It's tough to imagine how The Wizard of Poetry came into existence in the first place.

Why There Are Mountains ends up being like any great result of wanderlust--here, the journey is the end not the means; fortunately, that gives Why There Are Mountains astounding replay value.

The Wild Things soundtrack boasts enough illuminating, atypical turns from Karen O that make it worth experiencing independent of its source.

These go-hard-or-go-home tracks are still sprinkled across Fluorescent Black... But those who've been along for the 10-plus year ride may be looking for more of them.

Unfortunately, Seconds, Higgins' first album in 36 years, doesn't match the vitality of its backstory.

There's not a lick, hook, or lyric on Echo Kid that won't give you a feeling of deja vu, but the execution is strong and the music is pleasurable enough that it hardly matters.

The Sun Came Out, whether intentionally or not, is an album for singers, but often it's the music that elevates the songs and prevents even the slickest moments from falling into the AOR mire.

The sounds of Touareg and Afrobeat and Ghanaian Highlife are rippling through the eight songs here, each a rollicking, warm reflection of appreciation.

He doesn't exactly break free on Bright Penny, but typical of Hayes, it's not for lack of trying.

No one's perfect, I guess, especially when they're trying to go from one-note to every note in the space of a single record. Sadly, though, that means that the dancier stuff, though I want to like it so much, is Wild's main casualty.

The songs are generally slow, samey, and sleep-inducing, and the lyrics, any language differences notwithstanding, are hard to take seriously, even for a guy who raved about I'm From Barcelona.

This is evidence of true artistic growth, but these successes share space on Scars with creative cul-de-sacs and uninspired genre exercise.

The opener is as intriguing as it is unexpected. It's just too bad, then, that the rest of the album continues to ask similar questions, but never again with the same vigor or innovation.

The canniness of Album's production choices and the scuzzy depression of the lyrics and the gut-level songwriting instincts, along with everything else about the record, add up to something elusive and fascinating--maybe even heartbreaking.

Between My Head and the Sky becomes a bit of a muddle in the middle, with Plastic Ono Band's free-form approach yielding less satisfying results. [...But it] simmers down considerably in its closing third, shifting away from boisterous band jams toward meditative tone poems and piano pieces.

Despite the looseness and the grab-bag approach, the best of the songs on Unmap feel right as rain, like these weird mash-ups were there all along, just waiting to be discovered.

An album like this, filled with longing and a bit of resignation, may be an uneasy fit for today's mood of uncertainty and diminished opportunities. Hawley's mined a specific vein of emotion for years, and it's a testament to his skill that his hyper-local focus maintains such a broad appeal.

Sometimes, the result is as frail and lovely as worn lace; sometimes it's just threadbare.

Eskimo Snow just feels like the right kind of album for an incredibly gifted and increasingly prolific band like WHY? to release as a quick palate cleanser, reaching an endpoint of a certain sound rather than trying to top its predecessor's unmatchable extremities.

Though there is an overall whiff of the 1980s about Vapours, it sidesteps the traps of either sounding trendily vintage or indistinguishable from the rest of today's Reagan-era impostors. It works best, however, to think of the album as a return to "Return to the Sea," only, as its title suggests, in a hazier, less opaque form.

It's an album that draws its strengths from the simultaneous expression of sympathy toward the people in the songs and anger toward the shit they've gone through.

A Brief History of Love is a study in the enormity of sound doing just that, each reverbed kick drum, phasers-on-stun guitar, and wastrel vocal refuting the idea that you need to talk about the passion to express it.

Overall, Texas Rose, the Thaw, and the Beasts is a good mood record, a midnight opus that sounds great while it's playing but doesn't much travel with the listener beyond its runtime.

Born Again Revisited is a deeply rewarding record and a worthy entry in a pretty stellar catalog.

The restraint of the musicians involved leaves Chesnutt's fragility at the center of the music and lends the album an air of refinement and wisdom that could have easily been drowned out by guitarists more eager to call attention to themselves.

With follow-up Forget the Night Ahead, Graham takes his cryptic musings into a pitch-black place, but he still connects enough to make all the fraught drama worthwhile.

Even if the overall effect here isn't terribly original, there are still plenty of nice touches spread throughout these tracks to suggest Le Loup holds the potential to become more than an amalgam of well-regarded influences.

Milwaukee at Last!!! only seems broader than it is: Almost every track, it turns out, is from Release the Stars, and the audience doesn't seem to mind.