The results unfold like a well-plotted novel.

Mixed Emotions is a shiny bear-hug of an album--sometimes short on fresh ideas, but never lacking in heart.

What they lack in consistency they make up for in intentions. It's soul for all the right reasons.

Recorded with his working band the Blokes, the album isn’t without its misfires (the obvious 'The Johnny Carcinogenic Show'), but it is Bragg’s most assured statement since hooking up with Wilco a decade ago to give life to lost Woody Guthrie lyrics.

Luna fans will be pleased.

With Martine's fine-grain arrangements giving texture to Veirs's accounts of paddling down rivers and dreaming of silver silos. It's all exceedingly lovely stuff.

The bilious frontman has aged like a cheap wine: embittered, but with enough kick left to make for a good time.

Their sixth record reminds me quite a bit of that Metric album that came out last spring. You could put this reaction down to Sainthood’s understated, idiosyncratic electronic elements, or to the whole Canadian elevated-indie-pop thing.

Ditch the first 20 minutes and open the album with the stunning, nearly seven-minute "The Violent Bear It Away," which is tucked away toward Destroyed's end, and here's a career-defining work.

I Was Trying doesn't top "Is Dead," but it does keep Crime in Stereo on track toward the strange and unfamiliar. That might be the best compliment of all.

World Wide Rebel Songs is Morello at his most confident and musically expansive.

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

Kanye is after a very specific sound on this release, the dead-eyed, auto-tuned vocals and canned pianos contributing to a harrowing vision of emotional shellshock. The songs bleed into one another; only 'Love Lockdown,' with its magnificent drum breakdown, really grabs you by the throat.

There's nothing all that intelligent about anything SSLYBY have said or played, and Let It Sway is no exception--but someone will always love pure, simple, feel-good pop rock.

The many-splendored guitar blitz of Major rings in the return of good old-fashioned butt rock, but played to the squarely measured rhythms of '90s emo and Northwest indie stuff like Built To Spill.

His words are layers of palpable atmospherics; subtle and pleading at times, worried and demanding at others, mainly steeped in a falsetto that rarely wears thin - note "rarely" - it occasionally causes the eardrums to glaze over.

Ratatat never get as Daft funky or as outright punky as you’d want. But they never linger for too long in one place, and they throw more than enough cerebral curveballs to keep you on your musical toes.

Here, as on 2005’s "Takk," Sigur Ros have chosen to distill their rapture epics into shorter, more accessible bursts of swelling beauty. Yet this album still offers all the signature touchstones that make the band so deliciously unlike their post-rock contemporaries.

Beta Love is the best of both worlds: surprisingly slick and danceable, while subtly amplifying their art-school charm.

The spotlight stays fixed on his darkly soothing intonations throughout, keeping the smoky, low-key aesthetic unvarying despite some stylistic and instrumental adventurousness.

Yet if the title is straightforward, the music often isn’t, with LaVette teasing out new emotional details from songs that seemed to have given up all their secrets decades ago.

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.

It's not as challenging as previous Ducktails recordings, but a pleasant pop record nonetheless, and the band's most universally accessible yet.

So what subgenre tag is appropriate now? Is this discogaze? Funkwave? Only time will tell.

Disorienting at first spin, Wild Smile rewards by reconciling the easily digestible and the weird with each subsequent listen.

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

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.

This showcases Stewart's proclivity for macabre imagery and borderline perversion waging war with his pop-songwriting expertise.