It's what Sigur Ros might sound like if they came from Arizona, and it's truly excellent.

It's a stunning, confident piece of work that suggests the band is merely getting started.

The Beekeeper returns the quirky singer to the same whimsical terrain of 1992's Little Earthquakes, but with much stronger storylines, and a much more assured and nuanced voice.

Persson, the finest pop lyricist working today, is on peak form while the band's back-to-roots grand piano and grander acoustic guitars provide an appropriately magnificent backing.

A record that is wholly satisfying: not too overwrought and never self-assuredly slick.

Keyshia Cole proves for a second time--for sure and way beyond the shadow of a doubt--that she's headed for Mary J. Blige-style hugeness.

His talents and the heart he puts into his writing, singing, and picking remain at their peak. This stellar collection proves it--four times over.

Their songs are infectious, silly and often weirdly beautiful.

The album serves as both an ambitious travelogue and as a graceful rejoinder to the bitterness and frustration that inspired it, with Amos wading through swells of sadness ("I Can't See New York"), anger ("Don't Make Me Come to Vegas"), and insecurity ("Your Cloud") with velvety grace.

Sweaty, head-spinningly good dance music.

Get Behind Me Satan is the strangest and least focused effort by these unlikely garage rock superstars to date. It's also their finest, an Exile on Main Street-ish mish-mash where the sum is greater than the parts.

Chase This Light is packed with huge pop moments, galloping off with the exhilarating 'Big Casino' and swiftly following it with the towering 'Carry You,' songs seemingly custom made for action-packed pick-up truck commercials.

District Line, Mould's seventh solo album, is a swell follow-up to his bracing 2005 return-to-rockishness record "Body of Song."

Finn's knack for a melodic ballad remains firmly in place as Time on Earth coasts on his dreamy voice and introspective, hook-laden pop choruses.

The results range wider musically than Heavy Trash have previously, without compromising the sonic squawl and psychobilly vocals that have long provided the duo's signature sound.

Songs cascade along in loping forward motion, as prone to lushly orchestrated decomposition ("Apnea Obstructiva," "Te Amo...Por Que Me Odias") and succulent adagio ("Faltamos Palabras," "Olhas") as they are to the simple, charismatic sense of melody that propelled S&S.

An impressive, mature effort that expands a predictable Brit-pop sound into something with varied textures, shades and nuance.

Gil Norton's production has taken the band to new heights, allowing the music to have as much grit, substance, and dynamics as the lyrics.

For all its cathartic lyrics, I-Empire is actually packed with dazzling, fast-moving songs, like 'Everything's Magic' and 'Sirens,' that bring together U2's widescreen guitar flights with tuneful, straightforward punk melodies.

Dark, dusty, and ever bittersweet, Burnett's musical archaeology here is something considerably more than merely "O Brother Redux."

It doesn't even matter much that he's a B minus rhyme spitter, or that he spends way too much studio time name dropping.

Her third album continues her clear-minded, open-hearted lyricism, though with a ripeness that comes from years on the road and years more to reflect.

Perhaps only the fantasy duo of King Kong and Bambi could be a more bizarre pairing than Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Yet on Raising Sand, their haunting and brilliant collaboration, the Led Zeppelin screamer and Nashville's most hypnotic song whisperer seem made for each other

The album is a showcase for Cash's trenchant, soul-baring songs about love and mortality.

Easily their best album since 2000's Red Line.

His first recording of his own material in four years reminds that he has few peers among contemporary singer-songwriters.

Working Man's Cafe feels like exactly the album a 60-something rocker would craft--assured and direct yet searching and restless, a glimpse into the head of a man who's comfortable in his skin but still wonders how he fits into a world that seems to be turning faster and stranger as the years pass by.

[It] has more powerful and propulsive arrangements than is often the case with the artist.