A psychedelic blues washout that sounds like Dave Gilmour joined MGMT ("It's Cool," "Acid Song").

It's as unsettling as it is unpolished, but Backlash compels as much as anything this crew's put out.

Nine tracks drip, bubble, and bristle in love, shaken up with an emotionally invasive immediacy.

The Walkmen haven't changed much since B&A... but they've honed their nervy talent chiseling lines of post-punk history.

A disc of dark corners couched in defiantly bright pop.

All together, a mischievous lyricist captures the new West.

Callahan's search for meaning becomes fully realized when he's finally connected to another.

Breakup Song brims variety, not just song to song, but moment to moment.

Save for a track or two, Help is indeed fully erect.

Griffin could have skated on the success of her last effort, but Downtown Church is a gutsy move, one that's as haunting and original as anything in her past.

The New York quartet works its way out of that corner on its meticulous sculpted sophomore LP, Contra, branching out with tangents into kinetic ska-punk ("Holiday," "Cousins") and hyper dancehall music.

Travis has added some emotional weight and musical punch to its stock-in-trade, which remains surreptitious melodies that nestle in your thoughts and reappear as eminently hummable snatches of song.

The trembling 'All When We Were Young' is less convincing, and 'Memphis Flu' falls apart in drunken frenzy before it even starts, but across 13 songs, Yonder Is the Clock proves timeless.

What it lacks in identity, perhaps a statement of purpose locked down by a title, the tightly produced, musically pointed Wilco compensates for in near-total coalescence. Its hope, vulnerability, and fears converse as one Tweedy.

The Highway contains some of Williams' most potent songwriting.

The opening trifecta of Townes Van Zandt-channeling 'Moving Work of Art,' the biting title track, and searing indictment in 'The Rise and Fall of Intelligent Design' sets the disc's theme of unraveling female cultural constraints and represents the Houston Kid at his best.

A continuation of the warm folk, fiddle, and banjo style of 2013's Gone Away Backward, here Fulks continues proving he's one of music's best song craftsmen.

Grinderman is in no way a conventional comedy album, but an accomplished cocksman like Nick Cave howling the "No Pussy Blues" is pretty damn funny anytime.

Mercury Rev has not only matched the Herculean effort of Deserter's Songs, they've surpassed it.

The last couple 97's discs were perhaps negatively affected by frontman and principal songwriter Rhett Miller's burgeoning solo career, but here he seems doubly inspired, and the band charges alongside, particularly Ken Bethea, whose guitar play remains snaky and evocative.

Ha Ha Tonka's vehicles climb new heights with dazzling harmonies and impressive instrumental interplay on the revved-up "Race to the Bottom" and glimmering "Height of My Fears."

Nine albums in, the newly downsized trio rolls categorically mind-bending and noisy while sustaining creative novelty.

Metamodern Sounds in Country Music uses the genre's classic narratives to obscure right and wrong in the search for higher truths.

Fuses the chavvy charm of working-class Britain to a stream of anthemic, pure pop melodies in the service of pissed and pissed-off youth worldwide.

There's plenty of his trademark busted-speaker distortion and Hasil Adkins-joins-the Sex Pistols spew, with "Trainwrecker" verging on a backwoods version of Motörhead. Yet much of this finds Biram fully utilizing his home studio, sounding at times more like a band.

Raw and melodic, standing at the crossroads between the Ramones and Shangri-Las, singer/guitarist Lydia Night demonstrates a remarkable grip on youth and vulnerability in 2017.

Producer Adam Kasper (Queens of the Stone Age, Nirvana) captures the uncompromising energy of their live set and ferocity of guitarist and vocalist Lauren Larson.

Free from the constraints of perfunctory pop structure, Dee funnels seemingly dissonant patterns into pulsing tides of harmonious congruence.

Production seals it all as taut and as giving as speaker mesh.

While a few songs aren't quite as fleshed out as others, nearly every selection on White Blood Cells provides the sort of bluesy good-time kicks otherwise unavailable in today's pop marketplace.

Reportedly inspired by two rainy trips to the Portugese capital, Lisbon nevertheless sounds like a continuation of the NYC outfit's 2008 turning point, You & Me, a dramatic din of last-call waltzes and dimly lit remembrances.

Buoyed by intimacy and sincerity, Assume Form channels Blake at his happiest as each song plays out like a sentimental billet-doux.

