While Bush is strong enough musically, you can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if this crew had followed R&G with a full-length a decade ago, when everyone involved was still in his prime.

The detail-oriented approach that delighted on the Weather Station’s early records reappears on Loyalty.

For longtime followers of the band, Anxiety's Kiss has the feel of a logical endpoint, the latest natural development in an impressive career of progressions.

Overall, it's clear that HIVE1 doesn't manage to engage all of its composer's talents, despite its occasionally locked-in blend of notated percussion parts and sharp electro-production.

While Rundanns has all the makings of a late-career triumph, it’s less a new watermark for Rundgren’s sprawling discography than an analog to it: beautiful and baffling in equal measure, all over the map, and beholden to nothing but its own inexplicable logic.

Ultimately, 1000 Palms sounds like emotional throat-clearing, the transitional sound of a band finding their bearings, resetting their dials, and getting back on their feet in the wake of a lot of personal and professional turmoil.

It is his most personal record, but not because it's bare and raw, but because it's surreal and dreamlike.

The Good Fight is a streamlined reminder to ignore the restraints. Great music is great music, no matter where it comes from.

The problems with Jackie, a serviceable record that gets better with multiple listens, is that unlike her previous releases it's more heavily focused on paint-by-numbers Dr. Luke electro.

Scott fully inhabits her loudest moments by inching towards post-rock and synth-rock.

Cronin’s dulcet hesitance has given way to slightly meeker delivery. The hooks are there--in the engaging vocal counterpoint to a descending horn line on the bridge of "Say", for instance--but they’re difficult to appreciate.

By sticking so closely to the script laid out by their debut, II is the one thing punk rock should never be: careful.

Fated is an overwhelmingly pleasant listen. It is decidedly un-dazzling.

California Nights is a professional album: heavy-ish, filled with hooks, somewhere between "fast enough to dance" and "slow enough to sigh to while looking out of a window."

McCaughan has a gift for capturing simple, affecting moments without tipping the scales to sentimentality.

The busy arrangements and serious frontloading make Born Under Saturn’s 54 minutes a demanding investment, and the effort it takes to simply get any sort of visceral pleasure out of it makes it feel twice as long.

Hairball is certainly an evolution for Nai Harvest, but it’s tough to really call it progress.

Fading Love is set up to reward the same focus it demonstrates: if you dig into each new muted meditation and immerse yourself in FitzGerald's bubbling little temples of thought, you'll find yourself entranced.

For as bullish and dramatic as the music seems, the songs here often escalate for several minutes before making a point you think they’ve already made, like a series of false floors that open to bigger and bigger rooms.

Mew’s most consistently engaging record, even if it’s also the longest on both a cumulative and per-song basis.

Each song on Fast Food, her second LP, feels offered up and expertly framed, a series of rock songs given the lighting and treatment of museum objects.

The Waterfall stalls the most during the usually incendiary guitar workouts. But this is Jim James accepting where he and My Morning Jacket are at the moment: a bit older, a bit broken, more skeptical but very much among the living.

The glitchy, warped surface is offset by the clarity and versatility of Standell-Preston’s narrative vocals, which pull everything into focus.

Trickfinger often provokes an engaging anxiety, but when Frusciante's not pushing at the edges of the form it can lack the magic of his otherwise unapologetically experimental solo work.

For all its minor stylistic differences, Ripe is very much forged in their image. But if any traditions in British indie rock are worth perpetuating right now, this inventive, engaged stable is the one to back.

The highlights of American Wrestlers reveal themselves immediately, but elsewhere on the record McClure demonstrates a curious ability to bury concise hooks in otherwise-doughy or unfinished songs.

For all the album's modest ambitions, it doesn't lack for variety.

Even more denatured and opaque than the soupy Melbourne, Sunshine Redux is self-produced to a gooey, garish, gritty and barely mobile gel.