Overall, Roots Manuva may have a lot to say during the verses, but when his choruses consist of little more than a repeated line shouted over and over ("Awfully Deep," "Too Cold"), listeners won't be hanging around long enough to decipher his rhymes.

Like his two previous studio albums, Solitary Man is sparsely produced by Rick Rubin, and continues the themes of love, faith, and loneliness that their previous collaborations have chillingly embraced.

It all glides by easily enough on its surface, but dig a little deeper and The Magic Numbers reveals itself to be not just a crashing bore, but an irritating one.

The starkness of the arrangements helps draw attention to the distance between the origin of a song and Young's present. Now creeping toward 80, Young doesn't sound fragile yet his vocals display some age-related raggedness. Embracing his weathered, keening voice, Young highlights the tender yearning that runs throughout these songs.

The sad country warmth of "Play the Game" and the starkly fingerpicked front half of "Soon" are soothing in their implied heartache, inviting listeners to lean in and try to untangle McMahon's lyrics through her downcast mumbling. Sadly, those same mumbled vocals sometimes become a hindrance during the slower sections of the album, distracting from the otherwise well-written songs. Still, delivery affectations aside, Salt serves as a solid introduction to this sensitive and engaging artist.

All the restless energy adds up to a few too many diversions.

The rest of the record is filled with an invigorating amount of passion, noise, and power that impressively takes their roots and influences to a new place. Not bad for a debut album; it bodes very well for further endeavors.

One can't help but think that just a little bit more spice might have elevated all of these beautiful ideas out of the trappings of their now painfully insular song structures.

Megafaun are just as taken by quietly tortured dark-night-of-the-soul whisperings, lo-fi oddities, and shards of feedback shade as they are of banjos and summertime evenings, giving Gather, Form and Fly a bit of an unsettled edge at various points.

How Do You Burn? suggests he needs a fiercer and more energetic team of underlings if he's going to remain a force to be reckoned with.

If nothing on Antifogmatic is quite that ambitious, nevertheless in track after track Thile leads the band through labyrinthine arrangements that shift tempos and instrument groupings, over which he sings abstract lyrics in a slightly disembodied high tenor voice.

There are points throughout these works where Tesfaye is distinctively gripping, supplying deadly hooks and somehow singing for his life despite the cold blood flowing through his veins.

More Life is another overly serious, musically uninteresting effort.

The record gets better when the sci-fi murk lifts and a song comes into focus, which happens more often on the second half, when Simpson relaxes enough to offer up a bit of good ZZ Top funk ("Best Clockmaker on Mars") and a blues shuffle ("Mercury in Retrograde"). But songs aren't the point of Sound & Fury. As the title makes plain, it's all about the sound and fury, noise that grabs hard and eventually softens its grip.

As it stands, it's a hard album to get your head around and it's a hard album to fully embrace.

The Starlight Mints weren't excessively ambitious in the studio and the coolness of Built on Squares makes for a pleasant listen while capturing a band in the making.

Older Than My Old Man Now contains some excellent work when Wainwright's not putting on false bravado or bullshitting, but ultimately, this is for his hardcore fans rather than casual ones.

It's hard to see why most of this album exists beyond letting Ashworth explore and recreate two kinds of music she obviously loves to distraction. Whether anyone should follow along on her quest is up to their tolerance for sift rock platitudes and hard rock cliches.

The most natural and relaxed John Hiatt album in years...Hiatt's voice has never sounded better; its course edges sometimes straining for high notes works perfectly with this craggy, unpolished music.

Barry Johnson still knows how to write a sharp hook; they are just dulled by the lifeless production and the cookie-cutter approach. Only a couple of the tracks land.

As they're both charismatic singers with a way with an elliptical melody, it's pleasant enough, but by the time its 45 minutes wrap up, Lotta Sea Lice feels like a party where the hosts are having a much better time than their guests.

Taking disparate elements from their collective record collection, mashing them up, and spitting them out... the members of Silkworm nonetheless end up sounding like few other rock bands of their time while hardly sounding like a cover band revue.

The album isn't a total disaster, though, there are a few songs that manage to overcome the record's flaws and deliver some excitement.

While perhaps not on par with De La Soul falling from 3 Feet High and Rising to De La Soul Is Dead, this is almost as disappointing a plummet from Day-Glo genius to drab everyday product.

Youth and Young Manhood isn't sonically adventurous, but in the new-millennium pop realm, some greasy licks sure sound good.

While the band might be adjusting after a shake-up like losing a singer, they've still managed to create another riff-fest that, while not a throwback to their older sound, has them continuing down their current path without much trouble.

Bookended by a pair of moody cuts replete with intoned prayers spoken in the background, Abandoned plays to the severity of the Catholic faith, and if Defeater's thematic tendencies have begun to wear a bit thin, they still manage to pack a pretty big punch on a musical level.

Unfortunately, though, too much of Show Your Bones just isn't that interesting, even if it was born from genuine heartache instead of sass and attitude.