It’s noisy, it’s incoherent at times, but above all it’s a joyous record that's totally Neil Hagerty: inaccessibly accessible.

We can quibble about intent and expression, but in the end you will have to succumb to the heart, body and soul, and your brain might be left behind.

Ultimately, it comes down to the vagaries of taste, but measured against their previous output and current contenders, The Hungry Saw is a sleeper of a bar-chapped, morosely drunk record.

Noah and the Whale try their best to make weighty songs (look no further than the paint-by-numbers description of a funeral on the limp “Death by Numbers”), but they’re better as a pop group that digs ukuleles and acoustic guitars.

More than their previous efforts, this album exhibits the depth and experience that they have gained from such collaborations.

Despite Chunk of Change's flaws, Angelakos shows real promise as an innovative electronic-song weaver.

Death Magnetic is just about the best album Metallica could have made at this point.

While the return to straighter Old West soundscapes is welcome after Garden Ruin, Carried to Dust is really just another solid album from a band that’s made a career out of mining the genres of the Southwest.

Parenthetical Girls consists primarily of Zac Pennington's unmistakable vocals, and they are given a musical context that emphasizes their stark beauty on this album. It was well worth the three years of effort on his part.

Not only does it stand as a summation of their greatest (previous) strengths, its rhythmic and propulsive sway points to a new, more fervently alive direction for the group, making both the band and album’s name all the more appropriate.

It’s this awareness that makes Living on the Other Side--on one level a pretty basic rock album that doesn’t surpass any of its predecessors--seem like something much, much more.

Sam Champion’s sophomore album, Heavenly Bender, is a worthy rollick.

As a band whose biggest source of praise so far has been its unpretentiousness, The Shaky Hands may be better off with a little more bombast. If only they had the skill to put it together for more than a flash.

It’s a step forward chronologically but a step backward in overall album success.

All of this is still quite gut-wrenching, yes, but I find Caught in the Trees to be better when it explores other themes.

Me and Armini merely falls short of being as fully conceived as the astonoshing "Fisherman’s Woman."

Some of it works--'Southern California' 's honey-harmony’d and piano-led wistful look at the history of the Beach Boys in specific and SoCal in general is rather touching. But the rest of the album, especially the overwrought spoken-word interludes, remains a series of harmonized thuds and (however pretty) blank-eyed lobotomy-pop.

Putting out an album called The Recession right now, and draping the American flag over your head on its cover, comes with expectations of politically conscious ruminations. Instead, we get more of the same

The growth on display here outweighs the band’s now reliable--and easily addressable--shortcomings.

The tracks on Forth are long and often overproduced. It’s a tough blow to handle when a band you’ve loved for so long comes up so short.

The album, weighed down by a few awkward romance tracks and a well-meaning but ill-fitting MLK tribute, drags in the second half, and there’s no one moment to parallel the odd ache of 'Doctor’s Avocate.' But it’s once again more than the sum of its parts.

Despite Delta Spirit’s anarchic (i.e., creatively opportunistic) sampling of everything from cold war folk to the Cold War Kids, when the band members hit their stride--as on the rumbling, locomotive grooves of piano-stung epic Americana on 'Trashcan'--Sunshine becomes nothing less than an ode to musical joy.

The largely successful results characterize a risky proposition that in the hands of talent and artistic focus has yielded all sorts of adventurous delights.

You won’t hear anything on The Rhumb Line you haven’t heard before, but that doesn’t prevent it from being one of the year’s best debuts.

Though some of the oddball, art-house tendencies have been lost in this new translation of the band’s music, there has never been a better, brighter or more immediately satisfying pop soundtrack to Das Kapital.

Take Me to the Sea [is] a cross between sloppy prog-rock and emo that ends up being less than a sum of its parts.

The album is another solid (if somewhat too long) set by a band firmly in control of where it is at and what it’s doing.

Earth to the Dandy Warhols is as much of a joke album as "Metal Machine Music," except I don’t see any rock ‘n’ roll scholars finding anything particularly smart in this slop 20 years from now.