The fans who'll get the most from it emotionally will be those who are already invested in its singer and his honesty.

Freak Puke represents a band that's always in motion doing what it's always done: trying a crazy idea, releasing and reveling in the results and, before long, likely moving along to the next instantaneous notion. That's the spirit that's always made the Melvins great, just as it does on Freak Puke, if only in bits and pieces.

It's a pretty and intimately rendered collection of folk songs, but those moments of jarringly direct, piercing emotion are few.

Synthetica is something of a polemic, but Haines' moments of ambivalence are what make the record compelling.

The result is idiosyncratic pop-rock appealing to geeky outsiders and scene lifers that's perennially in short supply, largely by design.

That they don't treat ambient as empty-headed fluff for relaxation is laudable, but it also doesn't make Ursprung any less of a record for a self-selecting coterie of sound-art aficionados.

Under the cloak of Triple F's blatant crossover appeals, he slyly exceeds expectations by making a record better than it really needs to be.

The songwriting is as strong and intricate than on 2006's classic The Warning, even if it takes a few listens for the finer points to sink in.

There's a cocky strut to tracks like "Don't Hustle for Love" and "White Cloud" that suggest this is a band striving to make a connection with a far wider audience. On Dub Egg they fall just short of those ambitions, creating a transitory album that builds on what came before but doesn't feel like the finished product.

For all the good-natured vibes this record gives off, it's hard to ignore that Do Things is also a limited collection. It's easy to suspect Dent May's ambitions are as simple as to craft a record that finds itself endlessly stuffed into car stereos this summer.

Some of Banks' best lines are elegantly self-aggrandizing and enemy-deflating, but she's just as capable of executing those moves in more straightforward terms.

There's a gritty, lucid vein [in the album's songs] running just below the top layer of haze, the words' bite stinging all the more for their burial under all those dank guitar tones and harmonies as dark and delicate as black lace.

It's a shame that Falkous is playing to the cheap seats on The Plot Against Common Sense.

As impressive and encouraging as the production is, Pemberton's rapping isn't up to snuff. He's still overly dry and often noticeably amateurish, and he sometimes pushes himself to do things he can't.

The negatives far outweigh the positives... sounds entirely manufactured.

Her best and most cohesive work to date.

The problem with Radlands is that, armed with the potential to go wild with a new bag of tricks, Mystery Jets often become as conservatively minded as parts of the state whose outline graces the album's cover.

Isn't Anything crystallizes MBV's unique dynamic.

Though neither a high point nor a low point in her freewheeling, four-decade career, Banga has the same charm of Smith's best albums: It flits with the impressionistic fascinations of a single mind.

Endless Flowers is Crocodiles' best album and also their most frustrating. They're simply trying to do good enough and no more.

Curren$y's lyrics drip with nice things, and the joy that comes from fondly describing them. But the language he brings to them exists in its own universe.

This cerebral/visceral friction is one of the most satisfying elements of Black Hippy, and Ab-Soul arguably carries it the furthest of the group.

At times, it sounds far less like his beloved Boys of Summer 2009 so much as a simplified homage to Kompakt's more populist acts, electronic's version of a neophyte performing solo acoustic versions of Zeppelin or Radiohead at a college bar.

Another very good album from a band that consistently turns out good work while charting its own path.

Yet past all the stylistic flourishes, Generals is openhearted, politically engaged, feminist pop that, miraculously, never veers into schmaltz (or worse, didacticism).

[Song "Casualties of War" is] the sole promising moment on an album that ranges from average to disappointing. In the end, Joyful Noise feels like a stopgap.

[Guitarist Dave] Chandler's prowess as an axeman cannot be given enough emphasis: his writhing, twisted, screaming solos, and devilishly heavy riffs funnel blood and mercury into Saint Vitus' heart, as Wino's pipes lay down the soul.

It doesn't advance much on their debut and, like that record, it only intermittently allows their latent promise to creep to the fore.