the soupy Melbourne, Sunshine Redux is self-produced to a gooey, garish, gritty and barely mobile gel.

An endearing collection of pastoral narratives and humble melodies that sounds unearthed from the Gaslight Cafe, where minor folk singers plied their trade and presented their authenticity for analysis in the early '60s.

Yelawolf sounds like he's just going through the motions instead of actually covering ground.

In the moments when The Magic Whip is most interested in sounding like a Blur album, it is perhaps too interested.

Who Is the Sender? effectively doubles his recorded output and moves him from the category of a curiosity who returned after a four-decade absence to make a third great album to someone perhaps capable of doing so in perpetuity.

Though the pieces are fleshed out with other small touches—other horns at the periphery, and uncanny wordless vocals--the foundation of the album rests on the power and warmth Stetson and Neufeld generate by themselves.

Thug’s rapping itself, known for its unpredictability, is sharper than ever; his voice feels clarified, strengthened.

There’s moments where the Very Best show that rather than merely parlay exuberance and global harmony, they can also manage the somber aspect of their music.

Unlike ...For the Whole World to See, N.E.W. does not sound like a lost proto-punk classic; it's just a pretty good rock record made by guys who have been at it for a long time.

Sound & Color is not an electronic record. But it is strange and mystical and unexpected.

Edge of the Sun sounds newly invigorated and inspired as Calexico reconsider their own past and find new music to explore.

Too often, he strays from the hushed mode he's mastered and ends up supplanting the band’s strengths with its weaknesses.