On occasion, Noonan sets his sights on highbrow quarry, as in 'Reacharound,' which could pass for some unreleased Radiohead circa The Bends. But he’s at his best when he’s emphasizing accessibility over artiness.

Moorer takes an approach opposite to Lynne’s on the stripped-down Lovin’, giving each track its own distinct personality: Gillian Welch’s 'Revelator' is droning folk rock, Simone’s 'I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl' an organ-led torch song, June Carter Cash’s 'Ring of Fire' a drum-looped twang-hop. They all deserve a little spotlight.

Rock Music is free of both the maudlin and the mundane, and oddly rousing, too.

At their best--during the disc’s torch-lit forays inward, the piano-ballad title track and the forlorn 'We’re Looking for a Lot of Love'--Hot Chip get serious, delving into the up-late tangles and riddles of the 21st-century heart.

Cohesion’s where you find it, but headphone delights are everywhere.

The keyboards that colored his swan dive into dance music before he re-embraced rock with 2005’s Body of Song are simply another subtle layer of muscle for this sinewy disc.

The recent full-band reunion "Volume 4" was a small triumph, but Rain may be even more satisfying, since it’s the best work Jackson has done with a line-up that’s not strict-rock-band.

The fuzzy guitars start to blend together as the album progresses — the point, perhaps, but Black Mountain do well to break up the repetition with 'Stay Free,' an acoustic, falsetto ballad, and 'Queens Will Play.'

It’s a low, slow groove that might be coming out of the bodies of the musicians as much as their instruments--echoey, held back even at its most intense, every note sung or played with a determination not to force anything.

The 11 songs here clock in at a tidy 37 minutes--plenty of time to flavor the straight-ahead rock jolts with spaced-out country-rock ballads and pop-flavored rave-up replete with a horn section.

There are so many clashing vocal parts and guitar effects that you have to strain to hear the actual songs. Which is a shame, because said songs (all of which Ringo co-wrote) are pretty good.

Her fourth album brims with sunny hooks on its best tracks, and the alluring opener, 'Little Black Sandals,' affords her a rich, layered backdrop.

Their songs of experience suggest they spent some time exploring that darkness, only to have found the light on the other side.

Lupe’s new sophomore disc, Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool (Atlantic), is way too long.

Here you get an hour’s worth of top-notch disco-house jams crammed together into a non-stop megamix that emphasizes both the duo’s tune sense and their body-rocking beatcraft.

Having graduated from knuckleheaded threats to a more hardened ghetto perspective that sometimes blossoms into tender complexity, Freeway sounds at home, particularly over the sweetly weeping keyboard loop that grounds 'Reppin’ the Streets,' the album’s best track.

In spite of its self-depreciating title, this odds-and-sods collection of the usual B-sides and other spare tracks lives up to some of the best material the Las Vegas foursome have delivered.

Ire Works is good science tarnished slightly by one bad experiment.

From 'Intoxication' (a tale of sexual regret) to 'Church Heathen' (about hypocrisy in the church), the lyrics are more stimulating than your typical dancehall fare, and the beats are elegant and catchy.

On Smoke, his blog-buzzed debut, he offers a tuneful, mellow bedroom pastiche of trebly early-’80s punk funk, spirited, rhythm-rich worldbeat, and post-Beck white-guy R&B.

Why anyone would want to be subjected to such gloom is a good question, except that Burial is a witch with the kind of drum programming that leaves no choice in the matter.

Blackout may be more a tribute to the skills of the A-list producers who guided her through the disc than to any of her own talents.

Fans of old-time music, that vague notion of a genre called Americana, and bedrock artists like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard should find Dirt Farmer, Helm’s first solo disc in 25 years, appropriately haunting.

Chrome Dreams II is effective despite the sonic clash because, on both the new material and the leftovers, the loud ('Spirit Road') and the soft (the soul ballad 'Ever After'), it’s unified by its call to give props to spirit and humanity, a sentiment that, whatever it’s wrapped in, never gets old.

In SOAD, Tankian’s vocal gymnastics and penchant for subversive lyrics are kept somewhat in check by the mix of muscle and subtlety guitarist Daron Malakian brings to the table. Here, there’s nothing to hold him back.

The finished product is a cobbled-together dazzle that contorts your mouth into a 50-minute succession of grins and wows.

