As a backing mini-orchestra, Elf Power and the Strums may not be as inventive as Lambchop or as dark as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but they give Chesnutt just want he needs: a relaxed and less rehearsed environment.

Civil War shows a band that's matured in some typical ways-- as if anyone was clamoring for "broadened perspective" from these guys-- and some unexpected and not unwelcome ones.

Musically, Nicolay's in his comfort zone, making the sort of album he'd been more or less heading towards since "Connected," an album that, while certainly rooted in hip-hop, knocked like a pillow fight.

It's an intriguing approach that yields a few great songs, but because of the glut of similar material, these standout tracks tend to get lost in a neutralizing fog of sameyness.

It's still a heartily ramshackle affair, with pots and pans for percussion, rudimentary banjo picking, and what sound like first take on every track. The album's clattery rawness is its chief appeal.

In the end, though, Everything Is Borrowed's musical high points aren't enough to save it from its lyric sheet, and that, going forward, constitutes a real problem for Skinner.

for now we're stuck with Dig Out Your Soul, which like every Oasis album from 1997's "Be Here Now" onward, makes cursory gestures toward making the band's mod-rock more modernist, before reverting back to the same ol', same ol'.

Consider OH the "most Lambchop" of Lambchop releases, as it swings through almost every tone in the band's history of influence-collisions, arriving at a soul of its own.

Maggie balks at the chance to make your knees go wobbly, keeping its allure strictly intellectual and technical rather than hot-blooded. That ethos isn't going to win a lot of hugs and kisses from fans or non-fans, but Maggie never asks for more than a firm, professional handshake, the kind of appreciation it more than deserves.

Break Up the Concrete seems a bit uneven: The faster numbers begin to sound the same after a while, and the album hits a slight lull halfway through.

She's never been as in control of her voice, an incredible instrument that is as strong as it is attractive. And on The Living and the Dead, it's found just the right setting.

City of Refuge seems more like a collection of ideas for three or four different albums than one complete work.

Their latest record has more instruments and lyrical or melodic turns than hooks to hold onto, but its problem is more like an excess of ideas than a lack of them.

It's obsessive and choppy. It's playful. It's gleefully oblivious of when to shut up.

Un Día is as warm and welcoming as it is weird, but it's also something of an experiment.

It might seem counterintuitive to call Chemistry a grower: From the first listen, it's both pummeling and riveting.

As violent, plaintive, and ultimately conflicted as anything she's already written ("I know how to kill but I hate how it feels."), many of Powell's lyrical sketches are of the blood red, open-heart-surgery variety, a word set her producer knows well.

Ferndorf as a record isn't something to get you hearing music in a new way or an open up a new world, but it does succeed very nicely for what it is.

Ambitious and complex, it's stuffed with cocooning harmonies and shimmering, sunlight-smacking-the-Pacific melodies--a languid, easy West Coast record (think Randy Newman or SMiLE), infused with classic East Coast anxiety.

We all know a little something about chasing that ideal version of ourselves, and Antony's persistence in the face of futility makes it a joy to run by his side.

On Doomsdayer's Holiday, the haze is even thicker, and the album represents a sort of endpoint to their journey: taking place in utter blackness, it is their most alluring and impenetrable trip yet.

It's an album with its feet on the ground and its head in the clouds, and listening to it is a lot like waiting contentedly in a kind of musical purgatory, happy to be there but still wondering what comes next.

So among Forfeit/Fortune's many misses, Bachmann can't help but hit a few.

XOXO still manages a lonesome, crowded sound. Whether it's the sturdy chord progressions, overstuffed lyrics, or just Bianchi's tendency to avoid with melodies with contours his voice can't match, most of XOXO is likeable, if not a little tough to parse.

The set most vividly captures the Clash's most enduring qualities: the triumphs and tribulations of being populist punks.

Most of all, it's Díaz-Reixa's intuitive feel for rhythm that marks out Alegranza! as such an unusual and enticing listening experience.

He is, to put it bluntly, one of those people who gets it right far more often and in more different ways than your ordinary person really should. Uproot is another one of those instances.

The result is a collection of songs so taut and concisely resonant as to be psalms.