The Golden Archipelago presents a direly meditative culmination.

Holland's cry seesaws from yelp to confirmation within tunes of heartache and resilience, her songwriting poetic yet blue-collar and blending that invisible socioeconomic line between genres.

Results including "Lucifer and God" and instant classic "The End of Things" equal Mould's most melodically explosive punk rock since his Eighties heyday in Minneapolis, all abrasive guitar work and barbed lyricism candy-coated by tunefulness.

The only misstep comes from spoken interludes about WWAY Health, an unnecessary framing device for a smart, textured zigzag of songwriting.

Like its predecessor, Hope's lyrics alone spur startling awe and fierce innovation.

Galvanizing at heart, Fender's bow burns with sharp conviction and intimacy.

The quartet captures a harmonic pop mayhem they haven't approached individually with much consistency in the recent past.

10 inspired tunes and one choice cover sure to leave less accomplished songsmiths gasping for breath.

In full, nine tracks strike a balance between pop-structured stoicism and Holy Wave's foundation in lush, active instrumentals. It's tactile enough to run your fingers through while evading a tight grip.

Trading mic volleys and Velcro riffs on their second LP the quartet's frontmen lead perfect group harmonies ("White Wall") with the sweet/sour yin/yang of every great lead tandem since John & Paul.

On Death of a Decade, Ha Ha Tonka takes the harmonies and anthemic melodies one step further.

Constant Bop lights up a whole lot like his main band's 2011 breakout album D by the second song.

By the time "Everyone's a V.I.P. to Someone" brings Thunder, Lightning, Strike to cinematic closure, you're all out of breath and wanting to ride again.

Whatever happened to BMRC's rock & roll? Sounds like they found it.

Ideas thin at the end ("Can Anyone Who Has Heard This Music Really Be a Bad Person?"), but when blithe builds to a six-string gallop on stilling closer "2 O'Clock," Revenge kills.

By dialing back the intentional obfuscation of 2009's The Real Feel, the Northern Californians' sophomore release doubles its predecessor's skewed-pop pleasures.

Gossip finds the perfect balance between his raw emotional pull, singed in the soft sway of 'Let It Be Me' and on desperate ballad 'Winter Birds,' with Ethan Johns' deftly layered production and arrangements.

As with any Prophet effort, themes are at times tangential to the rock, and he rocks in a way that seems almost anachronistic these days.

If it feels like throwing styles against the wall, it's a testament to Privott, guitarist John Courtney, drummer Damien Llanes, bassist Megan Hartman, and keyboardist Natalie Wright that almost all of it sticks.

Where 2003's Her Majesty the Decemberists unfurled tales of royalty, and debut Castaways and Cutouts talked of the sea, Picaresque drafts a whole new cast of characters just as colorful.

So Divided attempts to unify the Austin outfit's operatic songcraft with the urgency of their "Days of Being Wild" to unlock 2003's The Secret of Elena's Tomb EP and overcome the trappings of the previous year's brilliant Source Tags and Codes, from which those days sprung.

Learn to Sing Like a Star is the full Hersh experience, encompassing as it does all of her back-catalog iterations, from the knife-throwing thrills of the Throwing Muses' precise power pop to the cutting melancholia of her Hips and Makers-era balladry.

Heavy, like delirious laughter looped ad infinitum, Lord Quas quivers with psychedelic rhythm.

Arcade Fire's Neon Bible stares down the sophomore jinx with a pissed-off preacher's penetrating gaze.

Their liberal word-cram of mixed meter and sea-shanty pentameter is on full display on instant jaunty novelties.

The combination of Wennerstrom's singular vocal style and the Bastards' multilayered guitars remains both lyrically commanding and musically transcendent.

The dynamic atmospherics of ATDI's swan song Relationship of Command are here, but the delicate moments are more focused, and the powder-keg bursts just as potent.

About half of American Goldwing owes more to Faulkner than Jack London.

Encrypted menace, lonely tremolo, and herky-jerk rhythms abound on the Detroit quartet's second album.

Overwhelmingly subtle and crushingly consuming, m b v delivers beauty in the slightest shifts and drama in its calculatedly awkward movements.

The Florida trio's first studio album in a decade and third LP overall revives a signature wall of bassless grunge, strummed on a pair of down-tuned guitars expunging riffs as thick as a Proust box set.

Troy Jamerson remains one "Bad M.F.," most evident on fifth track "Damage," a pointed anthem about pop culture and sociological injustices over a searing sample extracted from LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out."

