It’s a fluidly cohesive album that develops its music themes--that nautical lurch, that calming lull--over eleven carefully yet imaginatively arranged songs.

Tarot Classics' popcraft proves well beyond promising, and these songs are certainly sturdy enough to handle their lusher productions and knottier sentiments.

With the Screamadelica nostalgia out of their systems, More Light primes the Scream for their fourth decade in the best possible way, serving as a summary of everything they’ve done before, yet sounding nothing like it.

Rather than dour, however, the album sounds concerned, perhaps even worried, which illuminates even some of its weaker or seemingly extraneous tracks. It focuses Pollard, who sounds like a man who has said so much already but still has so much left to say.

On Ores & Minerals, there was a measure of spaciness that’s been lost here, perhaps surprisingly considering the circumstances of its birthing. If that album was a leap, this one is a step, and a gingerly one at that.

A little like a greatest hits, a little like a soundtrack, and a little like a collaborative art project, Black Mountain's 51 minutes of music for Year Zero serve as a reminder of how good this band has sometimes been and as a tease of the music they might still make.

Their careful pace and refusal to succumb to instant gratification is a tonic against chaos, a reminder that otherworldly idylls exist within terrestrial grasp. The Ground Our Sky encourages sensuality in the most literal sense: an awareness of one’s senses and taking deliberate pleasure in them.

It's easy to imagine Go Tell Fire to the Mountain giving disaffected listeners the promise of an entry to something beyond themselves in a way that James Blake or Bon Iver can't. Maybe you've grown past that sort of thing, but what about a record of exhilarating expanse and passion that sounds like indie rock and yet feels way bigger? Well, Go Tell Fire to the Mountain is that too.

The old Francis, the quirky, quipping storyteller, triumphantly returns on Human the Death Dance... to his unique blend of diaristic, down-to-earth meditations, eerie soundscapes, and loopy abstraction.

Lange is clearly in the mood to experiment, letting more traditional instruments take a backseat while he fiddles with electronic equipment, peppering nearly every track with whirs, burrs, clicks, and clacks. He occasionally takes time to build distinct grooves from all these little pieces ("Cenar en La Manana"), but more often than not, his fiddling is distracting.

Whatever the case, he and Switch are kicking off summer with an armful of perfect cookout-, top down-ready songs, like the daytime soundtrack equivalent of all of the summertime night's rooftop music that's been coming from Swedes Air France and the Tough Alliance and their new wave of American indie disciples, such as Real Estate and Memory Cassette in the past year-plus.

Exploring the vacated ghosts of stale forms, Coxon has breathed new life into some of rock's most bankable clichés.

The quiet-to-loud dynamics aren't forced, the ahh-ahh backing sighs come at the exact right moments, the church bells on the title track sound like god. These songs are simple, mostly, but they're executed perfectly.

Mostly, though, Jurado claims ownership of Saint Bartlett's achievements simply by turning in his strongest songwriting to date.

But if The Chaos marks the point where the Futureheads admit to themselves that the past ain't so bad, closing track "Jupiter"-- clocking in at a career-topping four minutes-- points to an intriguing new direction where the Futureheads apply their eccentricities to lengthier, more conceptual pieces.

Luckily, you don't have to write genius lyrics to make reliable, stadium-ready rock. The tics of weirdness that made this band so initially affable may be gone, but they're now a cut-rate pop act instead. Nothing wrong with that.

The murk and sloppiness of the early records has been mostly swept away.

Brighter Wounds, Son Lux’s fifth LP and second since guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang entered the fold, has loftier ambitions than Lott’s prior work.

Although Sigrid sings each line as if it’s eye-openingly profound, anyone looking for depth on How to Let Go will quickly find themselves in the shallow end.

Tomboy is a much more considered record, with thickly layered psych-style production.

Instead of the modern Stardust, Serpentine Prison is merely a prolific musician’s stopgap.

'Rue the Blues' is easily the most euphoric thing here, with that banjo-tuned-guitar, um, pickin' up a storm, I guess, and Sullivan opening his throat when he sings.

It doesn’t feel corny or hyperbolic to call this record life-affirming, so perfectly does it capture the flashes of gratitude, self-knowledge, and inexplicable joy that often follow an experience of great pain.

Even as Punk Rock shows that The Mekons have far better musicians today than when they were first fumbling around with Gang of Four's instruments, it also proves they're better songwriters.

Even while it's unfortunately anticlimatic, The Volunteers is a fine record, and a welcome addition to the modern singer/songwriter canon.

One of Excuses for Travelers' greatest weaknesses is that the album is too uniformly boring to be affecting in the least.

AOI:Bionix takes a belt sander to hip-hop's rougher edges, resulting in refinement, sophistication and undeniable accessibility.

Another in a line of accomplished, eternally pleasant and intermittently brilliant Stereolab records.