Filled with shimmering waves of pedal steel and slide guitar, these spare, gritty reenactments will surely please fans of his 2003 urban-folk platter Talkin' Honky Blues.... Underground hip-hop enthusiasts, however, might be put off by Buck's near-complete disregard for the rippling, sample-laden funk of his youth.

Its flimsiness usually finds a way to sound purposeful, and that makes Aqueduct's personal, cerebral pop worth coming back to.

Soft and subtle, Superwolf is the kind of record that unwinds slowly, and is best enjoyed over multiple listens and, unsurprisingly, many glasses of wine.

It reveals a manic, uncommon glint in their inventive fires, the unmistakable fervid gleam which accompanies artists who know exactly what they're doing, even if the rest of us don't.

Their songs burst open upon inspection; you must first shrink to their size, but once you do, you'll probably want to stick around for awhile.

Another goddamn home run.

This isn't a revolutionary album for Tobin but it's a lot of fun, and works surprisingly well on its own, given the stringent requirements it had to meet.

Ultimately comes out a very solid if not revelatory record.

His strongest, most satisfying effort to date.

This album, even more than their others, is like a cheap pinata: A lot of candies come out, and a few of them are bound to be stale yellowish things that don't taste like butterscotch.

All Harm Ends Here is hushed and apocryphal, but at times it sounds almost as half-hearted as it is heavy-hearted.

Magnolia Electric Co. is no Crazy Horse, and Molina's vocabulary on the guitar doesn't yet have the presence to carry such extended interpretations of his material.

The end result is a rich, triumphant sonic tapestry; you can hear every dollar that went into it.

Black Mountain are about as referential as they come. But despite the obvious touchstones-- which, incidentally, fucking rule-- the band are affable and idiosyncratic enough to win over those who passed on recent retrofits like Comets on Fire's Blue Cathedral or My Morning Jacket's It Still Moves, and make those records' admirers practically cream themselves.

It's well-recorded, well-mixed, well-performed-- hell, it's even well-packaged-- but it has little spark and a bad habit of insisting on five-minute songs.

Cam's flow is a thing of beauty.

Nothing's Lost is a well-meaning record that just got its priorities mixed up. These tech'd-up tearjerkers can out bench press anyone in terms of sonic fodder, but the album is whiny, transparent, and a colossal hodgepodge.

Yes, it's "sprawling," "massive," "has lots of filler," "should have been one disc," etc.-- but guess what: It's cocksure and it works.

Brash, grungy, and loud... a tiny handful of outstanding tracks and a whole mess of schmaltzy filler.

LAMB has one mega-hit, one okay song, three stillborns, and seven full-fledged embarrassments.

Those hoping for a trove of overlooked gems will be disappointed, as too much of With the Lights Out sounds like nothing so much as a dull-edged instrument lifting flakes of material from the bottom of a barrel. Simply put, there's enough good stuff here for a solid single disc.

If Mm..Food? feels merely good or somewhat inconsequential, it's because it is that way by design.

Watching such an undeniably talented artist blindly follow such an errant muse can be endlessly compelling, and the failure of these two albums to capture his visions and ambitions with any adequacy possesses the pull of true tragedy.

R&G has a unified sound, rare in hip-hop albums, but it's a sound based on tinkly pianos and noodly guitars and windchimes. It sounds something like The Black Eyed Peas if they tried to make a Barry White album, but with more falsetto warbling.

Encore is a fourth fascinating record from Eminem, but it's also easily his weakest and, in many ways, tamest album to date.

White People, for all its ambitions, fails to coalesce.

Case is a singer first and a songwriter second, and The Tigers Have Spoken is afflicted with the same malady as Blacklisted: Many of its songs are too short, clocking in under two minutes.

Joji sounds like a record made by mountains.