Jimmy Eat World go to great lengths to recapture the anthemic thrills of "Clarity"--and give or take a few bouts of brooding cynicism, they’ve succeeded.

Unless you’re a diehard fan, wait for their new album in the spring.

There’s plenty in the way of ambition on Widow City, but little substance to back it up.

There's much beauty in the modest moments: the gentle, dreamy guitars in the ballad 'Detlef Schrempf,' the Uncle Tupelo–ish tumble of 'The General Specific,' and the instrumental interlude of 'Lamb on the Lam (In the City),' which sounds like the Cure lost in the Appalachia.

The sweetest instrument, however, is Wyatt’s voice, whose fragile, high, quavering tone is honest to the core.

Chalk up at least some of this disconnect to Brendan O’Brien’s production, which is often so slicked down and smooshed together that it doesn’t just airbrush the band’s jagged edges, it sandblasts them.

A self-conscious return to Dashboard’s acoustic-troubadour roots. The good news is that the mellower sounds don’t come with mellower sentiments.

Despite always titanic levels of rock-star delusion must at some level be aware that this time they have turned in a truly half-assed piece of work.

The title Revival is no hype: Fogerty is again in full command of his talent for blending heartfelt writing with irony-free meat-and-potatoes rock.

Any of these songs would have been a charttopper in the day. Should be now, too, but that’s another story.

White Chalk is more chamber music, and a dark chamber at that. The only flickers of light come from Harvey’s voice: high, airy, and imperiled as she weaves her echo-coated and darkly soulful spell till the story’s bleak finale.

On his third Iron & Wine full-length, he goes for his biggest sound yet, but the production is mere window dressing for some of his best songwriting.

There’s an urban-informed edge to much of the disc.

There’s something melodious and calm about Will.i.am’s third solo hip-hop/R&B album--but there’s also something boring about its euphonic electro-funk dolor.

So far--on two full-lengths and a pair of EPs--the results have been underwhelming. That trend continues on this homonymous disc.

Subdued but not entirely resigned, Mitchell sings in a strong, assured voice that’s still warm and welcoming, though lowered by decades of ecologically unhip tobacco smoke.

Trees might be at its best when Moore gives into the freewheeling vibe that is the natural outgrowth of spending your adult life engaged in on-stage jam sessions.

Spirit If . . . takes plenty of time to revel in the beauty of its surfaces.

The Donnas get the ball into the red zone from time to time on Bitchin', but they never really score.

Working with producer Adam Kasper, Vedder played nearly everything on the album. And that gives Into the Wild a cozy, intimate feel.

There’s some exceptional songwriting here.

By the end of the 13-track disc, Lee's unwaveringly hopeful message starts to sound preachy. But if it works for him, well, maybe he’s onto something.

His crafty postmodern bubblegum is a treat well worth chewing.

You won’t care that it’s gleefully empty, shamelessly primitive, pre-rational, lo-fi. You’ll be too busy dancing.

The 12 songs are rhythmically warm and appealing thanks to Jay Bellirose’s spare-cymballed drumming and the beautifully knotty guitars of Henry, Bill Frisell, and Greg Leisz.

La Radiolina is the most rockist album of his solo career--and also the most disappointing.

Some things, like this album, are best left unanalyzed and simply enjoyed for their own bone-headed dedication to rockin’ out like a motherfucking banshee. Which Going Way Out does in spades and diamonds.

Aesop's preference for boring "live" beats tends to hit somewhere between the Roots ('Getaway Car') and Linkin Park ('None Shall Pass'), but that hardly matters: it's his delivery that commands the attention here.

For the most part, singer-songwriter Craig Pfunder doesn't justify the presence of vocals and lyrics.

These 11 tracks are mostly mellow and melodic, with some Otis Redding-style come-ons

Ear Drum doesn’t reach the highs of that far more ambitious and sprawling album ["Train of Thought"], but it’s a welcome return to form.

Minus the Bear seemed more serious about their music than about its presentation.

The title cut is the best of the lot, an anthem about the beautiful chaos of family life where wine is sipped from a jelly jar and “peanut butter is everywhere.”

There is a place in this world (Pottery Barn maybe, or a future Eddie Murphy romantic comedy) for the R(ap)&B cocktail party that is Finding Forever.

