The album also features songs written and sung by other Apples, and while they're perfectly pleasant indie pop, they only accentuate Schneider's mastery.

Rise Up doesn't always meet the occasion, but it's Cypress' most consistently listenable album in 15 years.

Two dudes from bong rockers Witch, including Dinosaur Jr. ax god J. Mascis, and two more from middle-aged glam junksters Cobra Verde, including singer John Petkovic, make for a three-guitar, super-ish group that actually gets somewhere rather than just revving its engine (see Them Crooked Vultures).

With Cash gone and Willie spent, hopes hang on Hag to deliver classic country, musically and poetically. And he doesn't disappoint.

The goofier aspects of his earlier work are missed here, as are his usual naturalistic beats, which have been replaced by squelching, ominously snaky G-funk.

Troubled frontman Anthony Green and his mates have embraced glossier production while reconnecting with At the Drive-In's teeming passion.

His latest release (aided by fellow Texans Okkervil River) is wizened and epic, marked by squealing guitars and a deep wistfulness.

Despite being haunted by the group's flip from rock-star charade to reality, Congratulations still brims with mischievous energy.

It's rarely as lively as 2007's Last Light, but the interplay of organ, cello, and acoustic guitar on "Brooklyn Fawn" has a genuinely comforting warmth.

Matsson is a Harry Smith acolyte, but his understanding of Americana (and American English) is fractured, and his songs are jammed with enough surprises to make him seem like a singular new talent.

If you're not already aware that this prog quartet's fifth album serves as both a prequel and a finale to something called "The Amory Wars," bemusement is probably the best you can hope for while enduring their overwrought, topsy-turvy blend of spiky metal riffs, Gollumesque vocals, and ambient melodrama.

Sam Amidon works similarly quirky alchemy here [as Moby did a decade ago], reinventing public-domain songs (plus one modern-day ringer) as rustic mood music for watching distant super-novas explode.

Junior could be just the thing for still-mourning Sleater-Kinney fans or anyone who likes their licks righteous and their indignation more so.

Her stormy folk songs (which, on occasion, recall PJ Harvey's) are primal and dark, crammed with ancient mythology and portentous warnings.

On his solo debut, Jonsi Birgisson--Sigur Ros' spectral voice and six-string skyscraper--embraces a lithe, lush pop his main band is too monolithic to accommodate, and it's revelatory.

The added vocalists flesh out the simple bed of guitar and handclaps on the crestfallen "Mama Don't Like My Man," and play her pragmatic foils on "Money," barking, "Whatcha gonna do?" while she pleads in a Tina Turner rasp for the green stuff to stick around.

Grooming their jam-band shagginess and spotlighting their songwriting chops, Philadelphia indie poppers Dr. Dog produce a clean, big-sounding album that uncannily evokes Summerteeth-era Wilco and Soft Bulletin–era Flaming Lips.

Man From Another Time cuts a steady rolling groove that wears well, from the opening salvo of "Diddley Bo" (which turns the Bo Diddley backbeat sideways) to the closing cover of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry."

On her Dum Dum debut, assisted by Blondie and Go-Go's producer Richard Gottehrer, she cages contagious odes to husband-Crocodiles singer Brandon Welchez (as well as anxious ruminations on losing him) in metallic distortion.

Medicine County is more boisterous than 2008's Dirt Don't Hurt, but there's still something pleasantly lackadaisical about Golightly's delivery, and her songs never feel like they've been blindly co-opted.

Singer-songwriters Becky Stark (of Lavender Diamond), Inara George (of the Bird and the Bee), and Eleni Mandell convene for this relaxed, deceptively sophisticated gem of an album.

For years, Dillinger Escape Plan have been the metal standard-bearers of dizzying, time-signature torture, though they have occasionally eased up to construct NIN-damaged, alt-rock superhero fantasies. The band's fourth album gives these two personalities their most seamless marriage to date.

Sometimes Volume Two drifts in a Valium haze of deep sighs, or its lyrics wanly drain the fun out of romance.

[Love Is All frontwoman Josephine Olausson's] aim is true on the Swedish quintet's third full-length, a fizzy, exhilarating hybrid of bubblegum pop and bratty punk.

On Head First, the singer's bandmate-producer Will Gregory creates a pitch-perfect neon-lit '80s wonderland with Hi-NRG bass lines and plenty of that fat synth sound made famous by Van Halen's "Jump."

Despite personnel changes, Here's the Tender Coming, the Unthanks' third LP, is still steeped in brutal Northumberland lore, and its doomed subjects (drowning sailors, child mine workers, a woman who dies on her wedding day) are well served by the band's dark, gentle strums and ghostly piano lines.

Rob Barber intensifies the band's trademark polyrhythms with snappy post-punk bass and eerie dub echoes on disco-leaning tracks like "On Giving Up," while singer Mary Pearson eschews lyrics about happy trees for stories of loneliness and alienation.

The old comedy adage goes that if it bends, it's funny, but if it breaks, it's not. Tell that to Drive-By Truckers, who break everything in sight yet still strike tragicomic gold every time. The Big To-Do, their eighth full-length, features another cast of walking-dead survivors struggling with their vices in a Faulknerian landscape of rocked-up desperation.