Religious music was never a hot button issue, and at no point does this, Moore's latest, feel like anything other than an honest expression of love.

Set your controls for the heart of your bong.

Tell Me, her second album, matches and at times even surpasses her debut in terms of rueful atmosphere and unflinching songwriting, and Mayfield works to break free of her country confines and showcase her vocals in new, unexpected settings.

Organic and jubilant, it successfully weaves psych, world, rock, and folk traditions into something new and endlessly compelling.

These spry melodies and generous arrangements are the stuff of pop fantasy, while the reach of Tyler's music offers calling cards for fans of folk and more textural avant garde pieces.

Its deeper appeal is that it's earwormy enough to take a casual listener multiple go-rounds to pick up on that.

Sure, they could use a few relatable sentiments to go with their outstretched sound, and the Clinic thing's just gotta go. But few bands this young are operating on quite this scale, and fewer still have the brass--and the patience--to pull off a big, glitzy, complex record like Zeroes QC.

Anika is shortsighted in the best way: it's a tribute, an exercise, the charming kind.

They sound more into straight lines than catchy arcs, more into the moment than what came before.

Sun Airway [has] crafted a mature and confident collection of alternate-reality singles far less common than its sound might initially imply.

Seefeel is a thorny album, a thicket of crackling guitars and faltering rhythms.

If Broken Dreams Club is indeed an honest glimpse of what's ahead, it sounds as though Girls have much more to give.

With this new LP -- released on a major label on both sides of the Atlantic, no less -- odds are, a lot of people are going to listen, and I don't mean in the tail-eating, blog-bite-blog sort of way.

The Golem is not a Pixies album, but it is a Black Francis record that walks and talks surprisingly well even without the master text of its film.

while Ghost Blonde can feel like it's keeping the listener at arm's length, further listens reveal a record full of vibrancy, the kind in which you soon find yourself fully immersed.

Even with all of the bands he punches the time card for, it's starting to become very clear that, with Is Growing Faith, his solo efforts are the ones that reap the most rewards.

So if the sprawling, all-bases-loaded Bardo Pond isn't the band's best LP, it might be their most representative: both the tiresome excess and the lung-blackening reward.

Lots of people use music to try and escape their living rooms, but Lady Lazarus seems more interested in inviting us into hers.

It's to his credit that he never seems too in awe of his most obvious antecedents, instead simply choosing to flex his own capabilities within the tight constraints that musicians like Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Dieter Moebius have operated within for decades. Still, it's a shame Manley didn't choose to filter more of his own ideas into the myriad eulogies on offer here.

Compared to the last two albums, Zonoscope has precious little guitar crunch, which makes it hard to even call Cut Copy a dance-rock band anymore.

Though there have always been plenty of bands mining the same era, with reverbed vocals and drummers that don't sit down, Stay Home captures attitude and devil-may-care confidence better than most of today's bands worth their weight in Nuggets compilations.

Minks adapt the style that the Clientele matured into over their recent full-lengths, which adds a foreboding touch to these love-and-regret-focused songs.

Their personality-bereft voices take on a chameleonic quality in which, when surrounded by the accompanying music, they eventually become nothing at all.

Hopefully, Rolling Blackouts marks the moment in the Go! Team's career where the idea of moving forward becomes less of a literal concept and more an artistic one.

If Samson's voice had the full-blooded verve of her old bandmate Hanna, she might be able to sell this stuff. Instead, she delivers all the album's lyrics in the same flat monotone, and she just sounds bored the whole time.

In its brief onslaught of sneery fun, Vicki Leekx only occasionally reaches the dizzy pop heights of Arular and Kala. But it does give us an M.I.A. who, once again, seems to be having a blast doing what she's doing.

On the new Party Store, the band leaps even further into uncharted territory, turning in a full hour of classic Detroit techno covers.

Spiritual, Mental, Physical-- a follow-up collection of grotty practice tapes and studio goofs culled from a set of tape reels recently unearthed in a Detroit basement-- is a bit less awe-inspiring.