For the Whole World to See is not the true revelation the label wants you to think it is but it has some catchy melodies and delivers them at breakneck speeds.

The Blue Depths can be a mesmerizing album to listen to. Tapscott's voice creaks with emotion, haunting these songs with a vital humanity that keeps their cold feel from being mechanical.

While the flowing, assembled vibe of Mother of Curses makes for a unique listen, it rarely reaches beyond the realm of sonic curiosity.

Mandell’s best, most varied album is hidden somewhere inside Artificial Fire. You have to dig through 20 minutes of brightly painted filler to find it, and unfortunately 12 of those minutes make up the album’s first three songs.

With The Camel's Back, Psapp grows up while successfully eluding categorization in the quest for catchiness.

Fol Chen's debut, Part I: John Shade, Your Fortune's Made, is end-to-end melodrama and that's fine; so far, they're doing it right. Instead of the kind of melodrama that produces sugar and hooks, Fol Chen appears to opt for storybook.

It’s admirable that Auerbach would want to start looking outside of the limitations he and fellow Key Patrick Carney put on themselves at the jump by bringing in a full band to augment his sound. But there’s not much on Keep It Hid to enjoy that couldn’t have come from the Black Keys.

Unfortunately, Richards doesn't play to her strengths often enough. Too much of Light of X slips out of straightforward and into simple.

Lonely Island are among the funniest musical comedians around. But without video, their songs are more "A Night at the Roxbury" than "Wayne’s World."

Matthew Houck, better known as the voice of Phosphorescent, has given Willie Nelson (and the rest of us) a gorgeous, shimmering gift in To Willie.

Decent Work for Decent Pay, a slipshod mélange of long-overdue remixes, is not what we're looking for. Unless you've been living in Kyrgyzstan without an Internet connection for the past few years, you likely wore out most of the tracks on Decent Work for Decent Pay long ago.

The album conjures up equal measures of frustration and dejection, especially as it bears all the hallmarks of a band growing in stature, who may have just delivered on all that untapped potential on a finely honed fourth or fifth record.

The Good Feeling Music Of...is good for a few plays and might raise a few smiles along the way.

The Heartless Bastards are much better on the alt side of the alt-country dynamic.

There is something distinctly perfect about the naivety that the Pains of Being Pure at Heart seem to effortlessly inject into every bouncy ballad of young love and young living that makes their self-titled debut not only a welcome throwback but a much needed vacation from over-calculation.

As its name implies, Snowflakes and Car Wrecks is meant for winter listening. But the open space on this EP is good for curled up meditations in any weather.

Bones' role as the accuser, sputtering anger at everyone around him, is wonderfully assumed here, and makes A Fool for Everyone an enjoyable glimpse at the life of an unloved rogue.

When the proudly worn tropes – the irascible low-life characters, the working-class heroes – show up to break up the life-affirming stuff on Dream, they're an afterthought (the jokey “Outlaw Pete”) or worse (heretofore never to be mentiond again "Queen of the Supermarket" is, well, really fucking terrible). That's why the finest moment of the album is "The Wrestler."

Yet it is the span of moods, paired with the elaborate arrangements, which reveal something new with every listen, that make Dear John an album worth persevering with.

His lyrics certainly won’t help, but if he wasn’t a Stroke, this album could only be sold out of Fraiture’s trunk at open-mic nights in upstate New York.

As good as some of the tracks are, it's just discouraging to think how solid the record could've been if it had been just ten tracks of more fleshed-out material.

They display a loose, gritty feel that ought to please metal fans as well as those who still think this is Crow’s version of Spinal Tap.

It’s disappointing that a duo this good on paper could be responsible for an album as uninspired as A.M. Even the album’s better songs (the piano-led 'And I Wonder' and the sauntering 'The Wrong Turning') are limp and tedious at best.

Has the album of 2009 been unleashed in January? I can’t see anything else coming near it.

The Crying Light is not exactly light and happy stuff, but for Antony, it’s a giant step forward down the path toward personal and artistic happiness.

Everything’s a little less condensed here than previous entries into the Newman catalogue, and the compositions even get to hang loose at times. That does lead to some delayed gratification, but it’s still exciting to see Newman let his hair down a bit--in an understated manner, of course.

Unfortunately, the bad tracks merely remind us that for all Cut Your Hands Off’s brazen energy, towering sound, and melodious verse-chorus one-two punch attack, it’s the subject of the songs that ultimately bores. Which is a shame, because most of the time, these guys get everything else so damn right.

Even while working inside a style that has changed very little throughout its multiple-century lifespan, with Drone Trailer MV & EE have learned that looking outside tradition and beyond the past is a precious means of progression.