The follow-up to an album celebrating the African roots of the banjo, Pentatonic Wars is a sprawling folk and jazz set featuring everything from cornet to cello to djembe drums as backing for Taylor’s resilient rasp.

Roan coaxes with an almost deliriously euphoric art-rock swagger, while O'Connor infuses every track with hedonistic energy. Amazing Baby are desperate to dazzle--and they often do.

These Brits--featuring two members of Mclusky, a great band that died in 2005--spit fiery, trebly guitar­rock venom with such lusty glee that following them to hell actually sounds inviting.

It's wittier than it is moving or insightful, but give McGuinness time.

Murdoch pipes up now and again, but he's mostly content to play puppet master in his own lush­pop cabaret and revel in the fact that he only has to write and produce these brilliantly classic­ sounding songs, and not warble them.

The Guilty Office recalls its predecessors, with better engineering focusing the details.

Their debut suffers from Morello's uneven arrangements, which vacillate between rousing hardcore funk and predictable hard-rock crunch.

The shotgun rhythms, spaghetti western guitars, and dubstep explosions intertwine with lover's rock, roots reggae, and other island styles to impressively evoke the pair’s genre-splicing DJ sets.

The Brooklyn siblings forgo their 2007 album’s rock star cameos (Karen O, Gibby Haynes, Fred Schneider) and funnel their adolescent aggravations into nippy punk rousers, where closet monsters and rich kids alike get served a scuzzy skewering.

She might be Hank’s granddaughter, but Holly Williams doesn’t let the lovesick blues get her down on this twangy-yet-smooth sophomore effort.

Longstreth's prickly surface belies a bright pop center: tart, sweet, and gushing all at once.

Lacking lyrics as memorable as 2006's "Meds," Battle for the Sun is heavier but duller, with the gap between Molko's spindly melodies and the fatter, newly Americanized riffs widening.

The Ecstatic is easily his finest full-length since "Black on Both Sides," his 1999 solo debut.

Th Peas keep it exuberantly funky.

Between the groovier tracks, the album rarely keeps its feet or focus for long, getting lost in mazes of mangy Stones riffs or acoustic roundabouts with little purpose or pulse.

Like Robert Earl Keen, he has a way with a punch line and the frat-boy fans to prove it--they're gonna love 'America's Favorite Pastime,' which recounts the 1970 no-hitter Dock Ellis pitched on LSD. The rest of us will admire 'Bring 'Em Home,' a spirited call to get our troops the hell out of harm's way.

A few tracks seem unfinished, but Deerhunter's obsession with oblivion remains as intact as always.

Both the production and Wyatt's shape-shifting croon are so butter-smooth that it takes repeated plays to sense the hurt that hides behind these dance-floor lullabies.

Flowers, a collection of mystical-seeming noise collages, absurdist dirges, and Pavement soundalikes, is as listenable as it is difficult to pin down.

Extraordinarily irrational and willfully convoluted, Jhelli Beam is avant-rap as quantum physics. Hopefully, his choir gets it.

Their first full-length collaboration since 1991's stellar "Mavericks" is a beautiful set of grown-up pop, meshing Holsapple's emotional directness with Stamey's headier approach.

Adam Freeland--the nu­skool breaks vet who broke through in 2003 with "We Want Your Soul"--dons a suit jacket and hires guns (Brody Dalle, the Pixies’ Joey Santiago, Tommy Lee) for the carefully concocted, pleasantly thumping Cope.

Nosaj’s remarkable, entrancing debut album gathers sundry influences, from U.K. dubstep to Aphex Twin-styled IDM, into a 36-minute computerized symphony.

The results feel tossed-off at times, but Iggy still flashes his charm and humor.

Pairing with producer T-Bone Burnett (who helmed 1986's rootsy antecedent "King of America") and a distinguished pickup band of country heavyweights, he gives his typically fussed-over tunes a tent-revival authority.

A fond, funky farewell.

Frontman Adam Lazzara's temper tantrums sound more sore- than full-throated, but they still freeze blood for short stretches, while the revolving choruses are as enormous and polished as Boeings.

The gentler E distances himself from his lycanthropic alter ego, searching for Ms. Right backed by a familiar arsenal of winsome melodies and elegant string arrangements.