At a focused 48-minutes, The Bones of What You Believe comes soaring through and makes its difficult for you not to press replay when it all fades out.

Beirut's mournful horn riffs, driving piano, sprightly ukulele, dense percussion and occasional synth loops proved haunting and entrancing at best, flat-out morose at worst, and benignly pretty the rest of the time.

Another stellar song collection.

What's missing is the meditative joy they achieved in their rockier moments.

The members of 13 & God have created a genuinely rewarding record that is better than the sum of its parts.

We, the Vehicles is ultimately too redundant to graduate Maritime into a more mature audience.

The Con is a mostly mature collection of solid songs.

The more you listen, the more you'll start to pick up on the elaborate instrumentation that exists in the background.

One of the year's best guitar-rock albums.

How lucky to be either a new or old fan, hearing Jansch at such a late age and in such a remarkable state.

This is a carefree release that is meant for our "reptilian" brain.

They reproduce, even with simple materials and simple words, complex emotions and ideas. And at the same time, they just make you want to sing, freak-out, and play beach-blanket bingo in a basement.

The type of searing instrumental rock Explosions in the Sky has helped put on the map is the modern-day heir of the aural expressionism of Debussy and Wagner.

If you have the time to dedicate to these genre-bending excursions, the effort can be worth it more often than not.

Between his willingness to experiment and a bountiful arsenal at his disposal, a spectacular range of dreamlike moods and sounds are created across Infiniheart's sixty-five minutes.

This record is the sound of a young musician being given the right chance at the right time and knocking it out of the park.

Mould is at the top of his game on Silver Age.

Whether they’re taking names or taking their sweet time, the Constantines pull no punches here.

There's a refreshingly human scale to everything on Pale Young Gentlemen--the songs are so strong that the crack of a snare drum and the bowing of a cello, simple gestures as they are, can achieve the band's grand theatrical ambitions.

The players on Monsters of Folk complement each other extremely well. There is definitely something to be said for group chemistry. These songs don’t always shine the way they could, but the album is a great effort.

Tycho is worth any self-respecting electronic fan's time.

It's a perfectly serviceable and enjoyable post-metal/rock album that makes no real mistakes, and does manage to tweak the knobs of the formula ever-so-slightly.

Well-worn, well-defined, Heaven is the work of band with nothing left to prove.

Girls are, at their most basic, a solid band of rock ‘n’ roll reappropriators.

Mountain finds the band taking several huge leaps toward that end, resulting in a more cohesive picture of their sound and a band beating down a clear path for where they'd like to take their music.

Xcel’s production doesn’t stray very far from its R&B and soul influences, but this time it comes without almost any samples, relying sometimes on players from a homebrewed funk band to create clearance-free beats instead. Unfortunately, this new recipe doesn’t always hit the mark, and songs such as “Black Diamonds and Pearls” sound more like smooth jazz than What’s Going On-era Marvin Gaye.

To have a release that's altogether thrashing, infectious and emotional achieves a depth that the slew of garage rock revivalists today fail to encapsulate.

It's all spare and often dark, but Breaks in the Armor is a surprisingly comforting album in its cloudy way.