The entire production is clever and suave, with effervescent female backing vox, even as the backside ranges more adventurous with the low-down "Bad Boys Need Love Too" and tinkering "Everything to Everyone."

Unlike the Strokes, and say, Interpol, no sophomore face-plant here.

If the midpoint between The Future and the Past is modernity, Natalie Prass nails it.

Deep Time has finally arrived.

While Point is ultimately plenty of fun, it's also serious work that can be taken seriously.

On Veni Vidi Vicious, the band plays like rascals on their way to jail, with the prospect of conjugal visits depending on the music's extroverted energy.

That emphasis on sonic variety opens Bad Time Zoo to a diverse observance of Twin City urban realism.

It's intimate, home, and it's never felt more comfortable.

Not a lot of sky over NYC, but Kevin Morby capitalizes on any glimpse of it.

Port of Morrow makes the hooks sharper and the pop poppier, and that in turn makes the Shins sound smarter.

The Fits and starts shaking and quaking this psychedelic shack in short, sharp bursts of fragmented soul and fractured R&B are the sum total of this flagship local trio's second LP.

Modernity tarnishes after a while ("Walk Don't Walk," "Dry Bones"), but Leon Russell's piano on closing prayer "Salvation" caresses penitent. We Walk This Road, pathfinder.

Original remixes are collected as Dance, though non-album singles, edits, B-sides, and soundtrack inclusions collected as Re:Call 4 deliver a stronger curio, including the gloomy "This Is Not America" with the Pat Metheny Group and a soft rock remix of "Loving the Alien."

The secret to Fountains of Wayne's genius is the ability to infuse personality into a typically personalityless segment of America, making sadness and mundanity both interesting and deceptively fun.

Hayes Carll may be playing American schlub on the LP cover, but he's razor-sharp and ready.

More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol. 14 also validates Bob's brother's urging to scrap and drastically rerecord five songs last minute. It's all especially enlightening if you have the blood and guts to listen to the collection in one sitting.

If you're presently in love, A Rush of Blood ... will make you want to frolic like Lily Tomlin with the cartoon animals in 9 to 5. Otherwise, it'll probably make you want to puke.

This wonderfully realized album by songbird/ violinist Caitlin Cary is proof that sophomore slumps are strictly for amateurs.

Campy? To be sure. Derivative? Absolutely. But cock-rock of this sheer magnitude and pomposity has been dormant at least since "Smells Like Teen Spirit" washed away "November Rain," so who really cares?

They Want My Soul returns Spoon to rare form.

Buckner has composed an album that grows more emotionally astonishing with each play, and, at 36 minutes, one that's entirely too brief.

Matangi, her fourth disc as M.I.A., succeeds in recovering lost ground from 2010 slump Maya thanks to the fire in its belly.

Dancing desert blues refract Parisian pop while still best at home in the title trance, 'Africa,' and hard-jangled closer 'Sekebe.'

The multi-instrumentalist's second album for Nashville, Tenn.'s premier roots and bluegrass label measures the giant steps her songwriting has taken on Follow Me Down, even as her ear for covers lends itself to Bob Dylan's "Ring Them Bells" and Radiohead's "The Tourist."

Backed by a full band, there are flourishes of rock and even reggae, but Azel stirs up another desert blues masterpiece.

The back end fades, but with Strange Mercy, St. Vincent masters the art of grin and bear it.

Even sharper and more cunning than its predecessor.

The One ... Cohesive earns all 55 minutes, from the simmer of YelaWolf's Creek Water on "Came Up" to "How Far," the duo's clever remake of Beach House's "10 Mile Stereo."

Americana may find its best representation in the Kiwi's broad reach and inclusive interpretation.

Ronson reins in the raucousness without curbing the catharsis--on 16 tracks that blast newly crisp but equally irreverent.

By the time the political party concludes with religious/romantic closer "God of Mercy," Nneka's evocative rhymes and miasmic tones make clear her outsize talent has small use for earthly boundaries.

You never heard a sadder album than American V.

Golden Triangle gets in and gets out, but they have fun doing it.

Blank Face stalls near its end with pedestrian raps and an awkward R&B crossover bid, but when Q locks into the streetwise grooves of "Dope Dealer" and the lush psychedelia of "That Part," he hints at the masterpiece he came tantalizingly close to making.