Redd Kross sound tighter and more energetic, even though their guitar tones have mellowed a little.

Devotion marries her natural gift with throbbing instrumentation that breathes life into every single turn of phrase or sensitive vocal embellishment.

The elements of pastiche are woven smoothly into her sound, which dances gracefully on the edges of past and present, of waking life and dreams.

Fragrant World is curiously thin.

Sun God is an unapologetic, all-or-nothing proposal.

Foxygen haven't so much produced memorable songs as much as cool, disembodied sonic layers that might one day coalesce into memorable songs in your head if you listen to it enough.

Sure, maybe Eremita is sometimes awkward, chintzy, or melodramatic, but for 52 minutes, Ihsahn mostly allows the listener to have a blast, if occasionally and arguably at his own expense.

The original is a seduction; this [album] is food-court flirtation.

There will be an audience for bands like Jukebox the Ghost, who at least do this unoffensive brand of power-pap serviceably. But if you're too much of a realist to believe in trick lighting, happy endings or choreographed emotion, Safe Travels will probably leave you wishing for riskier terrain.

Raw Money Raps is immaculately constructed as identity crises go, and there's an uncontrived honesty that feels more like someone working through a multifaceted outlook on life than testing his options for which crowd to play to.

There's something about the visceral, elemental nature of Niki and the Dove's production that takes you right there, shivering and pulling the collar of your coat close as wind whips under the viaduct.

The fundamental Gatekeeper template has been stretched and tweaked, putting one tentative foot forward into the future while the other remains firmly rooted in the past.

Compelling... [Yet] Forever So's resolutely overcast vibe grows a touch dreary around the three-quarter mark; Husky's tempos tend toward the deliberate, and they're most comfortable hanging out in a minor key, but after nine or 10 fairly maudlin affairs in a row, you may find yourself longing for a little respite.

Way's most compelling moments on Sorry are those in which she's particularly hellish, strong, and lyrically bold.

What hits quickest yet lasts longest are his more wistful, sentimental tunes.

C.A.R. is an excellent, devastating record, a chronicle of the amiable pessimism and occasional nihilism of a rapping Bukowski who can't seem to find a way out of the condition in which he finds himself.

The seven songs on In Motion #1 were commissioned as alternate scores to seven short avant-garde films, and without those inspirations unspooling in front of the listener, there's a strange incompleteness to most of them.

Though often disjointed, when some of these fragments manage to really connect, it's hard not to imagine Supreme Cuts as being able to hit a decent stride in the future.

Even when they're digging into the grit of a country's flaws or society's problems, the synth-driven hooks can be outright jovial.

[Graceland] was unique in its total, and totally natural, synthesis of musical strains that turned out to be not nearly as different from each other as its listeners might have expected, and the result resonated strongly around the world and across generations.

It's nice to see that a band can organically develop its sound while still maintaining a home-grown sensibility.

When they wanted, Múm could already do abstractly affecting without also tipping into cloying sentimentality. But since the bulk of the compilation is so second-rate and saccharine, an obvious learning experience put on tape, Early Birds is inessential.

For its breadth and complexity, [Blur 21] actually tells a simple story: Blur are a band that did an astonishing amount of different things really, really well.

[The Merge reissues of Copper, Beaster, and FU:EL] are a wonderfully presented document of a punk legend [Bob Mould], starting over creatively and emotionally in a brief window he helped open, and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations.

There is still some great music on God Forgives, but it is somewhat overshadowed by higher-profile misfires.

Instead of justifying or summarizing two decades of work, Tyler and McDonnell set them aside and come up with a concise, lovely album that, like a gentle tourist, takes only pictures, leaves only footprints.

The paradox about them is this: With two people, Om sounded expansive; with more, they sound comparatively weak. The music is unmistakably theirs, but the intensity of it feels lost in the arrangements.

Hints of humor are often symbolized in Scholefield's artworks, but here they have an unbalancing effect, only serving to detract from the portentous musical renderings of the uneasy symbiosis between digital glitch and the natural world.