The middle gets muddy, as they return to their weaker late-Nineties fare (read: "ballads"), but it's a strong album overall.

Pity that "Jupiter," disc one, mostly falls flat.

Time Being, as with his previous work, is laden with winning melodies and a poet's worldly insight.

Although plucky, Another Fine Day never quite eclipses its members' better-known efforts.

Razorlight shoots from the hip noticeably more immediate than the group's more manicured 2004 debut.

Overlong as they are, these are beautifully recorded tracks: unadorned, antiquated, intimate.

Merging Siouxsie Sioux with Aphex Twin, Silent Shout twists manipulated sounds around a basic core of addictive rhythm in a convoluted game of tetherball.

At this point, homage is almost expected of the Keys, but in doing so, the band is starting to dilute the "Heavy Soul" and Thickfreakness of their earlier material, as well.

What The Information lacks in Sea Changemanship it makes up for in Midnight Vultures, hats be damned.

The Killers overextend themselves grabbing for the heartland's heartstrings.

Finn... has the poetic lovable-loser act down cold, but is too distracted by the ever-present "Party Pit" and "Southtown Girls" to expand his vision beyond the club parking lot.

Blood Mountain is a big slab to grab, especially shakier bits such as Josh Homme stinking up "Colony of Birchmen."

He may be a lion in winter, but one with plenty of roaring left.

She sounds forever Gainsbourg – not a bad thing in this case.

Not every song hits its mark, and Hinson's monotone often grates, but as dark as his recovery might have been, Opera Circuit doesn't mope or whine.

One of the most ambitious artistic statements of the year.

[Yours to Keep] doesn't have the stylish and sexy six-string swagger one would expect from the 'froed Strokes guitarist, but it does yield enough Top 40 radio gems to spark a small feud with Liam Gallagher.

After 30 years, Waits keeps getting weirder and weirder while still aging gracefully.

A sonically interesting mess but proof that not everything they record should be released.

A near-perfect collection, if a bit short.

This time around, no celebratory hand gestures are required.

Jones has concocted a pleasing effort underneath its delicate air.

Svanangen's bright falsetto holds his miniature musical tapestries together.

The real glory is in watching the trio pull it all off live, perfect harmonies and all.

Candylion's dozen tracks are charming, lovely, quiet little bits of hope and glory and melancholy that arrive from somewhere you've never been but always wished to inhabit.

The Broken West's debut sports a big, masculine sound strangely lacking in swagger but with a sensitivity that never devolves into emo self-consciousness.

There's a musical landscape between Simon & Garfunkel and Devendra Banhart begging to be found in the here and now, and the Autumn Defense has settled in, sentimentality and all.

Sykes' voice has a rasp some might find off-putting, but she and her friends have crafted another set of songs that, as whole, are enrapturing.

Living With the Living might agitate the lefty already inside, but you don't have to like Leo's politics to move to the music.

Armchair Apocrypha, is as instantly engaging as "Fake Palindromes" from 05's Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs.

Mason displays promise, but with limited range vocally and echoes of Ben Harper, Los Lobos, and John Hiatt in his song-craft, he hasn't hit one squarely out of the park yet.

More muscle than penmanship, more highway than garage, Because the Times rolls like Foghat at the close of Dazed & Confused.

Cassadaga, while not exceptional in Oberst's canon, demonstrates a maturity that ensures his legacy beyond emo-folk.

Maturity has doomed too many bands to mention over the years, but this ain't one.

Lavigne's punk-lite cheerleader chic could well be tweens' first tantalizing steps down the primrose path to Patti Smith.

Besides a batch of solid singles – electro-punk death march "Survivalism," fiendishly swinging "Capital G" – every so often Year Zero devolves into a feverish barrage of squelches and squalls that comes off as mood music for especially amorous androids.

Apparently evolution is overrated.

Beyond the interstellar electro-club vibe, it's still distinctively Björk on the ballads.

The Swedes ignite right from the "Intro."

This time around things are more industrial and complex but every bit as sleazy and intoxicating.

Surprisingly pensive.

Together the band is starting to sound seriously heavy.

The title track erupts like a "Seven Nation Army...." The rest is a mixed bag.

Isbell has pulled together another gritty Southern Siren song.

Gogol suffers beneath ST!'s length and schizophrenia.

The honeyed twang of the Austin songbird remains a hallmark on Translated, but the songs are forged with a more mature fire and relaxed tone.

Rise to Your Knees, the first album by reunited brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood since 1995's misleading "No Joke!," is a subdued and psychedelic affair, where the guitars melt instead of fry.

The Brooklyn trio's fourth album has made it out of the terrible twos, and growing pains have produced a curious pastiche.

