VYP nonetheless shows, perhaps by design, a pretty convincing arc of maturation.

At a certain point, the xx need to turn off that reverb pedal and learn to sing above a whisper - but I'll be damned if they haven't worked their magic again.

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.

Hard Bargain is a gorgeous album.

Art-pop triumph "Tell Me" puts it all over the top as the zenith of Triple D's young career. That's something to be optimistic about.

For the most part Life Death Love and Freedom makes good on--and somehow makes entertainment of--its sober sense of purpose.

Guilty as charged, then: I’ll gladly let Moz, my all-too-human co-pilot, do my thinking for me.

This might not be the experimental genre-crossing venture the duo set out to accomplish, but it is a slideshow of timeless pop songs.

At War with the Mystics is as accessibly odd as Yoshimi but more scattered and darker.

Women + Country sets the standard for new-century conformist rock--a genre far less boring than that phrase might suggest.

Mirage Rock might as well be the name of a new airy-rock subgenre, with luscious, echoey story-tunes rolling in like a soft mirage-inducing mountain fog.

Shadow's densest and longest work at first sounds like an overstylized, underwritten retread with lots of superfluous cuts sporting names like "Tedium." But it eventually rewards hard listening.

When Old 97's are on--which they are most of the time on their eighth studio album--they're very, very on. Rhett Miller's writing is the definition of neatly sculpted songcraft, with every piece firmly in place, and not a bit of fat.

The majority of the songs aren't much more than bare bones, with sparse piano and spacious, airy guitars, but it's the way the women work together so naturally that promises more than a one-off experiment.

Gibbard's carving out new musical territory on Former Lives, while amplifying the broken heart of what makes his sound so wonderful.

It’s better this way, all apologies to Meg White.

Telefon Tel Aviv have always been the product of two drives (both senses), but on Immolate Yourself, for the first time, the workflows of Cooper and Eustis merge a single, renewed vision. They go a bit poppier than they've ever gone, yet it's also their darkest work.

The band's wonderfully detached mood seems born of their music's head-bouncing distractibility rather than any pretentious pondering.

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

Even when Banhart seems more in a predicament than in the zone, he’s hopelessly inventive. Several songs experience complete transformations over their modest three-minute spans, succeeding like little daybreaks.

Ascent is stuffed with psychedelic guitar virtuosity, moments where Chasny leaves this plane and enters one of those transcendental, mind-freaked, head-tipped-back, eyelid-fluttering states that few are capable of.

The thread that tethers I'm Gay to the rest of Lil B's immense, sprawling catalogue is his earnest loyalty to the central tenets of the "based" movement: love and positivity in the face of adversity.

[It] depends less on the band’s gear-smashing antics than on their sense of tunecraft, which isn’t as highly developed.

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.

There's more melody here than on previous Mastodon albums; opener 'Oblivion' even has a sweetly grungy Alice in Chains breakdown. And Brendan O'Brien's production does increase the fist-pumping factor in 'Divinations' and 'Crack the Skye'--the latter of which bites some of Metallica's Black Album rumble. But this is still a forbiddingly dense piece of post-prog rock.

The History of Apple Pie aren't exactly breaking new ground in the world of indie rock, but they are the sort of band who win you over in seconds.

National Ransom isn't the midlife masterpiece that obsessives have been pining for, but its finer points are worth seeking out, in all their sepia-tinted glory.

Langford and co-vocalist Sally Timms lead listeners through tales of country, God, and man with a weather-beaten grace that would make Nick Cave fans squeal.