The result bounces all over the place, from zippy new-wave rave-ups to tinkly twee-pop lullabies to handsome folk-rock jams with trippy guitar sounds.

Johns’s stylistic schizophrenia might set you off here; even his singing on Young Modern changes from cut to cut. Everyone else: dig in--this thing is quite a feast.

The group’s second album continues in the same vein as the generally winning debut--only now the arrangements are lusher and more ornate and, in a few unfortunate cases, the songs are longer.

It's nice to be reminded that the world is shit and we're all gonna die. Editors have mastered the form.

Attention to the smallest instrumental details and the finest points of every composition have become Interpol trademarks; more complex than its pop song structures might suggest, Our Love To Admire is well worth exploring.

Rough-edged and overdriven in the right places, super-slick as their Reagan-era new-wave touchstones elsewhere, this pomo-funk concoction from Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé is like a French kiss from Sonny Crockett.

Although it doesn’t attain the career-defining cumulative power of 2005's "Gypsy Punks," it's a broader, more intricate disc.

This disc is both violent and romantic, offering warm singer-songwriter torch songs and jagged avant-noise frays with large-hearted choral flourishes.

'New Dark Ages,' with its layered background harmonies, wall-of-sound instrumentation, and quietly propulsive drumming, is a 27-year career in a nutshell.

In exploring his split psyche, T.I. forgets what made the excursion interesting to begin with: there’s good and evil in everyone, but you gotta mix the two to get a reaction.

The misstep here is that it all sounds too safe - rarely does he deviate from the sweet, melodious splendor of previous S&S discs.

A merger made in musical heaven.

Boy in da Corner may be the classic Dizzee will be forced to chase for the rest of his career, but Maths + English shows him still striving.

On Excellent Italian Greyhound they deliver the expected fistful of vitriolic by-number chuggers.

Sweet Warrior finds him spinning epic yarns instead of heroic solos.

Like a perfectly attired woman, the National are fleetingly alluring, never gaudy, subtly enchanting.

At their best, though, Handsome Furs do for the disaffected what the Postal Service did for sentimental Death Cab cuties: they deliver more of something not quite the same.

Erasure remain A-level, mid-tempo melody makers, crafters of classic romantic pop songs with electronica serving as the template.

His music always offers an emotional complexity to mirror its melodic sophistication.

You pretty much know what to expect from a new Sea and Cake disc: breezy lounge-pop tunes embroidered with sleek keyboard blips and gentle drum-machine pitter-patter.

The songwriting isn’t BRMC’s most memorable, but Baby 81’s noise-roots fumes are pretty thick.

If he never takes another chance, this new R&B torch carrier will still have a pop career for another 20 years, but if he wants to make a real mark, he’ll have to toss that hat.

Maybe it’s Lambert’s dark, rocking side that makes her ballads sound so disarmingly tender, sweet, and vulnerable.

These tunes shred as po’-facedly as any the Champs have recorded.

Ode to Ochrasy is a little more energized, but Mando Diao still aren’t breaking fresh ground.

Although rooted in history, this album’s themes and passion are timeless.

Fear of a Blank Planet is not only their most vintage-sounding album, it’s also their best.

A weirdly entrancing collection of polished electronics and acoustic-guitar riffs layered like fruit in a parfait glass.

Dark, spry pop that’s thick with synths and noir guitars and indebted to OMD, Roxy Music, the Human League, and “Let’s Go to Bed”–era Cure.

It feels endless — in a good way.

As Blur, Morrissey, and even Oasis learned the hard way, engaging in parochial social criticism — as much of Yours Truly does with its references to youth clubs and housing estates — doesn’t connect with more than a cult of Anglophiles here in the US.

Strangelet... seems like the work of a man who hasn’t aged a day since he figured out what kind of music he wanted to make.

Here the material has the swagger and toughness of loud, sloppy rock.

The heart is here, but the lyrics have him sounding like a man who’s turned healing into a systematic process — a man who’s heard too much kind advice or maybe sat through too much therapy.

There’s something oddly accessible about the mess the duo make on Why Bother?

It’s more polished and sonically ambitious. But it’s not a major departure.

Seven great tunes... and... three dull ones.

It delivers on the promise of Louden Up, with infectious beats and a kitchen-sink approach.