All that touring and woodshedding has apparently taught them not to waste a note, because the first side of No News from Home has a determined cohesion, sequenced to evoke the choppy rhythms of the road. Almost inevitably they lose some of that focus on side two, whose songs don’t have quite the same sense of purpose or that same sense of movement.

Wire feels at first almost strangely normal. Lewis is credited with most of the lyrics, Newman does most of the vocals in his gentler speak/sing mode, and the feeling generally is calmly inviting.

If you’ve loved Built to Spill’s music your whole life, Untethered Moon will have this same comforting, classic feel.

As an album, it feels complete but transient: True Romance has the capacity to lift and inspire, but that feeling doesn’t linger.

Dead is a frustrating record, one that finds the band on the cusp of making something truly great. While consistency and better production do work in Ascension's favor, some of the spontaneity of the first record would have been rendered even more powerfully here.

The mercurial, combustible potential within suggests we may not be laughing at it for much long.

Even on an album as wholly electronic-sounding as Damogen Furies, Jenkinson's musicality remains organic and responsive.

As the band continues to evolve around and with her, Speedy Ortiz’s music finally sounds as complex as its leader dares to be.

The wearying volume of Jackrabbit is the most taxing aspect of a record that already arrives intentionally overstuffed.

She is an artist who knows who she is, and Froot luxuriates in the confidence that we do, too, relaxing in the space and power that Diamandis has claimed.

Fast-Moving Clouds benefits immensely from its mid-fi, almost homemade sound, which lends weight to her inventive pop flourishes.

The intensity rises and falls with the rolling hills, but the vistas remain the same, and the horizon never gets any closer. Despite the uniformity, there are clear highlights.

His greatest strength has always been world-building, using a synth-heavy blitz of candy-colored jazz chords taken straight (sometimes blatantly so) from the Pharrell handbook. Cherry Bomb isn’t exactly a hard left turn from this lane, but it is a quick swerve.

Dark Energy has all the hallmarks of footwork--its frenzied pacing, arrhythmic kick drums, a graphic command of blank space--executed with clear-eyed self-determination. This gives the album an opaque, thoughtful quality.

Sure, stylistic and mechanical hesitations pepper these seven songs, but even those instances feel mostly like the charming reservations of a brilliant beginner.

These new songs don’t sound terribly different from Stables’ first recordings nearly a decade ago, but the music is bolder and more purposeful, with a broader, richer palette of sounds.

In Calder's songs solace proves elusive and fleeting, but when she finds it, it's always during moments of calm.

Batoh's new act, the Silence, is at once a continuation of the past and a break from it.

Keeping up with it requires careful attention, though unpacking it hardly feels laborious. Just don’t expect Ava Luna to do any hand-holding for you throughout the process.

Like much of People of the North’s catalog, Era of Manifestations comes across as an attempt at extreme therapy; I secretly find myself hoping the band never quite finds the peace that its raging towards.

What is frustrating are the infrequent but genuinely interesting moments of creativity and cohesion, which suggest that if Marching Church had taken their time and laid off the improv a little, there might have been something special here.

Sonnet positions Meluch somewhere beyond the insular place he occupied before.

For an act so consistent in their sound, it’s hard to get a bead on their ambitions.

New Glow may be Matt & Kim’s most polished album, but their songwriting has never been more amateurish.

Suuns and Jerusalem in My Heart does leave you wondering what more the two entities could have accomplished had they worked on this for more than a week.

An album that delivers a gorgeous, if somewhat restrained, step forward. It’s a document of quiet, if not necessarily earth-shattering, revelations.

For a record so bent on impressing the listener, Culture of Volume somehow never manages to leave a mark.

Curren$y may not do "new," but he is very good at what he does: riffing on cars, money, women, weed, and obscure moments from television shows.