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

This may not be a perfect album, but it is affecting and haunting.

Worlds Apart is an aspiration, an apology, the sound of confusion.

While this new batch of songs is pleasant and often charming, they're not as memorable or passionate as Barlow's best.

Digital Ash has the claustrophobic feel of a singer locked up with a computer, and it's distractingly chipper, like Rilo Kiley in their own Dntel homages; not every Bright Eyes record has to be an emotional epic, but Digital Ash feels like a practice run.

I'm Wide Awake weaves the personal and the political more fluidly than most singers even care to try, and the consummate tunefulness just strengthens those moments where he pinches a nerve.

The Chemical Brothers tend to find the best results when they focus on atmospheric, buzzing instrumentals.

If this album is indeed the beginning of a long, arduous journey of rediscovery and rebirth and other fun ponderous stuff, here's hoping the rest of the trip is more enjoyable than this initial misstep.

This is a mammoth collusion of synth gasps and distorted swirls, darker and more urban than its meadow-bound predecessor.

The consistency of Wilderness' eleven songs is almost overwhelming.

'64-'95 succeeds when Lemon Jelly stick to their bread and butter: pleasant and facile ambience.

Filled with shimmering waves of pedal steel and slide guitar, these spare, gritty reenactments will surely please fans of his 2003 urban-folk platter Talkin' Honky Blues.... Underground hip-hop enthusiasts, however, might be put off by Buck's near-complete disregard for the rippling, sample-laden funk of his youth.

Its flimsiness usually finds a way to sound purposeful, and that makes Aqueduct's personal, cerebral pop worth coming back to.

Soft and subtle, Superwolf is the kind of record that unwinds slowly, and is best enjoyed over multiple listens and, unsurprisingly, many glasses of wine.

It reveals a manic, uncommon glint in their inventive fires, the unmistakable fervid gleam which accompanies artists who know exactly what they're doing, even if the rest of us don't.

Their songs burst open upon inspection; you must first shrink to their size, but once you do, you'll probably want to stick around for awhile.

Another goddamn home run.

This isn't a revolutionary album for Tobin but it's a lot of fun, and works surprisingly well on its own, given the stringent requirements it had to meet.

Ultimately comes out a very solid if not revelatory record.

His strongest, most satisfying effort to date.

This album, even more than their others, is like a cheap pinata: A lot of candies come out, and a few of them are bound to be stale yellowish things that don't taste like butterscotch.

All Harm Ends Here is hushed and apocryphal, but at times it sounds almost as half-hearted as it is heavy-hearted.

Magnolia Electric Co. is no Crazy Horse, and Molina's vocabulary on the guitar doesn't yet have the presence to carry such extended interpretations of his material.

The end result is a rich, triumphant sonic tapestry; you can hear every dollar that went into it.

Black Mountain are about as referential as they come. But despite the obvious touchstones-- which, incidentally, fucking rule-- the band are affable and idiosyncratic enough to win over those who passed on recent retrofits like Comets on Fire's Blue Cathedral or My Morning Jacket's It Still Moves, and make those records' admirers practically cream themselves.

It's well-recorded, well-mixed, well-performed-- hell, it's even well-packaged-- but it has little spark and a bad habit of insisting on five-minute songs.

Cam's flow is a thing of beauty.

Nothing's Lost is a well-meaning record that just got its priorities mixed up. These tech'd-up tearjerkers can out bench press anyone in terms of sonic fodder, but the album is whiny, transparent, and a colossal hodgepodge.