A marvel of pure songcraft.

It's a fittingly strong ending for a band that did almost everything right.

Whether the album achieves its titular synesthesia is debatable, but Bell Orchestre tap into a wide, mesmerizing range of the spectrum.

The album captures an anger and regret intense enough to nearly bruise listeners and attendees, but also manages to preserve the pristine trembles in Oldham's throat.

Despite Price's best efforts to infuse these songs with motion and finesse, Confessions never quite reaches its earlier heights after "I Love New York". When Madonna actually starts confessing, the album loses its delicate balance between pop frivolity and spiritual gravity.

It's a record played in the red, and it's not afraid to have a good time there.

So this is what A Ghost Is Born is supposed to sound like.

His band is tight, but Oberst sounds a bit tense and weighed down on heavily embellished tracks like "At the Bottom of Everything" and Lua B-side "True Blue".

None of the tracks are more noteworthy than anything on Sing "Other People", Angels' latest and straightest LP, and the foreshortened format disables development. But Gira's fatherly measuredness is a nice foil to Akron's hyperkinetic mini-opera.

Far be it from me to criticize happy endings, but in musical terms, a comfortable, even-keeled existence sometimes comes out as isolated and ordinary art.

Not all of Diamond's new songs go awry. Most just go away, their melodies dissipating, their lyrics flimsy even through those tremendous pipes.

Given which songs are chosen and when this is being released, Scab Dates is a neither a concession nor a step forward, revealing inclinations that feel half as indulgent as they should when following a record like Frances the Mute, and about half as interesting to listen to.

The box is scattered, as expected, but the songs collected go a long way to indicate that, contrary to popular belief, Pollard has a measure of control over his songwriting.

Lacking the emotional knack for jaw-dropping singles, the band succeeds in consistently churning out songs that would be solid filler on an amazing album-- a Magical Mystery Tour comprised solely of "Blue Jay Way"'s.

These tracks are botched experiments that can't even function as interesting failures.

A deliriously ambitious record packed with neo-psych lullabies and swooning choruses.

With a penchant for sloppy dance beats and an ear for sonic minutiae, Tom Vek unites skill sets as antipodal as Rapture and Elvrum.

Flimsy replicas of rock history.

On Lookaftering, it comes as a relief to hear not only how pristine Bunyan's delicate vocals remain but that she has retained her understated abilities as a songwriter.

As a think piece, Rehearsing My Choir is enormously engaging, but as a pop record, it's exhausting and fruitless.

In the end, it's hard to decide if Descended Like Vultures is better or worse than Rogue Wave's debut.

Feels is an excellent record, one that, despite a more conventional approach, happens to get better over time.

This feels like a step down from the last two albums.

If you really are the sort of person who's been waiting with bated breath for a new Depeche Mode release, then don't worry: You'll love this. Dear everyone else: It's pretty okay.

It finds the band climbing toward some unknown peak, and while it attains great heights, there's also a now-again sound of wheels spinning, and every reason to believe LB still haven't reached their ultimate destination.

Where 2001's Bright Flight leaned into full-bore country, emphasizing Berman's voice and lyrical content, Tanglewood Numbers is a band-oriented rock record-- crashing, amped-up, aggressively ramshackle.

This album is almost a non-entity.

Cale squanders whatever momentum he accrued on the estimable avant-pop of 2003's HoboSapiens by adorning these new songs with such unflattering, generic alternarock textures that they often render their author unrecognizable at best, and irrelevant at worst.