You can't deny that Cuomo feels no shame and is making exactly the kind of music he wants, and there's ultimately something disarming about that.

Solo ultimately reveals little we didn't already know about Vijay Iyer as a pianist, but to hear him explore these facets of his sound on his own, with no one to lean on, is still interesting. The central suite is where the album and the artist truly shine.

He's sad and pathetic and needy and yet somehow still smooth, which is sort of the central animating paradox at the heart of the Walkmen. They make these wounded, anxious songs, but they make them so confidently, with such unearthly rich-guy assurance.

More money means more studio time, and more studio time can lead to more experimentation; as such, Business Casual's most successful moments are the result of genre-related leg-stretching.

Like much of Cave's work, there is an ominous sense of dread always creeping. But unlike previous work, there's a speed and intensity to Grinderman 2 unheard before.

False Priest is billed as a more collaborative effort, both on the production end with musical savant Jon Brion and in the spotlighted duets with divas Janelle Monáe and Solange Knowles.

Phosphene Dream is a step up, if only for the little bit of variety that the tighter arrangements and genre-hopping provide.

For an album that presents a more assured, swaggering Black Mountain, it's a minor disappointment that Wilderness Heart doesn't so much climax as gradually wind down, without a show-stopping finale to crown the victory lap. But even in their quietest moments, the band can still leave you unsettled.

Significant artistic development of any kind probably would've been a bad idea for this band-- they were, as the saying goes, small but perfectly formed. Still, it's also not quite satisfying to hear 40-year-olds come back to what they were doing half their lifetime ago and approach it exactly the same way.

Rather than protest the state of the world, Staples is toasting human endurance-- hers as well as ours.

Summer of Hate felt meek at times, content to retreat into its own shadow; Sleep Forever's many oversized melodies and wider-reaching sound prove that these guys do a lot better taking a few steps into the light.

Outside of a distorted vocal on "Not Getting There" and a slowly blooming and surprisingly gripping waltz ("Everything Is Wrong"), the arrangements seem done up like hospital rooms, every sound picked for maximum sterility.

Much of Majesty Shredding seems to concern the importance and difficulties inherent in maintaining a fantasy life as you get older, but it's not a morose or self-involved album. Instead, they've made a total wheelhouse record, and a very good one.

On the other hand, Fields' dearth of surprises makes it a little disappointing even for those with more conventional tastes -- listeners who generally value stuff like quality and consistency more than the shock of the new.

So Barking stays the course, with the added prospect of a fitter, happier Underworld on the horizon. It's about time.

They tease out old ideas and combine them with new ones, affixing Appalachian folk to classic rock, ambient, avant garde, and a kind of musical entropy that pushes many of their songs into sputtering, oddly compelling noise.

While there was an unspectacular battle-rap anonymity to his past lyrics, they were at least spit in the service of a strong overall style. Now he's grown a bit, upping the emotional dimension subtly and letting some more specific humanistic details come through, even in the lines that read like average boasts on paper.

The upside is that it sounds warmly familiar, a reminder of why we missed them in the first place, but the downside is that the album gives very few indications of what Fink and Taylor have learned during their hiatus.

Pop Negro feels transitional. El Guincho has a clear abundance of talent; he simply didn't harness it this time around.

People who've appreciated the band's last three albums will find time for this once it has a chance to sink in, but it's not essential for people who got a charge out of Ta Det Lungt and passed on the rest.

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.

Expektoration is DOOM at his live-show peak, and people who go into this knowing this set's from six years back might feel a bit more charitable. But releasing a concert album with an "Act 1"/"Intermission"/"Act 2" structure instead of a telltale tracklist, and obscuring its actual place in a years-distant history? That's not supervillainy, that's antagonism.

Were its songs more dynamic, its arrangements less haphazard, its tone more even, its sentiments a bit more clearly stated, Elf Power could really be affecting. But as it is, it just feels affected; the sound of a band in mourning seeking a musical catharsis they can't quite extend to the listener.

There aren't many hooks on this record, and the tempo shifts are sometimes subtle, so it can feel overwhelming-- kind of a constant onslaught of sound. This is a taste issue, but if you require a respite now and again, it might be a difficult listen.

There are glimmers, in the various half-ideas that surface throughout No Ghost, of a vision that the band could have taken and run with. Klausener's lyrics can be appealingly morbid.

Minor quibbles and missteps aside, Body Talk Pt. 2 is a perfectly solid-- and occasionally awesome-- record.

The good news is that they're too skilled, experienced, and important to make a record that's just a mess, and for a while there's nothing so terrible about this one.

Personal Life is hardly a failure; much of it is excellent. But it's also missing that anger-meets-energy urgency that made the Thermals' early albums so undeniable.