Another solid release.

Dessner, as studio ringleader, misperceives Van Etten's power as simply a matter of mounting force and so tries to buttress her performance (her personality) with all the layering clichés and atmospheric tricks in his indie rock playbook.

Come To Life is a continuation of the captivating style he brought to the fore with Digital Lows; it’s motivational, sure, but it’s also thought-provoking and catchy as hell.

Four albums in, Polar Bear are clearly trying new things, ensuring that their brand of jazz-punk remains at the forefront of forward-thinking jazz music with an incessant desire to rebel against current trends.

While I would put this work near the bottom among Patton's opus, there are still some definitely enjoyable songs.

Grinderman 2 goes a long way towards solidifying this four-man Bad Seeds mash-up as a distinctive musical act, even as it brings them closer to their parent band's wheelhouse.

The one knock on this record is that it just isn’t very dynamic, as too many of the tracks fail to strike with the impact of truly great efforts. There are exceptions, of course, and the drumming on the fantastic 'Skeleton Man' propels the track with a driving momentum that’s too often missing on The Evening Descends.

At nine songs in length, Go is short enough that its purposefully naive milieu never becomes rote or oppressive.

Even if The Long Sleep is (deep down or hiding in plain sight) a resigned, muted, end-of-the-line Kool-Aid party, the bug juice is delectable enough to call one back from the great unknown for seconds and so on.

As they stand with Ice Cream Spiritual, Ponytail have captured an ample document of their instrumental majesty without losing a lick of their live energy.

It isn't life music, unless you live in a camp permutation of Gold's Gym. The Air-like, Gary Numan-lite instrumentals popping up between the songs with hit potential are way lighter than air. I don't mind 'em, but also don't love 'em.

I don’t think garage needs saving. Yet, when Ty Segall shares visions within the freaked-out space of garage, he cracks it open.

It's obviously the most upbeat album they've released yet, and despite the more rigidly defined dynamic, it's a far cry from the bog standard "rock" sound the mainstream has accepted as the norm.

For an artist who has released as prolifically as Moss, having a “defining solo album” is a hard choice. But this is an excellent primer for Jamal Moss’s singular ideology, and deserves our dual attention.

A bit more polished, a little more cohesive, and a bunch more bizarre, but all still an attempt at reinventing rock ‘n’ roll from the inside out.

The guitars are jangly and questionably tuned; the drums are doused in whiskey but always manage to keep the train moving; and the vocals are passionately out-of-key but always a perfect companion to the aesthetic and historical world they float within.

Pierce sinks his heart into his music, and while that may not manifest in impassioned yelping or big rock riffs, the exquisiteness of his playing and songcraft make it apparent.

Despite these compelling, fidgety positives, those who bugged out to last year's On Patrol (i.e., everyone) will be forgiven for experiencing a sense of deja entendu.

They are uniformly wise and lovely, and by turns elliptical, sad, even political, whatever.

It’s really the power of the synthesizer that allows his playing and compositions to breathe, to carry the music into the z axis. And while this new dimension may not present much in the way of a challenge for Frahm or for us as listeners, it’s chill indeed, and also beautiful.

Although the album bares many dark and barren moments, as well as the recycled voices of pristine, angelic choirs, few songs are ever overtly “positive” or “negative.” They probe atavistic fears, wistfully and with an endless curiosity.

While many of the album’s stronger tracks are also its most spacey and elusive, the sequencing emphasizes just how important the clicking, EDM drums are to the project’s core.

Emperor's Nightingale takes that smoky Stereo MCs sound to the stadium much more effectively than their previous attempts.

The recording captures the irrecoverable magic of a first meeting and encapsulates it.

Landing well above a genre bedeviled by the twin albatrosses of solipsistic whining and overwrought political grandstanding, lyrically Sollee's songs feel well-worn yet sturdy. But they stand out chiefly because the array of melodic and textural effects available to a cellist is much different than your run-of-the-mill fingerpickin' crooner.

Foster is a surprisingly competent and natural songwriter; freed from the constraints of tonal faithfulness owed to giants of poetry like Dickinson, Foster is able to draw from disparate genres to play with whatever form she's interested in from song to song.

Oneida is traveling further down the path laid out in last year's The Wedding. It's equally pastoral, with luscious production and Bobby's surprisingly beautiful voice taking centerstage.

Though Sheff’s lyrics can be too earnest sometimes, there’s no doubt he’s one of the most exciting songwriters of recent years, and The Stand Ins is another fine entry in the band’s discography.