On disc, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl is a bland, bluesy celebration you can afford to miss.

On 200 Million Thousand, Black Lips sidestep expectations and make a record less approachable than its predecessor.

There is a resigned quality to Hungry Bird that stands in sharp contrast with the sprightly, slightly goofy tack the band took on 2001's career highlight The Ghost of Fashion.

There are, almost out of obligation, some unimaginative pairings....Other pairings are much less obvious and either more satisfying or more puzzling.

Only swatches of the lyrics are intelligible ("Look at me," "Feast your eyes," "All is yours") but that's part of the enchantment of magic: A fleeting glimpse of something that might have been transcendent, leaving our minds to fill in what we didn't quite see.

White Bird Release, while not as conceptual as For Waiting, For Chasing, almost by default flows as a sort of suite, with each track named after a fragment of this quotation.

The album's production and Vermue's economical, buttoned-down songwriting offer plenty of tonal and genre variation, but everything still feels like it's hitting the same mark.

Once producing dense, complex music that rewards each additional listen, Dissolver's content as comfort food for rockists, too quickly sating the listener.

Rather than re-tracing the path that made him popular, he has hacked into the wilderness of his new inspirations, no matter how divergent, and emerged triumphant.

Hold Time is an enjoyable, well-constructed album, and as good a place as any for newcomers to start--it just doesn't hold many surprises.

A Morrissey record you can dig into without caring much about the man's lyrics.

The Century of Self turns out to be every bit as stubborn as its predecessors, even as it goes a certain way towards justifying them.

Many of the songs on Isbell's sophomore release don't necessarily aim for (or achieve) such profundity, yet they still compel through sheer verve and Isbell's unwillingness to let an unhip sound or idea discourage him.

It is a work that shows a band still struggling to come to terms with itself, discovering on record the music it wants to make, and settling for a safe middle ground in the end.

These clusterfuck all-the-cooks experiments, more often than not, add up to way, way less than the sum of their parts.

With their boundaries and ambitions by now well established, on Tight Knit Cabic and company largely succeed in luring the listener hazily back in time and into Vetiver's comfort zone.

One gets the feeling that with a little more ruthlessness about what makes the final cut, Goodnight Oslo could offer more hits than misses. As it is, it falls just a little short.

Havilah broadens the Drones' sonic palette and continues to carve out a sound that is uniquely theirs, and in that sense it's an accomplishment, but wrestling with the record's dark subject matter makes it a difficult listen.

Their catchier material that front-loads the record is so distinct and stunning, however, that it's hard not to be left wanting more after those opening tracks.

Working with material hog-tied to the past and performed with traditional trappings puts Diane at some risk for creative stagnation and worse--the kind of anonymity and irrelevance enjoyed by vast swathes of the contemporary folk universe. To Be Still avoids these traps thanks to Diane's spectacular voice and, well, the little, mostly indescribable things.

Sometimes it feels like they're playing two different songs, working from two different ideas. There's no steady view of the horizon anymore. It's disorienting, but charming, to hear their parts blend, settle, and separate over and over again.

Dark Was the Night comes off as a gray, monotone look at the current indie landscape and, as a result, works best in small batches.

For an album mostly preoccupied with cataloguing past relationships and the mistakes that did them in, it follows that Feel. Love. Thinking. Of. would manifest those feelings with nostalgic sounds, some welcome, others less so.

Ferree obviously loves his source material, and the way he weaves in the references throughout is ingenious. But something about the pleasure he takes in his obsession cloisters it away - he can't quite make his subject matter in a way that transcends Bobby Driscoll's life and death.

Choral sometimes feels staid and a little postcard-y: a pretty gesture that fails to eclipse the experience of actually going somewhere.

At times the songs can sound cold, as though they want to keep their distance, refusing to shed any armor. Although this could be a handicap on other albums, it only serves to makes Carboniferous more intriguing.

Watersports sounds terrific.

The album falls short of a diamond-in-the-rough-caliber discovery, but considering these seven songs are the remains of an aborted 12-song full-length-from a band that reinvented itself every three or four years, For the Whole World holds up well alongside, say, concurrent Blue Oyster Cult or New York Dolls albums.