Idaho native Josh Ritter's fifth LP illustrates how well an artist can incorporate his influences while developing his own voice and sound, which in this incarnation is part Dylan, part sensitive swinger with a soft spot for Calamity Jane and Joan of Arc.

They're still about the classic Harvey tropes of repression and longing, but Chalk's fixated on death and madness, at times feeling claustrophobic in its emptiness.

There's still clamor; it just happens between songs. The rest is honest to goodness pop.

Though the LP culminates a clear progression for Beam, Iron & Wine coalescing since 2005's "Woman King" into a band secure enough to experiment, the barrage of instrumentation and effects do little to advance the songs on The Shepherd's Dog.

Despite the melodrama, the LP's perfectly done, every note in place.

He's still a little corny in parts, but it's outweighed by the genuinely sincere.

Seven new songs polish Chrome Dreams II, which glides past Young's well-meaning but flaccid new millennial output--"Are You Passionate?" (2002), "Greendale" (2003), and "Living With War" (2006)--in pulling alongside 2005's "Prairie Wind," and near some aforementioned career peaks.

On the heels of 2006's exceptional live double-disc, the Sadies' seventh studio album isn't their most ambitious work, but it ranks among their tightest.

Next to 2003's comparatively straight-shooting "Quebec," Ween's first studio album in four years is flush with quick right turns.

Despite uneven attempts to branch beyond their explosive pop-punk, the Hives' fourth full-length ultimately delivers the goods.

Recorded in Dublin, 2005, the 2-CD/1-DVD set bores through nonhits but paints a vivid picture of legends in a post-9/11 world.

Robert Plant's pilgrimages to the Deep South led him to Nashville for Raising Sand, an imaginative, seductive collaboration with bluegrass goddess Alison Krauss that explores the desolate valleys between his Delta blues and her Appalachian folk.

New York City soulstresses born in January a decade apart ('71 and '80, respectively), Mary J. Blige and Alicia Keys flex their commercial empowerment in passionate opposition. Yonkers street survivor Blige and Manhattan piano prodigy Keys presently command career-high profiles with voices incapable of unfeeling line readings, though Booker T. & the MGs rather than synthetic New Jack soul should groove both ladies back to the old school, where their voices belong. Blige's desperate search for romantic stability counters Keys' full blush of new connection. Her eighth album since 1992 and first since 2005's Grammy-winning The Breakthrough, the former's Growing Pains starts unsteady, but its heart beats strong and sincere. Million-dollar opener "Work That" updates Motown for the 21st century with a rinky-dink piano figure and Blige's wigged head held high. Entanglements with Ludacris ("Grown Woman") and Usher ("Shake Down") tryst up unadvised, while the yearning "Feel Like a Woman" and its appeal to traditional sex roles feels pat. The succeeding "Stay Down" couches its pleas in experience rather than idealism, however, and "Hurt Again" promises this is the last time, obvious wishful thinking given the song's hook: bald denial. The synthetic funk of "Till the Morning" works best for more submissive bedroom confessions, backup "Roses" whiffing equally needy yet turns vulnerability into resentment ("it ain't all roses, flowers, and poses"), and eventually dominance. It's one of Growing Pain's best, another being "Fade Away," its treadmill tempo riding a straight line groove. The disc then loses steam (nagging "Talk to Me," clouded "Smoke") when it should've lost 20 of its 65 minutes but ends on strong note in "Come to Me (Peace)," a sort of ramped-down antidote to the relative anxiety of the rest of the album. As I Am, Keys' third studio release, pounds and caresses ivory, yet Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder carry equal weight with Streisand and Minelli since the singer soars from a much larger stage.

Her latest finds the paranoia sliding away slightly. Recorded at a home in Houston with accompaniment from brother John on bass and drummer John Adams of Fatal Flying Guilloteens, the 15 songs eye home longingly, kicking up a folkier dust.

The much-publicized rift of RZA and his seven other swordsmen glares on 8 Diagrams, production far more experimental and melodic than any prehiatus work. RZA of Renaissance proffers an unequaled vision, and the inability to convince his soldiers to follow suit keeps the disc from being the complete innovation Wu's abbot intended.

Her eighth album since 1992 and first since 2005's Grammy-winning "The Breakthrough," the former's Growing Pains starts unsteady, but its heart beats strong and sincere.

Rock Music proves BSP can hold their course.

The seductive warble of Cambodian-born singer Chhom Nimol converts this psychedelic canvas into high art as she sways effortlessly between English and her native Khmer.

Coming down from the, er ... mountain, well, British Columbia, bandleader Stephen McBean and his cohorts sound logjammed in the past on In the Future.

It's a seamy, dreamy take on post-punk.

