If Dream Attic is any indication, recording studios may soon be as irrelevant to Richard Thompson's career as big record companies are.

All Birds Say plays like some east coast indie darling took his acoustic guitar out into the great west, met a kindred soul with a steel guitar and shared a few sweet and unambitious thoughts on life. Broemel chooses his instruments well, and if the album never raises its voice, with a consistency in tempo that approaches droning, it's still a pretty haze.

The problem is that the band seems to want to go mainstream as it stood in 1995. As a result, they've lost a lot of what made them unique.

God Willin', while a pretty record and certainly head and shoulders above so much of what has been released this year, it is nearly completely bereft of the emotion that we've come to expect from LaMontagne.

The songs are pretty, well-written and well-constructed, but the album as a whole lacks the vitality that would give it necessary variety.

Coming in at six songs and a lean 22:30 run-time, Blake Shelton's All About Tonight is what I imagine being in the studio audience for an average sitcom would be like.

It works. And not just because Tilbrook's high and mellifluous voice has only ever-so-slightly thickened and Difford's lower register--used for great deadpan effect on "Cool For Cats"--defies aging concerns, but because these effortlessly clever, tuneful and pithy songs never got their full due in the U.S.

These United States' lead singer Jesse Elliot has a scratchy, affected voice--maybe a super-strung-out Ryan Adams, if you're looking for a point of reference--which makes for a varied listening experience: Sometimes you want it to lead you to the Promised Land ("Just This"), sometimes you just want to make it stop ("Ever Make You Mine").

Dark Night mostly fits together as an accomplished piece of downbeat concept-rock. The mood can get--to quote Chesnutt's song--"grim," but the artfulness shines through.

For the all the bang of "Saturday Sun," "Elephants," with its slow-paced piano, closes out Intriguer, drowsily, though perhaps fittingly so.

Writing this review would be so much easier if you didn't seem like such a nice dude and if you hadn't had such a disaster fraught year so far. we'd totally let into you about that Miley Cyrus duet and probably scold you for including that atrocious remix of the Rock of Love theme, but frankly, we can't. Not now anyway.

Though songs are on the lengthy side (around five minutes), they don't drag, and there is enough powerful bass and drums to complement electronic noise.

What We Walk This Road lacks in over-the-top displays of technique, it makes up for in soul, as Randolph's tasteful playing and subtle vocal phrasings emerge more clearly when not fighting for space inside overloaded arrangements.

After listening to Gray's latest, The Sellout and going back to the music that had shifted through our slush pile unnoticed over the last decade or so, we're pretty stoked to find an artist making solid, soulful music beyond the confines of contemporary culture.

If you buy Bingo! expecting to hear some burning blues, or to hear another of the Miller hits that may have excited you in the '70s, you'll be disappointed either way

Science or not, Widespread Panic's eleventh offering shows that after all this time, they've got something figured out.

His latest album, Country Music, is Willie at his finest, characteristically understated and effortless.

There are no crescendos, no peaks or valleys. It's a straight line all the way through, which, as we all know from watching medical dramas on TV, can only mean one thing--the lack of a pulse.