Lynne doesn't mimic though, taking nine tunes Springfield sang, along with one original in the spirit, and interprets them in a manner that's elegant, if not always satisfying.

It's certainly their most adventuresome, but overdone production touches from Terry Manning (ZZ Top, Al Green), who brings horns and an orchestra into the mix, blur some material.

The effortless Mockingbird proves she doesn't need to write to make music that's all her own.

The local duo has struggled to top its electroclash charades. Their solution? Lasers. On Ghostland's third self-produced LP, Robotique Majestique, mastered at the Exchange in London by Nilesh Patel (Daft Punk, Justice), that strategy largely translates into massive, Technicolor electronic interludes delving deep into Depeche Mode.

Though no song stands out as particularly remarkable, Warpaint drips steady consistency.

Trouble follows the critically lauded 2006 masterstroke, "Destroyer's Rubies," and Bejar's band, returning from those sessions, makes it feel like a solid rock album.

It might be one big, saccharine, catchy fuck-you to the industry and culture, but it's really just addictive songwriting reared on Britpop pioneers who didn't prioritize reputation over substance.

This Odd Couple is from the future, even if Gnarls Barkley's second LP comes littered with shades of the past.

Deschanel's voice inhabits so many chanteuses that she never reveals her own, save perhaps for unadorned closer 'Swing Low Sweet Chariot,' and at times even threatens a theatrical kitsch (especially the Hawaiian-cowpoke arrangement of the Beatles' 'I Should Have Known Better'), but Volume One is utterly enveloping in its charm.

As 34 minutes advance, songs get longer and less interesting ('Sing for the Submarine'), but "Horse to Water" stomps, and 'I'm Gonna DJ' ("at the end of the world") doesn't decelerate.

Though his father, Steve Earle, once vowed to climb on Dylan's coffee table to champion the late Townes Van Zandt, the next generation two-steps through such a musical minefield and turns out a winner with his Bloodshot Records debut, The Good Life.

Morrison's first collection of originals in longer than most of us can remember relies on a characteristic combo of jazz phrasing and bluesy riffs that should please die-hards and maybe bring in a few latter-day converts.

The album's visual, an indie rock show tune on shrooms, but it's just difficult to take seriously hairy men smeared in war paint incoherently singing.

Safe-sex ed for Ivy Leaguers.

It's tempting to knock Lidell for being too derivative of Wonder and Donny Hathaway or for simply being the latest in a never-ending line of Brits mimicking the sound of Soulsville, but why bust up a party that's this much fun?

The album drags at the midpoint with 'Softly Through the Void,' the psychic/sonic equivalent of a 3pm sugar crash at your cubicle, but 'Paralyzed' and "Fried Out" offer enough psychedelia-beds-rock jolt to yank one out of the fog.

Like some of his best work, Momofuku feels thrown together, loose and natural.

This 10th studio album from the Norwich, England, Brit-psychers pulls double duty as its own tribute LP, layering the best bits of L.A.-based frontman Tim Burgess' vast back catalog of emotionally disconnected couplets atop the band's trademark soaring keyboards and insistently hummable guitars.

Whereas "Passover" came wired with explosives, Ghost airs out its thrust with mercenary inevitability.

It's Wayne's personality that both floats and sinks TC III.

If the band's found inventive ways to stretch out its melodies, lad-in-chief Jon Fratelli delivers best on soused songs illuminating how love has gone wrong. Party on.

With material this naked, a stumble or two is expected, but Seeing Things possesses enough newfound emotion to make even Bob Dylan proud.

It isn't perfect, but Viva la Vida re-establishes Coldplay's relevance in this era where every new indie rock band really wants to be Coldplay.

N.E.R.D's third album, an "Anti Matter" suggestion that devotees "tilt your head back and close your eyes" and try Seeing Sounds, bangs frantic enough to entice one serious auditory seizure.

Her confidence trumps cute here.

Doling out more free samples than Sam's Club on Sundays, Girl Talk's copyright-challenging fourth LP cuts and pastes more than 300 song snippets into a seamless but fervently paced 54-minute aural collage of club bangers that's every bit as enticing as his 2006 career-defining opus, "Night Ripper," though it sounds more like a companion piece than a fresh body of work.

At just more than 33 minutes, Modern Guilt is compacted for impact and delivers.

Dr. Dog evolves impressively with each album but still promises more than Fate delivers.

With no thrills or spills on its journey through Dutton's ideologies, a now-threepiece Special Sauce (former Boss Hog keyboardist Mark Boyce's addition is official) slinks and sways on its traditionally level medium.

The piano-driven 'Trashcan,' bright and jovial 'House Built for Two,' and wobbly waltz of the title track accent Ode to Sunshine's 11 tunes, making it a pleasing debut from a band that should have an interesting future.